NBC's Troubled Documentary on the Indonesian Genocide (Commentary)
Commentary
on Indonesia: The Troubled Victory
NBC News, 1967 51:00 minutes
From the opening of Indonesia: The Troubled Victory:
As our war in Asia gets bigger, a largely unnoticed
victory over the communists has been decisively won in Southeast Asia. In fact,
it is the single biggest defeat ever handed to communists anywhere in the
world. And it was won without a single American soldier, American dollar, or
bomb. Geographically [Indonesia] dominates Southeast Asia and politically, as
the former ally of Peking, threatened to become the communist southern front in
the malignant battle for Asia, a massive end run around Vietnam... Sixteen
months ago, these beautiful and tranquil-looking islands exploded with stunning
violence. Indonesia is still in a state of shock. Without warning, Indonesia’s
three million communists tried to seize total control of the government by
killing their opposition in a single night of assassination. This act in turn
was revenged by the slaughter and arrest of half a million suspected
communists. The terror and the trouble is by no means over... With
unprecedented violence, Indonesia on her own has handed the world its single
biggest victory over the communists. But it is a complex and uncertain victory
in the battle for Asia, and it is a troubled victory.
The way that the security state has
undermined democracy has been extensively described in numerous books and
alternative media sources. Among the many writers who have covered this theme,
there are the famous critics of American media and foreign policy, Noam Chomsky
and Edward S. Herman, who wrote the classic Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media. They described how The New York Times and
The Washington Post, as papers of record that establish narratives for all of
the media, act like propaganda outlets that faithfully follow US State
Department and US security agencies’ messaging. They also do real journalism,
speaking truth to power once in a while, but this just serves to raise doubts
and counter allegations that they are mouthpieces for government. In spite of
deviations, it can be demonstrated that these leading media organizations
generally act as cheerleaders for American foreign policy. They may express
regrets and mistakes after the fact, or lament that good men had good
intentions, but they go on to repeat the same errors when it is time to support
the next illegal foreign intervention. Other sources have expanded on the theme
of Chomsky and Herman’s book by describing in detail programs such as Operation
Mockingbird which recruited journalists, academics, artists, authors and
editors to co-operate with the CIA.[1]
Much of the public has unquestioningly
bought the narratives told about Syria, Ukraine and Russia in recent years. It
is difficult for many to get perspective on the present and see it without the
bias imposed on us. If one is skeptical that government agencies influence “objective”
reporting of world events, it may be easier to make the case if one looks at
historical examples. One can see their absurd and transparent biases more easily,
the way one readily sees the strangeness of fashions and hairstyles from
decades past.
If one should ever doubt that the
CIA could infiltrate major media corporations and lead them by the nose to
preferred narratives, the NBC News television report from 1967 discussed here illustrates
the point in ways that should shock contemporary audiences.
The one-hour report Indonesia:
The Troubled Victory was presented in 1967 as an in-depth look at a complex
political and social transformation, but it served as an unquestioning parroting
of the preferred narrative supplied by the new Indonesian and American regimes
that had recently taken power. Sukarno and Kennedy had been swept aside in
their respective countries, and both of the new governments were strengthening
their anti-communist offensives. The following discussion will illustrate how
NBC News created a blatant piece of propaganda through ideological bias,
choices of terminology, editorial decisions, unsupported and unquestioned
assertions, historical ignorance and an extreme commitment to a dehumanizing “objectivity.”
The report opens with the statement
that “a largely unnoticed victory over the communists has been decisively won
in Southeast Asia.” It is true that this “victory” was ignored while so much
attention was focused on Vietnam, but behind the scenes America had spent
heavily in Indonesia through the previous two decades on covert operations,
foreign aid, and supplying weapons to the outer islands rebellions and a border
war with Malaysia. This was done in order to keep Indonesia unstable and push
it toward military rule, with the aim of destabilizing Sukarno’s government and
hindering progressive land reforms. There is no smoking gun evidence that
proves the CIA handpicked Suharto and masterminded the coup as it actually
happened. If they left such evidence they wouldn’t be doing their job right.
Nonetheless, there is much suggestive evidence, and it is a strange coincidence
that the outcome was exactly what Allen Dulles, head of the CIA during the
1950s, had wanted.
It may be useful to think of the CIA’s
methods in this story as those of a “showrunner” (writer/director) of a long
cable television drama. The entire run of the drama lasting several years has a
grand story arc, and within that each season has its own story arc. The
showrunner establishes the grand arc which outlines major themes, conflicts and
a desired end point. Each minor arc within the major arc has its own sub-plots
and characters, but they ultimately serve the larger story. The showrunner
writes a few episodes and gives instructions to his team of writers, then he
leaves them to it. He steps in to supervise and advise occasionally, reacting
to the surprising plot twists and character development that his writers have
created. The important point is that at the start he knows only where he wants
to go, but not how he will get there. He can’t control the whole process and
has to react and improvise along the way. He has to let his writers and
characters do what they will, then further the story toward his goals as it
evolves. This is a useful way of understanding how Allen Dulles got what he
wanted out of Indonesia while staying concealed and letting the political events
appear to be an entirely domestic phenomenon.
In light of the mass violence that
was unleashed after the coup, it is interesting to note the implication made by
the narrator in the introduction: that this conflict—which was not a civil war
but rather a genocide which consisted of the slaughter and detention of unarmed
civilians—was a good thing, a “victory” because, unlike Vietnam, it hasn’t cost
American lives or involved America directly in a civil war. It pricks the
conscience slightly. It is, admittedly, a “troubled victory,” but all in all we
are good with it.
The report makes many exaggerated
claims that go unchallenged and unverified. News documentaries don’t have to
include a list of references, unfortunately, or have their claims challenged by
scientific method. One allegation was that Peking was an “ally” of the Sukarno
regime. No evidence is provided about what the nature of this relationship was,
yet in other segments the documentary makes it clear that Indonesia had taken
foreign aid from several nations in recent years, including both the USSR and
the US. It was obviously involved in diplomacy and trade with many nations, so
it is not clear why Peking is singled out as the sole dangerous liaison. In the
year of the coup, the US had cut off aid to Indonesia, but Peter Dale Scott’s
research on these tumultuous years reveals that the US aid was simply no longer
flowing to the government.[2] It was going to the new
government-in-waiting in the form of military assistance to Suharto—the
“unknown” entity who would miraculously appear and save the nation during the
bloodshed of the September 30th coup.
Many wild and fantastic descriptions
of the famous coup have circulated for years and have been used as
justification for the anti-communist mass murders that occurred afterwards. The
truth of the event seems to have been lost forever in rumors, conflicting
accounts, disinformation, lies and biased interpretations. One thing is
certain, though, and that is that the outcome is exactly what CIA director
Allen Dulles worked toward ever since massive gold and oil reserves were
discovered in West Papua in the 1930s. His goal was to make sure that West
Papua would be absorbed by Indonesia and its resources would be given to
American corporations, along with resources in the rest of Indonesia. This
required the elimination of socialism and nationalism in Indonesia, and the
defeat of Dutch attempts to lead its former colony in West Papua toward
independence.
Indonesia specialist Greg Poulgrain
studied this history, and evidence he uncovered suggests the CIA backed Suharto
in a complex and duplicitous plot to encourage a small faction of the PKI (Communist
Party of Indonesia) to detain six generals who were suspected of plotting to
overthrow Sukarno.[3] A coup by either left or right-leaning
army factions seemed like a certainty during 1965, Indonesia’s famous “year of
living dangerously.” Whoever acted first would be able to say they were
pre-empting an illegal takeover by the other side. Indeed, the leader, Colonel
Untung, said the plan had been only to detain the six generals and bring them
to Sukarno so that they could explain to his face whether they were planning a
coup or not.[4] Along the way things got out of
hand and they were murdered during the struggle to bring them to the palace.
Greg
Poulgrain, from The Incubus of Intervention
Sukarno
was at the center of the conflict between John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles
(Director of Central Intelligence) With the intention of removing Sukarno
from power, Dulles’ strategy of ‘regime change,’ was well-advanced before
Kennedy became president. Indeed, his career in intelligence had started even
before Kennedy was born. In 1958, DCI Dulles was at the height of his power.
He was not simply targeting the Outer Islands in Indonesia, but the entire
Indonesian archipelago—including Netherlands New Guinea [West Papua] where
the world’s largest gold deposit was located (and is today still being
mined). Unlike Dulles, neither Kennedy nor Sukarno was aware of this El
Dorado. But when the author interviewed Joseph Luns, the former Dutch Foreign
Minister who became NATO Secretary-General, Luns said that he had asked the
Americans involved to exploit the huge gold deposit jointly with the Dutch.
It was their refusal, Luns said, that actually forced the Dutch out of New
Guinea. When Kennedy and Sukarno in 1963 resolved to work together, US
foreign policy threatened to disrupt—unwittingly—Dulles’ own Cold War
strategy which was focused on Indonesia. JFK’s wariness, after Allen Dulles’
role in the Bay of Pigs, drew a tongue-in-cheek but prophetic comment:
“Domestic policy can only defeat us,” he used to say, “Foreign policy can
kill us.” (from the book jacket)
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Suharto was an unknown with no political
experience or reputation for any political policies. Poulgrain points to
evidence that Suharto was an outsider from the special forces who was backed by
the CIA. He had personal contacts with the plotters that went back to the
1940s, and Poulgrain asserts that his plan was to encourage them by telling
them he would protect them after they seized the generals. However, he intended
to double-cross them, seize power for himself, and terminate communist and
moderate influence. He had even pre-arranged some aspects of the plan to
destroy the PKI throughout the country before the coup took place. The deaths
of the generals during their abduction eliminated his rivals in the military
leadership and created an atrocity that would fuel the nation-wide rampage
against communists. Poulgrain summed up his views in a long interview about his
book in 2016:
Increasingly, as further evidence is compiled years
after the event, Suharto is taking on the appearance of the Kostrad commander
at the center of a web. He had made plans—even before the event occurred—to
strike at the PKI for the events which occurred on the night of 30th September.
And through Sjam he was able to ensure the kidnapping event ... was turned into
the murder of the generals; ... Suharto ensured the event was turned into a
tragedy of epic proportions, from which Indonesia has yet to recover.[5]
The new regime quickly circulated
wild stories about the slow torture of the abducted generals, with lurid
descriptions of female torturers aroused to sadistic excesses in sex orgies and
satanic rituals. The NBC report repeated this narrative unquestioningly. Even
though Ted Yates used the adjective “incredible” to describe it, no doubts were
raised about it being just a little too convenient as propaganda for the new
regime. Retired CIA officer Ralph McGehee wrote about Indonesia first in The
Nation in 1981, and later in 1991 he described the CIA’s massive propaganda
operations by their nickname “Mighty Wurlitzer”:
Between 1961 and 1975 the Agency conducted 900 major or
sensitive operations, and thousands of lesser covert actions. The majority of
its operations were propaganda, election or paramilitary. Countries of major
concern, such as Indonesia in the early 1960s, were usually subjected to the
CIA's most concerted attention. Critics of the CIA have aptly described the
mainstays of such attention: "discrediting political groups... by forged
documents that may be attributed to them. . . ," faking "communist
weapon shipments,'' capturing communist documents and then inserting forgeries
prepared by the Agency's Technical Services Division. The CIA's "Mighty
Wurlitzer" then emblazoned and disseminated the details of such
"discoveries." The Mighty Wurlitzer was a worldwide propaganda
mechanism consisting of hundreds or even thousands of media representatives and
officials including, over a period of years, approximately 400 members of the
American media. The CIA has used the Wurlitzer and its successors to plant
stories and to suppress expository or critical reporting in order to manipulate
domestic and international perceptions.[6]
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... 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 third largest 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....
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The most interesting omission in the
NBC report is that the producers never got an interview with Sukarno himself.
He survived the coup and stayed on as figurative head of state for a few more
years. It is not clear whether the producers were blocked from having access to
Sukarno or whether they were not interested giving an opportunity for rebuttal
to the man they slandered repeatedly throughout the report.
Sukarno is portrayed as a corrupt
and decadent leader who has led his nation to economic ruin. However, the
report never explains the reasons for his popularity and his hold on power,
even after the coup when Suharto didn’t dare dispose of him quickly. In the
United States a popular president was assassinated in 1963 without the event
being followed by a popular uprising, but this wasn’t possible in Indonesia.
The report gives no background about
the fact that the US State Department and ambassadors throughout the 1950s had
found Sukarno to be a reasonable centrist, an anti-communist nationalist who
wanted to find an economic and social system adapted to his country’s unique
circumstances. Sukarno had wanted to follow a neutral path in the Cold War, and
he was famous for having launched the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung in 1955.
President Kennedy had a plan to support Sukarno, focus on peaceful development,
and divert foreign aid to infrastructure projects, and Sukarno said after his
assassination that he believed Kennedy was murdered to prevent him from
visiting Indonesia and establishing a policy that would block the carefully
laid plans of Allen Dulles.
Furthermore, the description in the
report of Sukarno as a devout (but hypocritical) Muslim contradicts the
allegation that he was sympathetic with communist, atheist, anti-religious
forces. It could be that Sukarno, the communists, or both weren’t as
anti-religious as they were portrayed to be when their atheism and hedonism
were alleged as an excuse to kill. The portrayal of the PKI as savage heathens
ignores the possibility that they were not opposed to religion but were instead
interested in blending their religious faith with progressive land reforms,
poverty elimination and national independence. Portraying them as evil heathens
was a propaganda ploy to turn religious institutions against them, and it
worked extremely well.
The documentary also condemns
Sukarno for kicking out the United Nations and cursing American foreign aid,
but it never explores what led to this deterioration of previously warm
relations. An investigation of this matter would have revealed that Sukarno was
aware of how the UN mission in Congo had been used by the CIA to remove Prime
Minister Lumumba and have him killed by his domestic enemies.[7] Sukarno too was under such implicit
threat, constantly being pressured to abandon land reform and policies that
would keep Indonesia’s resources under domestic control. His development
policies are portrayed as failures, which they were to some extent, but the
report never explores whether these failures were caused by the refusal of
Western powers to help Indonesia unless it cooperated with Western economic
models. As President Nixon stated the policy when speaking of Chile a decade
later, the policy toward an uncooperative government is always to “make the
economy scream.”[8]
The report celebrates the return of
America and the UN who were now ready to help Suharto’s “New Order”. However,
Yates never explains why these two saviors were so silent about the genocide
and even complicit in it. If Sukarno was wrong to have mistrusted them, surely
they would have denounced the outrageous human rights abuses that occurred
after the coup, abuses which the UN Charter required them to not support, denounce,
stop and punish. This failure was in the news briefly in October 2017 when
documents were released pointing to American complicity in the genocide.[9]
If Sukarno should be condemned for
anything, it must be his hypocritical insistence, as the great anti-colonial nation-builder,
on colonizing West Papua, long before 1965. Also, his silence after the coup
shows that he preferred to be turned into a figurehead by Suharto rather than to
speak out against him and against the genocide, going into exile or risking
imprisonment if necessary.
By the time Ted Yates gets finished
with his descriptions of Sukarno and the decrepit state of the country, we may
be ready to say there is some truth here about Sukarno’s failures, but the
reasons for them are never explored, and this report peddles so many lies and
unsubstantiated allegations that everything stated in it becomes unreliable.
As mentioned above, this report
makes no mention of the significance of Indonesia’s annexation of West Papua,
and how central this issue was in plans to control that territory’s resources.
Sukarno, the great anti-colonial fighter, was eager to colonize this region
that, according to the UN charter, was entitled to self-determination because
of its unique cultures and languages that had no connection to Indonesia.
President Kennedy was eager to put the territory under Indonesian control in
order to keep Indonesia as a Cold War ally, and tragically the Soviets and the
Chinese were also eager not to antagonize Sukarno for the same reason, so the
hopes for a West Papuan nation were dashed by the UN’s “New York agreement” in
1962. According to this agreement, a referendum on joining Indonesia
permanently was required to take place within ten years, but when this was held
in 1969, only a thousand tribal leaders were allowed to vote as delegates for
their people, and they voted at gunpoint. Indonesian control of West Papua
since the 1960s has been described as a slow genocide,[10] but today it is a forgotten part of
the world whose importance in Cold War history is almost completely overlooked.
The NBC report is sadly ironic when
we know in retrospect what a violent, repressive kleptocracy Suharto
established over the next three decades. The report celebrates Suharto as a
moderate hero, living in a modest bungalow with “only one wife,” and an
enjoyment of hunting tigers, so apparently he was just an all-round American
guy. He’s a man of reason who also takes advice from an astrologer, according
to NBC. The report celebrates the emergence of his one-man rule right after it
has finished condemning the end of the previous era of one-man rule. No serious
questions are asked about where this is all headed.
Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (Paperless Publishing, 1988, 2012),
Chapter 13:
What
was NBC in 1967?
I kept asking myself, why had NBC
worked so long and hard to tear our case [the conspiracy to assassinate JFK]
apart? ... I had known for years, without having ascribed any particular
significance to it, that NBC was a subsidiary of Radio Corporation of
America... I learned that RCA had become an integral part of the American
defense structure during World War II with its development of the expanded
use of radio by the armed forces. This partnership had grown even stronger as
RCA went on to develop a new, extremely effective altimeter for high-altitude
bombing missions. From there it had moved on into advancing of radar and
other sophisticated machinery for the armed forces. Like the American
military, RCA had grown from a relatively simple service into a powerful
colossus. Its prime military contract awards had increased more than one
billion dollars from 1960 to 1967. It no longer was a mere “radio business.”
Now it was a part of the warfare machine. And its chairman, retired General
David Sarnoff, was well known for his belligerent, pro-Cold War public
pronouncements and activities… Given this background, it made more sense to
me why RCA and its subsidiary NBC might want to discredit a local district
attorney who kept raising the unpleasant possibility that the President had
been assassinated by the cold warrior establishment of the United States
intelligence community.
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One cringe-inducing segment is on
the reporting of violence against ethnic Chinese. Since the communist influence
was blamed on “Red China,” popular anger was directed at the Chinese minority.
They were contradictorily blamed for being both socialist and greedy
businessmen. Ted Yates describes them as being victimized because they “control
the economy and refuse to integrate.” Notably, he doesn’t say, “They are
believed to control...” or “They are accused of controlling...” He states this
as an accepted fact which he almost seems to agree with as a justification for
their treatment. If the same methodology had been applied thirty years earlier,
an American reporter in Germany would have said the same about how the Jews “control
the economy and refuse to integrate.” Ted Yates seemed to miss the irony and
continued to report on these events as an objective automaton lacking human
moral judgment.
During the reporting it is not at
all clear what Ted Yates thinks about what he is witnessing. He appears to be
somewhat sympathetic to the injustices he sees, but he never editorializes,
never even raises a question about whether Americans should withdraw support
for this regime and protest American involvement in the genocide. The
possibility of doing valuable reporting is lost in the delusion that one could
report on such events objectively, without reference to morals or ideology, or to
one’s pre-existing biases.
Ted Yates visits a detention camp
where Chinese have been sent for their own safety until they can be deported to
China, a country where they have never lived. He stays there for several
minutes while the crowd pelts him, his crew and the guards with stones. They
are chanting anti-American slogans, so the NBC crew is the obvious cause of the
assault, yet he lingers there for the longest time putting himself, his crew
and the guards in danger. What was he thinking? Unfortunately, this kind of
risk-taking got him into trouble. He was shot and killed later in the year while
covering the Middle East.
In another segment, we hear a few
comments from a dissident journalist who was imprisoned during Sukarno’s rule. But
when this newly released dissident speaks on camera, we hear not a word of
concern for the million people who have just been slaughtered. Instead the
dissidents are described as welcoming in a new flourishing of culture and the
arts that is now sure to begin. Sadly, it is well known that modern-day Indonesia
is a cultural wasteland, as depicted in Joshua Oppenheimer’s two documentary
films on the genocide, The
Act of Killing
and The Look of Silence. A genocide buried and never
confronted in the collective consciousness tends to also kill artistic and
intellectual life. Journalist Andre Vltchek described this loss of culture and how
inappropriate it was for UNESCO to anoint the city of Bandung as a “world
creative city” in 2015:
And how paradoxical and cynical this stamp really is!
UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization. During and after the 1965 coup, education, culture and science
were thoroughly destroyed in Indonesia. Today, this fourth most populous nation
on earth does not have one single writer, thinker or scientist of international
caliber.[11]
In a later segment of The
Troubled Victory, Ted Yates covers an anti-Sukarno student demonstration, still
occurring after the coup apparently restored stability. He fails to question
how the chaos on the streets might be a carefully orchestrated unbalancing act
done just to keep things from settling down too much. Ted Yates points out that
the students support Suharto but he must reluctantly send out the army to
maintain order. At the end of the scene Ted Yates rushes to help a student
reporter whose neck has been broken by a rifle butt, but he refers to him pejoratively
as a member of the “commie press.”
Ted Yates interview with a genocidaire in Bali (4:23).
The prize for the most shocking and
cringe-inducing scene must go to Ted Yates’ interview with a proud genocidaire
in Bali, who also happens to be an archeology professor:
Ted Yates: Bali is such a beautiful island. The people
are so attractive. The climate is so lovely. It’s hard to believe that so many
unpleasant things went on here in the last year.
Rata: Yeah, but now, Bali has become more beautiful
without communists and this is the duty of the Balinese people: to clean their
own island of the communist influence. This is the holy duty and we did it. In
Bali, we really did it.
Ted Yates: What actually happened here in this village?
Rata: Well, the story here is because some of the
communist leaders from this village realized they had done wrong, they came to
the village council and asked the village council when the village council
would clean their village of the communist people.
Ted Yates: You mean the communists themselves asked to
be killed?
Rata: Some of them. And then the village council made a
list of who must be killed from their village. And some of them wanted to be
killed, but they asked for time: “If you want to kill me, you can kill me the
next day, but now give me a chance to pray at the temple, at the village
temple, to say goodbye to all of my relatives, and the next morning I’m ready
to be killed.” So the next morning or next evening, the villagers brought him
here and then killed him by sword.
Ted Yates: They killed him with a sword?
Rata: Yes, with a sword. Stabbed them one time and
killed them. They were buried, with a headstone like this one, so the family
could recognize the next morning where the family member is buried.
Throughout this interview, Ted Yates
maintains his composure. At one point he rubs something out of his eye. He may
be crying or trying to register some form of disgust at what he is hearing, but
he doesn’t seem to be betraying much emotion. We’ll never know what he was
really thinking about hearing such a blunt and happy confession to mass murder,
or what he thought about this entire assignment in Indonesia. Was he under
pressure to keep his own views out of the report and raise no doubts about
American involvement in these crimes, or did he sincerely accept the need to
tolerate the genocide in order to pursue “the greater good” of fighting
communism? If the answer to this question is yes, then Americans too sank to
the level of fighting a “holy war” against communism. It may be shocking to
hear this archaeology professor enthusiastically support the killing, but
American intellectuals were also complicit in these acts. The killing of infidels
had official blessing of both the Balinese villagers and the politicians,
intellectuals and bureaucrats in Washington.
The final outrage comes at the end
of the report when Ted Yates reports on one sliver of light shining on
Indonesia in these grim times. The New Order wants the Americans back. Public
sector spending is going to be reduced, and nationalized corporations are going
to be returned to their foreign owners. A Goodyear rubber factory is shown as
an example where profits are back and the factory has now been converted into a
prison camp. The workers, who could have been killed for their former communist
affiliation, have been spared. Now they do their jobs at gunpoint. After
Americans had for so long pointed to Stalin’s gulags as the principal failing
of Soviet communism, here was an American reporter proudly showing off prison
laborers in a military dictatorship toiling at gunpoint for an American
corporation.
This eerily calm celebration of a
genocidal “victory over communism” should seem outrageous five decades later,
but perhaps many people will still say, “But they were communists!” Most people
watching this documentary today can see what an outrage Indonesia: The
Troubled Victory was. It stands out now not as a historical record of
events in Southeast Asia but as a glaring example of state propaganda. Watching
it now may help people question contemporary interpretations of world events
that are fed to them. What will people say in fifty years’ time if they can
view the great volumes of reportage from our day advocating military
interventions and screaming “Assad must go,” “Maduro is a dictator!” or “the Russians
hijacked our democracy!”? What will they think about the interview with Hillary
Clinton in which she says about the overthrow of Gadhafi: “We came, we saw, he
died”? The Mighty Wurlitzer is still there, and it has told us to be very
afraid of Cambridge Analytica and other newfound methods of manipulating public
opinion through social media, as if attempts by powerful, hidden forces to
influence the public mind were a new thing in this world.
__________
__________
This essay was originally posted in
November 2017, and was revised in July 2019.
The meaning conveyed by the term
Mighty Wurlitzer may be unfamiliar to readers in the 21st century. This was the
name given to the giant pipe organs, sold between 1914 and 1943, that enabled
one maestro to imitate the sounds of a full orchestra. In the CIA’s usage of
the term, there is the obvious suggestion that the agency had the power to act
as the wizard behind the curtain, playing every instrument in the global mass
media network.
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| The Mighty Wurlitzer |
Notes
[1] James F. Tracy, “The CIA
and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know,” Global Research, December 1, 2016, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956.
[2]
Peter Dale Scott, “Still Uninvestigated After 50 Years: Did
the U.S. Help Incite the 1965 Indonesia Massacre?” Asia Pacific Journal, August 3,
2015.
[3] Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting
Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles (Petaling Jaya,
Malyasia: Strategic Information and Research Development Center, 2015).
[4] Coen
Holzappel, “The role of
Suharto in the Indonesian genocide of 1965,” Colloque “Les
violences de masses en Indonésie (1965-1966) et la question de la
reconciliation,” Centre Asie du sud-est
(CASE), January 19, 2016, https://youtu.be/O9r2h-gUQP8.
[5] Greg Poulgrain and Edward Curtin, “The CIA’s Involvement in Indonesia
and the Assassinations of JFK and Dag Hammarskjold,” Off-Guardian, July 24, 2016.
[7] Jihan El-Tahri, Cuba: An African Odyssey, Part 1,
directed by Jihan El-Tahri, (2007; Temps Noir) DVD, 00:26:34~. In this film, Vladimir
Shubin, former Director of the Africa Department of the Soviet Politburo said,
“The UN troops were supposed to protect the independence of Congo, but they
wouldn’t allow the Congolese troops which were loyal to Lumumba to operate. The
mission of the United Nations troops was misused to topple the government of
Lumumba or to at least not protect Lumumba.”
[8] “‘Make
the Economy Scream’: Secret Documents Show Nixon, Kissinger Role Backing 1973
Chile Coup,” Havana Times, September 10, 2013. From this source: “In 1970, the
CIA’s deputy director of plans wrote in a secret memo: ‘It is firm and
continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. … It is imperative that
these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that
the USG [the U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.’”
[9] Jim Naureckas, “No, US Didn’t ‘Stand By’ Indonesian
Genocide–It Actively Participated,”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting,
October 17, 2017.
[10] Elizabeth Brundige et al., “Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in
West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian
Control,” Allard K. Lowenstein International Human
Rights Clinic Yale Law School, April 2004.
[11] Andre Vltchek, “Bandung–-Creative City or the Legacy
of US Imperialism?”
Global Research, February 2016.
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