Purging Truth

Michael Sullivan is spinning Indonesian history, again. In his Thursday ATC piece about China's growing influence in South East Asia, Sullivan includes a short clip from Harry Tjan Silalahi of Jakarta's Center for Strategic and International Studies, and then states,

"He says a 1965 coup attempt by Indonesia's Communist Party helped convince the Indonesian military of China's expansionist impulses. The coup was brutally suppressed by Indonesia's US backed military. More than half a million people - many of them communists - were killed in the purge that followed."

This distortion and pro-Suharto/pro-CIA propaganda of Mr. Sullivan's is breathtaking, really. Notice that the blame for the bloodbath of up to a million humans is laid at the feet of Indonesia's Communist Party even though there is NOTHING in the historical record to definitively support the claim that it was a communist coup. In fact, as the Guardian noted, the coup generals were likely put up to their actions by the CIA. Sullivan also relegates the role of the US to a "backer" of the military, when in reality the US was elbow deep in blood - helping to plan and execute the Suharto counter-coup and holocaust that followed.

That Sullivan works so hard to cover the CIA's role in this horror of the 1960s has to make you wonder just who Sullivan really works for.

Leave Your Memory at the Door

A visitor to this blog left the following comment in the open thread below:

NPR had a piece on the death of Indonesia's former President Mohammed Suharto, which, though its complete and utter omission, verified the public's general ignorance as truth: That the United States government, and specifically the CIA, had no role whatsoever to play in his criminal rule, or in massive number of murders his regime perpetrated in the name of "anti-communism". And the US certainly didn't give the go-ahead to Suharto's invasion and slaughter of East Timor.

As this reader points out Nurse Michael Sullivan's report on Weekend Edition Sunday is so contemptuous of the historical record as to be criminal. Oh, Sullivan does mention that "many accuse Suharto of unleashing one of the greatest mass killings of the twentieth century - the deaths of more than half a million suspected Indonesian communists and ethnic Chinese," but you'd never know that the US was directly involved in planning and executing this mass murder or in approving and supporting the East Timor genocide (see this page from ETAN if you want to explore links on this).

The basic thrust of the piece was that in spite of being a pathological murderer and torturer Suharto did a lot of good for Indonesia - improving health, education and the economy. (Yeah, and Stalin essentially industrialized the Soviet Union, too.)