A documentary that disturbs
A fake revolution was staged in Indonesia in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. A recent PBS documentary about it, Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence,” is difficult to watch. There are excruciating silences as the brother of an Indonesian communist horribly murdered in 1965 waits for a sign of regret from the killers, or their families. Except for a middle-aged daughter, none is expressed.
A 2012 companion piece, “The Act of Killing,” was screened for members of Congress in 2014 and Oppenheimer called for the U.S. to acknowledge its role in mass murder. The Indonesian “people” slaughtered up to a million communists in the fall of 1965 because they weren’t religious and had sex with each other’s wives, according to some of the killers. The official justification, that communists were behind a failed coup d’etat of their benefactor, President Sukarno, is too ridiculous to repeat, as is the charge spread by Britain that the communists were planning a murderous rampage in the capital, Jakarta.
Killers drank their neighbors’ blood, believing it would forestall going crazy. The death squads operated locally with a chain of command organized by the Indonesian army under Sukarno’s successor, General Suharto. One death squad official says they all deserve a vacation in the United States, or at least a luxury cruise, for what they did.
The Vietnam War, a deterrent and diversion, cast an obscuring shadow over U.S. covert activities in Indonesia and throughout the world, including the homeland. COINTELPRO, a creation of the FBI, disrupted the antiwar and civil rights movements. Today, new code words describe those surreptitiously protecting capitalist control of the U.S. government from Americans promoting social and economic justice in the fight for a sustainable environment.
Jim Greenwood
Washington