WHAT WE KNEW FOR TOO LONG

Starting in 1965 and continuing for nearly two years, people were killed in Indonesia as part of an anti-communist purge organized by the army.
Which the United States encouraged and assisted.


All of the following passages are from Wikipedia:

CITE: The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the "New Order" and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War.

CITE: Thousands of local vigilantes and army units killed actual and alleged PKI members. Killings occurred across the country, with the worst in the PKI strongholds of Central Java, East Java, Bali, and northern Sumatra.

CITE: Despite a consensus at the highest levels of the US and British governments that it would be necessary "to liquidate Sukarno", as related in a CIA memorandum from 1962,  and the existence of extensive contacts between anti-communist army officers and the US military establishment – training of over 1,200 officers, "including senior military figures", and providing weapons and economic assistance  – the CIA denied active involvement in the killings. Declassified US documents in 2017 revealed that the US government had detailed knowledge of the mass killings from the beginning, and was supportive of the actions of the Indonesian Army. US complicity in the killings, which included providing extensive lists of communist party officials to Indonesian death squads, has previously been established by historians and journalists.

CITE: A top-secret CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.

CITE: As early as 1958, Western powers — in particular the US and the UK — pushed for policies that would encourage the Indonesian Army to act forcefully against the PKI and the Left, which included a covert propaganda campaign designed to damage the reputation of Sukarno and the PKI, and secret assurances along with military and financial support to anti-communist leaders within the army.

CITE: The US Embassy in Jakarta supplied the Indonesian military with lists of up to 5,000 suspected Communists.

CITE: Local Chinese Indonesians were killed in some areas, and their properties looted and burned as a result of anti-Chinese racism, on the excuse that D.N. Aidit had brought the PKI closer to China. In the predominantly Christian islands of Nusa Tenggara, Christian clergy and teachers suffered at the hands of Muslim youth.

CITE: Although, for most of the country, the killings subsided in the first months of 1966, in parts of East Java the killings went on for years.


BALI

CITE: Like parts of East Java, Bali experienced a state of near-civil war as Communists regrouped.

CITE: The balance of power was shifted in favour of anti-Communists in December 1965, when personnel from both the Army Para-commando Regiment and 5th Brawijaya Military Region units arrived in Bali after having carried out killings in Java. Led by Suharto's principal troubleshooter, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, Javanese military commanders permitted Balinese squads to kill until reined in. In contrast to Central Java where the Army encouraged people to kill the "Gestapu", Bali's eagerness to kill was so great and spontaneous that, having initially provided logistic support, the Army eventually had to step in to prevent chaos.

CITE: Hundreds of houses belonging to communists and their relatives were burnt down within one week of the reprisal crusade, with occupants being butchered as they ran from their homes. An early estimate suggested that 50,000 people, including women and children, were killed in this operation alone. The population of several Balinese villages were halved in the last months of 1965. All the Chinese shops in the towns of Singaraja and Denpasar were destroyed and their owners killed.


YOUR COFFEE ISLANDS

CITE: The targeting of ethnic Chinese played an important role in the killings in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

CITE: The killings served as a direct precedent for the genocidal invasion and occupation of East Timor. The same generals oversaw the killing in both situations, and encouraged equally brutal methods.

CITE: In recalling the attitudes of US government officials regarding the killings, State Department intelligence officer Howard Federspiel said that "no one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered."
Within the United States, Robert F. Kennedy was one of the only prominent individuals to condemn the massacres. In January 1966 he 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?



CITE: While the exact role of the United States government during the massacres remains obscured by still sealed government archives pertaining to Indonesia for this period, it is known that, "at a minimum," the US government supplied money and communications equipment to the Indonesian Army that facilitated the mass killings, gave fifty million rupiah to the KAP-Gestapu death squad, and provided targeted names of thousands of alleged PKI leaders to the Indonesian Army. Robert J. Martens, political officer at the US Embassy in Jakarta from 1963 to 1966, told journalist Kathy Kadane in 1990 that he led a group of State Department and CIA officials who drew up the lists of roughly 5,000 Communist Party operatives, which he provided to an army intermediary.



CITE: The State Department volume Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, which the CIA attempted to suppress in 2001, acknowledges that the U.S. Embassy provided lists of communist leaders to Indonesians involved in the purges, and notes that Marshall Green stated in a 1966 airgram to Washington, which was drafted by Martens and approved by Masters, that the lists of communists were "apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership." Scholars have also corroborated the claim that U.S. Embassy officials provided lists of communists to Suharto's forces, who, according to Mark Aarons, "ensured that those so named were eliminated in the mass killing operations."

CITE: Robert Cribb, writing in 2002, claims "there is considerable evidence that the U.S. encouraged the killings, by both providing funds to anti-communist forces and supplying the Indonesian army with the names of people whom it believed were PKI members.

CITE: Bradley Simpson, Director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive,  contends that "Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party's unarmed supporters might not go far enough.

CITE: Western support for the Indonesian Army solidified as it demonstrated its "resolve" through the mass killing campaigns. US President Lyndon B. Johnson's Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy reported to the president that the events since 1 October had been "a striking vindication of US policy towards Indonesia in recent years: a policy of keeping our hand in the game for the long-term stakes despite recurrent pressure to pull out" and that it was made clear to the Indonesian army via US Embassy's deputy chief of mission, Francis Joseph Galbraith, that "Embassy and the USG generally sympathetic with and admiring of what Army doing."

SOURCE: Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 - Wikipedia



As a Dutchman as well as an American, it rather pisses me off when "Anglos" bring up colonialism as criticism of the Netherlands.
Y'all can kindly stfu.

And those of you who keep talking about Balinese culture and how you love that place are also pretty darn irritating.
Stfu.




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