"Western" nations sponsor Indonesian Genocide

[Je suis Omar]

"No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre."

Each page you turn, or as it is for most of us "moral" westerners, each page you refuse to turn, brings news of even more, greater USA/UK/Australian/... savagery.

How can this be? We supposedly are the ones with the open societies, the ones who staunchly support the rule of law, the open press - guardians of our democratic principles, and all the other tired bullshit that we so frequently see and hear, replete with hearty congratulations all around for being such decent human beings.

Our model dictator

by John Pilger

...

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover in 1965-6 as "the model operation" for the US-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, BBC south-east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time ... There was a deal, you see."

READ ON FOR MORE HEART WARMING STUFF AT,

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/28/indonesia.world

[drummindiver]

WHAT?

Dude, where do you get your information.

This is the most ludicrous, ill informed post I have ever read.

You should be ashamed.

http://www.gendercide.org/case_timor.html

[Je suis Omar]

The following is typical of USA actions against the poor of the world.

Indonesia: U.S. Role

in 1965 Massacres

Confessions from the U.S. State Department

Revolutionary Worker #1116, August 26, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org

"Communists, red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of communists after interrogation in remote jailsThe killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies."

Time, December 17, 1965

The exact number of people killed in dictator Suhartos rise to power in Indonesia in 1965-1966 may never be known. A U.S. State Department estimate in 1966 placed the figure at 300,000. Official Indonesian data released in the mid-1970s placed the number of deaths between 450,000 and 500,000. In 1976, Admiral Sudomo, the head of the Indonesian state security system, said more than 500,000 had been murdered. And Amnesty International has quoted one source placing the number killed at 700,000 and another at "many more than one million."

In 1990, 25 years after the massacre, a villager in a city in Northern Sumatra recalled that, "For six months, no-one wanted to eat fish from the river because they often found human fingers inside the fish."

*****

The people of the world will never forget and never forgive this horrendous crime against the people. But government officials in the U.S. are still trying wash the blood from their hands and cover up how the U.S. supported and aided this mass murder.

In late July 2001, the U.S. government ordered all copies of a research volume recalled from libraries and bookstores. The 800-plus-page volume, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968: Vol. 26--Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines, talks about how the U.S. government provided financial and military support and lists of political activists to the Indonesian military as it carried out the huge 1965-1966 slaughter aimed at communists and other political activists.

The volume, part of a large documentary history of U.S. foreign policy, is an official publication by the U.S. State Department. Released 30 years after the period covered, these volumes are produced as "the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity."

The CIA also held up the release of the volume in the series that covers Greece, Turkey and Cypress from 1964-1968. This volume most likely contains information about how the U.S./CIA backed the reactionary junta which seized control in Greece in 1967. In 1990, the CIA censored the volume on Iran in the 1950s -- deleting any reference to the CIA-backed coup that brought the Shah of Iran to power in 1953.

But the U.S. attempts to censor the volume on Indonesia have so far been unsuccessful. The volume was obtained by the National Security Archives at George Washington University, which posted them on the internet (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/). And publicity around the attempts at censorship has only drawn more attention to the volume. At the University of California Berkeley several faculty members have written letters urging the library to refuse to comply with the governments request to return the book.

In early August, the State Department backed down and released the volume covering Indonesia in the 1960s -- denying there had been an attempt to censor the volume.

From the Horses Mouth

The new State Department volume on Indonesia, while hardly a complete documentation of U.S. covert actions related to the 1965 coup, does contain some revelations on matters previously denied by U.S. officials.

Before the coup the government in Indonesia was a coalition government headed by Sukarno. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was a major force in this coalition government.* The Sukarno government didnt stand for genuine independence from imperialism, but it took some actions which reflected bourgeois national interests.

The new State Department book on Indonesia documents communications back and forth between the embassy in Jakarta and the U.S. State Department in 1965 and 1966 reporting on the arrests and killings of the PKI leadership. On August 10, 1966, Ambassador Green sent a memo to the State Department reporting that a "sanitized" [meaning without reference to their source in the U.S. embassy] version of the lists of PKI members was made available to the Indonesian government in December 1965 and "is apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership at the time."

The volume also documents direct U.S. financial support for the Indonesian death squads called Kap-Gestapu. On December 2, 1965 Ambassador Green wrote a memo to Assistant Secretary of State Bundy about providing 50 million rupiahs to a leader of the death squads:

"This is to confirm my earlier concurrence that we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs requested by him for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movementThe Kap-Gestapu activities to date have been important factor in the armys program, and judging from results, I would say highly successful. This army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group is still carrying burden of current repressive efforts targeted against PKI, particularly in Central Java. The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be."

Horrific Massacre: Made in the USA

The U.S. had major strategic concerns about Southeast Asia. At this time, the U.S. was getting in deep trouble in Vietnam. Maoist China had become a powerful revolutionary influence throughout Asia and the world. Anti-U.S. sentiment was growing in Indonesia. And given all this, the U.S. wanted a more reliable pro-U.S. regime in Indonesia.

READ ON AT,

http://revcom.us/a/v23/1110-19/1116/indonesia.htm

[Je suis Omar]

WHAT?

Dude, where do you get your information.

From a number of reliable sources, drummindiver. Why do you ask? This one is from,

"John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned."

INDONESIA

... in 1965 the CIA organized an operation to discredit the Communist party in Indonesia. Their strategy was to make the party appear to be secretly planning a violent takeover of Indonesian society. The truth was that the Indonesian Communist Party was doing quite well to obtain representation in the Indonesian government through the democratic process. That was what made it so threatening to the United States. They simply could not have an example of legitimate and successful participation by the Communists in the democratic process.

The techniques of the Indonesian destabilization were classic: CIA agents planted caches of arms that would then be "found" by Indonesian police under the watchful eye of the alerted media. Along with the arms would be all kinds of forged documents proving that the Communists were fomenting a violent uprising. Propaganda agents planted stories in the media, inflaming the mistrust of the Communists. Others gave speeches. The situation heated up until some generals in the Indonesian army were killed, and the boil of tension burst. The Indonesian army went after the Communists and the people they felt traditionally supported the Communists. The result was a bloodbath that the New York Times described in terms half a million to a million and a half dead. The Australian secret service, closer to Indonesia, put the figure at closer to two million-the rivers were clogged with the bodies of the dead.

In the summer of 1990, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that it had indeed delivered lists of names, of people who were subsequently killed, to the Indonesian government.

The CIA's own internal reporting estimated that 800,000 people had been killed. The organization published a cover story through the Library of Congress that the Communist Party had supported a classic insurrection, which the army had put down. However, internal CIA reports cited the operation as a classic success in which they had targeted the world's thirdlargest Communist Party and aided the Indonesian army by providing thousands of names of suspected individuals and completely eliminated from the face of the earth not only the party, but the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who tended to support the Communists. Simply put, this is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA and cited as a model to be copied elsewhere....

http://www.whale.to/b/stockwell_secret_third_world_wars.html

[Je suis Omar]

Multiple sources describing and cataloging USA war crimes, USA terrorism, the extreme brutality of the USA and the silence is deafening.

East Timor Questions & Answers

Stephen R. Shalom, Noam Chomsky, & Michael Albert

Z Magazine, October, 1999

1. What was U.S. policy toward Indonesia

In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policy toward the Asian colonies of the European powers followed a simple rule: where the nationalists in a territory were leftist (as in Vietnam), Washington would support the re-imposition of European colonial rule, while in those places where the nationalist movement was safely non-leftist (India, for example), Washington would support their independence as a way to remove them from the exclusive jurisdiction of a rival power. At first, Indonesian nationalists were not deemed sufficiently pliable, so U.S.-armed British troops (assisted by Japanese soldiers) went into action against the Indonesians to pave the way for the return of Dutch troops, also armed by the United States. In 1948, however, moderate Indonesian nationalists under Sukarno crushed a left-wing coup attempt, and Washington then decided that the Dutch should be encouraged to settle with Sukarno, accepting Indonesian independence.

It wasnt long, however, before the United States concluded that Sukarno was a dangerous neutralist, and under the Eisenhower administration Washington attempted to subvert Indonesias fragile democratic government. These effortsthe largest U.S. covert operation since World War IIwere unsuccessful, so the United States shifted its strategy to building up the Indonesian military as a counter-weight to the mass-based Indonesian Communist Party. In 1965, this approach bore fruit when a military coup, accompanied by the slaughter of somewhere between half a million and a million communists, suspected leftists, and ordinary peasants, deposed Sukarno and installed General Suharto in his place. Washington cheered the coup, rushed weapons to Jakarta, and even provided a list of Communist Party members to the army, which then rounded up and slaughtered them. According to a CIA study, "in terms of numbers killed" the 1965-66 massacres in Indonesia "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." The United States established close military, economic, and political ties with the Suharto regime.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199910--02.htm

Edited June 2, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[jacee]

since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence.

Gee do you think it has something to do with waging wars of aggression to

- support the arms industry

- support the resource extraction industry?

.

Edited June 2, 2015 by jacee

[Je suis Omar]

since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence.

Gee do you think it has something to do with waging wars of aggression to

- support the arms industry

- support the resource extraction industry?

.

As it has always been, Jacee. All rapacious USA business.

Smedley Darlington Butler[1] (July 30, 1881 June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, ... .

...

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 19021912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

The raping and pillaging of poor people's lands has been the hallmark of the USA throughout its long and sordid history. It started before its own terrorist beginning and it continues to this day. Millions upon millions of the poor have died to satisfy American greed.

Funny how there are so many who still cling to the fatuous notion that the USA is a kind, benevolent nation, the saviour of the oppressed.

Edited June 2, 2015 by Je suis Omar

[PIK]

Raping and pillaging has been a favourite of man forever. But not as bad as some countries do to their own people. Look at what Canada and America have done in the last 200 yrs ,but these other cultures that are hundreds of yrs old are still killing each other.

[bush_cheney2004]

...Funny how there are so many who still cling to the fatuous notion that the USA is a kind, benevolent nation, the saviour of the oppressed.

Sure is "funny"....millions of emigres just kept on coming to the US of A. Far more than to Canada, or any other nation on the planet.

[Je suis Omar]

Raping and pillaging has been a favourite of man forever. But not as bad as some countries do to their own people. Look at what Canada and America have done in the last 200 yrs ,but these other cultures that are hundreds of yrs old are still killing each other.

The USA is the biggest group of liars and hypocrites in the world. Look at all the people who mistakenly think the USA is a force for good. The USA is now, and has been since before its own terrorist origins, the biggest murdering and thieving nation. One only has to look at the historical record.

Canada has been one of its avid and not so avid supporters. Regardless, that's not an enviable position either way, supporting a country that is the equivalent of Nazi Germany, every president a little or big Hitler.