With a population too terrified to speak up, corruption exploded. In the early days of the Suharto regime, US oil executives bragged that they were taking advantage of exactly those dynamics as they dined in front of Barack Obama’s mother. His government, along with the US-backed Mobutu regime in the Congo, would go on to set world-historical records for corruption.4 Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was founded on mass violence. And by the late 1960s, Indonesia was operating a system of US-supported concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.5
