30 September is the day of mourning in Indonesia, for both anticommunists and communists. On the nights of 30 September and 1 October 1965, six Army generals were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by communist officers and soldiers, including the presidential guards. The seventh one, Abdul Nasution, escaped at the cost of his daughter, adjutant, and a passing policeman.
The Army retaliated in the afternoon of 1 October and defeated the communists in days. By March 1966, General Suharto had forced the resignation of President Sukarno and changed the allegiance of Indonesia from Beijing to Washington D.C. Mass purge of communists, both members of the Communist Party and people accused as communists, followed for the next years, with up to a million deaths.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War when communism was no longer a menace. All Indonesians grow up with the myth of 30 September. There’s a strong Catholic tone in the Passion of 30 September and the Resurrection of 1 October, and it’s not a coincidence in Islamic Indonesia. Suharto’s era, from 1967 to 1998, was a golden age for Catholicism, as Javanese generals and technocrats and Dutch Jesuits influenced the government and media.
To this day the murdered generals and officers are called Revolutionary Heroes, ironically a socialist title since in 1965 Sukarno believed he was undertaking a global revolution against the United States. Never formally a communist, he saw himself as an anticolonial leader worthy of international recognition, along with Nasser and Nehru. He wished for the national unity of Nationalists, the Religious (i.e., Islamists, whose American-backed rebellion was defeated in 1962), and Communists. After the Islamists, the Army was the strongest American ally in Indonesia. While Sukarno believed he was fighting an anticolonial war in Borneo against Malaysia, Nasution’s Army refused to play along and kept the jungle warfare against Australia and Britain low risk. Bloodier was the bombing of the MacDonald House in Singapore that killed two HSBC employees and a driver.
The Passion of the Communists
While anticommunist governments set the narrative in Indonesia, left-wing academics in the West set their own since the sixties. The Cornell Paper, written by Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey in 1971, portrayed the Indonesian Communist Party as a victim of an American coup. The fall of Suharto in 1998 allowed pro-communist materials and opinions to enter Indonesia, and Sukarno had his revenge as different parties hated America and the Army in the 2000s – Islamists, liberals, and the emerging Left, from socialists to anarchists.
And yet, anti-communist conservatism remains strong in Indonesia. Communism still has no place in Indonesian politics, just as generally it has morphed into other ideologies in the West, like the Greens in Australia or the Democratic Socialists in the United States. The murdered generals remain revered and their murderers, the killed and executed communist leaders, remain reviled and forgotten.
In the 2010s Indonesian feminists and liberals, just like their peers in the West and elsewhere, put the intersectional Left perspective on 1965. The communists were framed as innocent, and the post-coup mass killings targeted all the marginalized, from peasants to feminists and Chinese Indonesians. On the other hand, it didn’t help that Islamists also embraced anticommunist conservatism at the time (which seems incomprehensible now, especially in the West), associating communism with the 2010s liberal ideas of feminism, LGBT rights, and atheism.
And there’s the film. 1984 the Suharto government released The Betrayal of G30S/PKI, referring to the date and the Indonesian Communist Party. The home video version is 4.5 hours long and was mandatory viewing for school children in the 1980s. It’s bloody, oppressive, and precedes The Passion of the Christ by twenty years, only overlong. It was made to instill anticommunism among Indonesian children, ironically at the time when Islamism presented the greatest threat to Indonesia and Suharto (which was the point, to plea for unity with the Islamists).
The Inevitability
The film has a bad history, and so does the academic convention outside Indonesia presenting the communists as innocent victims. My issue is the long-term attempt to categorize the mass killing as an anti-Chinese pogrom, which has several uses. First, it puts the Chinese Indonesians as fellow victims of anticommunism, instead of an important part of Suharto’s economic policy and a Christian ally to the Army. Second, it puts Chinese Indonesians on the same table as People’s Republic of China, which diplomatic ties were cut by Jakarta for the rest of the Cold War.
At least, most Chinese Indonesians hardly think of 1965 and dislike communism. At least, this idea is confined to Western-based academics and progressive Twitter. Malaysian Chinese Left had the worse idea of romanticizing the communist rebellion of the 1950s, which was unpopular with the Malays for the obvious reason – it was blasphemous. But that never deters young Malaysians, who saw their ‘ancestors’ as anticolonial fighters who gunned down British plantation owners and their families, instead of persuading the Malays to side with the British.
Whether as a Chinese Indonesian academic or a Malaysian Chinese illustrator, the affiliation to ancient communism did some people good in the 2010s online social scene, if only to undo the model minority baggage that’s not just affecting ethnic Chinese in the West but also Southeast Asia.
Finally, I wish the mass killings were preventable. But it was Southeast Asia. In the mid-1960s. With Sukarno already ailing from medical complications, the communists and the military knew that it was a high noon duel, and the communists shot first. But they knew they were outnumbered. To this day left-wing politics are confined in Java among the Javanese – the other regions and tribes are too religious to embrace socialism. Unlike in post-1945 Eurasia, only the Air Force stood with communists, thanks to close relations with Pact Warsaw and Yugoslavia (nobody, nobody ever had a good memory of the Red Chinese).
China and mainland Southeast Asia, meanwhile, were also in the mood of mass purges at that time. Indonesia never talks about the mass killings, but it’s a mirror image of the Cultural Revolution and the future Killing Fields, which Western communists still think is nothing really bad. It wasn’t anything really bad either for America: Indonesia ceased hostilities with its neighbors, maritime Southeast Asia became anti-communist by 1967, and American products had returned to Jakarta soon, including ironically all the leftist, countercultural films and vinyl.
My parents, meanwhile, were out of the socialist-inflicted poverty and spent the sixties normally. Without deranged propaganda, without air raid sirens, without food shortage. It was good enough for them and good enough for me.