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May 16 - June 15, 2025
Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.
Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.”
Much of colonialism had relied on the logic of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or in practice, “Do as white say, not as white do.”
As part of a range of psychological operations alongside the war on the guerrillas, CIA agents spread the rumor that an aswang, a bloodsucking ghoul of Filipino legend, was on the loose and destroying men with evil in their hearts. They then took a Huk rebel they had killed, poked two holes in his neck, drained him of his blood, and left him lying in the road.
Thoroughly modern, he loved neologisms and acronyms, and later coined NEKOLIM—that is, neocolonialism, colonialism, and imperialism—to name the enemy he believed they all faced.
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.
There were the santri, the stricter, orthodox Muslims, more influenced by Arab religious culture. Then there were the abangan, whose Islam existed on top of a deep well of mystical and animistic Javanese traditions.
“Soccer was the people’s sport, because it was cheap,” he would remember later. “And sport builds the collective spirit, it teaches you to work with others, that you can’t accomplish anything alone. I realized soccer taught me that if you have something you want to accomplish, you have to cooperate.”
Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.
“I love America, but I’m a disappointed lover.”
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.
In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people, probably the highest proportion in the country.
the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.
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.
The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally.41 But there’s no reason to believe that the mass violence of 1965–66 has its roots in native culture. No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved.
Given the state of the world, and considering the success of Western imperialism, the only path to revolution was protracted guerrilla struggle.
form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. A few things united them—authoritarian developmentalism, close ties with Washington, and, most importantly, anticommunism.
“First we will kill all subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we kill the timid.”
“The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea,” he said. “If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”
Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.
“I guess it’s funny—well, maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word—but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.”
The psychological effects of US covert action are felt everywhere, including in North America. More and more citizens there have connections to countries touched by recent US interventions, and even for white Americans, there are psychological effects. When people find out that some things, important things, have been hidden from them, they start to doubt things they shouldn’t, and embark on wild conspiracy theorizing.
As for the victors of the anticommunist crusade, it’s clear that as a nation-state, the United States has done enormously well since 1945. It is an extremely rich and powerful country. But if we look at individual Americans, or break down the analysis along class and race lines, it’s clear that the spoils of that global ascendance were shared extremely unequally. More and more of the flows coming in from other nations have accumulated at the very top, while some US citizens live in poverty comparable to life in the former Third World.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.
few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.
In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured or killed.5 Some women were prosecuted simply for setting up an orphanage for the children of communist victims.
There are an estimated tens of millions of victims or relatives of victims still alive in Indonesia, and almost all live in worse situations than they deserve. This ranges from abject poverty and social isolation to simply being denied the admission that a parent or grandparent was killed unjustly—that their family was not guilty of anything at all.
“Americanism” can be “virtually defined as the polar opposite of communism.”
Duterte does not even speak Tagalog fluently—he gives his national addresses in English, which not every Filipino speaks.
