It
is estimated that at least 500,000 people – some estimates go to three
million – linked to the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) were eliminated
between 1965 and 1966.
Recently declassified Foreign Office documents show that British propagandists secretly incited anti-communists,
including army generals, to eliminate the PKI. The campaign of
apparently spontaneous mass murder, now known to have been orchestrated
by the Indonesian army, was later described by the CIA as one of the
worst mass murders of the century.
As
the massacres started in October 1965 British officials called for “the
PKI and all communist organisations” to “be eliminated”. The nation,
they warned, would be in danger “as long as the communist leaders are at
large and their rank and file are allowed to go unpunished”.
Britain launched its propaganda offensive against Indonesia
in response to President Sukarno’s hostility to the formation of its
former colonies into the Malayan federation which from 1963 resulted in a
low-level conflict and armed incursions by the Indonesian army across
the border. In 1965 specialist propagandists from the Foreign Office’s
information research department (IRD) were sent to Singapore to produce
black propaganda to undermine Sukarno’s [governmment]. The PKI was a strong
supporter of both the president and the Confrontation movement.
A small team produced a newsletter
purporting to be produced by Indonesian émigrés and targeted at
prominent and influential individuals, including army generals. It also
supplied a black radio station broadcasting into Indonesia run by the
Malaysians. […]
The
propagandists called for “the PKI and all it stands for” to be
“eliminated for all time” advising its influential readers that
“procrastination and half-hearted measures can only lead to… our
ultimate and complete destruction”. Over the following weeks massacres
of alleged PKI members, few if any with any involvement in the attempted
coup, and other leftists spread across the archipelago. […]
A letter to the
British ambassador in Djakarta from the “coordinator of political
warfare”, a Foreign Office propaganda specialist called Norman Reddaway,
who arrived in Singapore in the aftermath of the attempted coup,
reveals the policy was “to conceal the fact that the butcheries have
taken place with the encouragement of the generals”, in the hope that
the generals “will do us better than the old gang”. […]
Reddaway considered the downfall of Sukarno
to be one of Britain’s greatest propaganda victories. In a letter
written years later he said “the discrediting of Sukarno was quickly
successful. His Confrontasi was costing us about £250,000,000 a year. It
was countered and abolished at minimal cost by IRD research and
techniques in six months.”
![umu-official:
“ anchovy-official:
“ abandonedandurbex:
“Radioactive cars from the Fukushima disaster slowly being eaten by nature [1841x1227]
”
Not if I eat them first
”
Colette why do you say things like this?
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