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July 14 - November 7, 2023
when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism.
Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism.
Indonesia is an archipelago whose islands sprawl across two million square miles of sea and are home to hundreds of distinct nationalities speaking more than seven hundred languages. Nothing brought them together other than the artificial boundaries imposed by a racist foreign power. The young nation needed a shared sense of identity more than anything else.
Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people.
“first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”
neutralism itself was an offense. Anyone who wasn’t actively against the Soviet Union must be against the United States, no matter how loudly he praised Paul Revere.
John F. Kennedy made his opposition to this approach very public in a set of speeches given in the years after Bandung. In a speech harshly criticizing the French for attempting to hold on to Algeria by force, he said that “the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.”
soccer taught me that if you have something you want to accomplish, you have to cooperate.”
There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”
Washington had been exposed in Asia as an aggressor against one of the world’s leading neutral powers. Very little of this made the news back home, but people in the Third World knew.
“To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right,” Kennedy said. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress.”13
August 25, the White House gave the order, and the CIA drew up plans to have him killed.
MKUltra, a program that kidnapped poor black men in the United States and dosed them with LSD to see if the Agency could control their minds
Brazil is a Western European settler colony, with extreme inequality and a very obvious racial hierarchy.
Brazil would not hold another democratic election for twenty-five years.
When anyone offers aid that comes with political demands, he said that his message to them was: “Go to hell with your aid!” As Jones put it, “He had really done it now.”
“black operations” and preparations for psychological warfare.
Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.
The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.35
The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.37
No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved.42
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps.
In addition to the crime of extermination, an International People’s Tribunal assembled later in the Netherlands found the Indonesian military guilty of a number of crimes against humanity, including torture, unjustified and long-term detainment in cruel conditions, forced labor amounting to enslavement, and systematic sexual violence. The judges found that all this was carried out for political purposes—to destroy the Communist Party and then “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime”—with the assistance of the United States, the UK, and Australia.49
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular. In line with Frank Wisner’s early strategy of covert direct confrontation, the US government launched secret attacks and murdered civilians in 1958 in the attempt to break up the country, and failed. So American officials adopted Howard Jones’s more subtle on-the-ground insights, turning to a strategy of building deep connections with the Armed Forces and building an anticommunist military state within a state.
Indochina, Washington’s anticommunist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results.
Phoenix Program with the assistance of Australia and the South Vietnamese government in 1968. The goal was to “neutralize” the enemy’s administration through persuasion or assassination. This meant murdering civilians, not waging war. The military drew up blacklists and went hunting for its targets. Operation Phoenix killed tens of thousands of bureaucrats and unarmed people.7
super-secret Phoenix Program.
It’s believed the events of 1965–66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.
1966 in Guatemala was the first time the region suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.
Bobby Kennedy said, “We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims?” No other prominent US politician condemned the massacre.
In his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he wrote that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” According to Nkrumah, the new way of the world was that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world,” and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves.38
the 1970s, Thailand’s government would kill thousands of people in its own anticommunist purge.
They were porous to international investment, and happy to export raw materials to rich countries under the existing terms governing the international economy. They certainly were not trying to rewrite the rules of the global economy, or use the power of a unified Third World to shift influence
The people of Indonesia and Brazil lived under “crony capitalism.”
communist politics, while her country had been taken away from her forever. “Racism, very simply. White Europeans are offered tolerance and sympathetic treatment, while we are not.”
When Frank Wisner and Howard Jones were working to re-engineer West Germany’s financial system after World War II, the US government wiped out all public and private debt as they created the new deutsche mark. One shudders to think how a major Third World leader perceived as anti-American or “communist” would have been treated if his country tried the same thing after a war of independence.
complementary explanation might be that these countries, some still overseeing remnants of colonial empire, were incredibly rich and powerful. They were much harder to push around, even if Washington had wanted to, and—perhaps more importantly—they sat at the top of the world economy. They were being fully integrated into the US-led system, and so there was much less of a risk they would try to radically reshape the global order, because it had served them quite well.
