Not Just an Ideological War: America’s Tireless Persecution of Communists
By: Mira Bungarachmana Raue, Contributing Writer
During the Cold War, American hostility towards communists was generally seen as an unarmed, ideological conflict between the US and the USSR. However, most do not know that the longest and most significant unarmed conflict in modern history also led to numerous genocides, massacres, and organized killings in the Global South countries. As a result, the effect that the alterization of communists by the US has had on developing countries and today’s world order utterly opposes the idea of an ideological, unarmed, civilized conflict while revealing a far deeper exclusion. In this essay, the conversion of the Republic of Indonesia from a nationalist, socialist, and progressive non-block nation to a capitalist, American-allied, West-bound economy will be analyzed deeper to better understand the alterization of communists by the United States of America.
The power terminology that Isaac Reed defines in his book Power in Modernity helps us determine power dynamics in complex systems by breaking them into chains of power, projects, and actors.In short, Reed’s conceptualization empowers the individual to understand the system they are a member of and enables them to decide if they want to continue being a part of it. His terminology can be applied to the global world order under the reign of the United States of America, and, in this essay, will be utilized to fully grasp the alterization of the communists by the community of Americans. According to Reed, a community is defined by its unifying traits, and that the chain of power is made up of actors and rectors who bind and send agents to accomplish their project. The significance this holds for America in particular leads to a broad explanation of the extreme alterization of communists on a global scale.
The acting, or active, community that is analyzed in this essay is the national community of the United States of America. It has a clear structure of power embedded in its existence as a state. The leader of the state, the President, is at the top of this social hierarchy and is closely followed by political institutions, where the general public constitutes the lower levels of social influence. However, as the American community is a democracy, the public has power and for a president to carry out an agenda, especially a conflict, the public must conform. In this particular case, the extent to which the general public was aware of the processes that the exclusion of communists entailed can be questioned. Furthermore, scapegoating in the form of the Red Scare, which originally sparked after the Russian Revolution of 1917, seems to have justified even more extreme measures taken by the US government. Interestingly, the exact dynamics of the Cold War mechanisms outside the country remain hidden from the public.
The outsized role the CIA plays in this conflict alludes to this, as there are many secret missions acted out by this authority. Hence, it is important to note that while the active community is the US, the community that they altered, the communists, spans the entire globe. The United States othered and excluded the communists, or non-capitalists, from the global community rather than simply the national community because of Cold War power rivalries and their inherently global scale.
While most nations identify their unifying features as ethnicity, heritage, or common history and traditions, the United States is an outlier as it defines itself largely through its civic identity. The pride of the Declaration of Independence (Americans “have certain Inalienable Rights including Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness”) illustrates why the communists became such a threat to the community of the US. Therefore, it seems reasonable that the conflict with the USSR resulted in the extreme persecution of communists worldwide because while the heritage or ethnicity of a person cannot change, their values can. This made the opposing ideology an essential threat to the form of existence that the United States of America practiced and the beliefs and structures that define their community.
In an attempt to succeed over their enemy, the USSR and their communist ideology, the United States resorted to means of enmity and scapegoating. These processes highly correlate with a sense of threat and competition over power. While slavery and invisibility, two alternative forms of alterization, are usually employed when the community sees themselves as superior, it can be noted that it is characteristic for both enmity and scapegoating that the alterizing community feels severely threatened. Social psychologist Peter Glick characterizes it as stemming from “envious prejudice” towards the opposition. In the case of the United States, the civic nationality as a unifying factor rather than ethnicity offers an explanation for their resort to these measures.
In Indonesia, the communist party (PKI) was the largest communist party in the world, apart from the Soviets. Vincent Bevins’s research novel The Jakarta Method captures how the alterization of the communists played out through scapegoating and enmity as a form of information warfare perpetrated by the United States.
Essentially, scapegoating techniques implemented by the US-backed Suharto, the second president of the Republic of Indonesia, achieved massive success in the alterization of the communists in the global community by making Indonesia the capitalist, American-allied country that it is today. The scapegoating correlated with and induced further enmity. As explained by Peter Glick in Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, ”demonstrably false beliefs are held about the scapegoat” (115), yet their implications are real and powerful. Glick analyzes the extreme scapegoating implemented by the Nazis against the Jewish population in Germany and, interestingly, similar techniques can be identified in the alterization of the US- and US-affiliated community in the case of the Indonesian Republic.
Here, the PKI and the Gerwani, a women’s association, were solely blamed for the killing of six high-ranked generals of the Indonesian Armed Forces on the night of September 30th, 1965. Curiously, there is even the historically familiar reference to “witches”, as evil, threatening and supernatural feminine powers, as there is a record of the American Embassy of Jakarta sending a cable to the State Department in Washington with the news of “nine GERWANI witches” (146) having been killed due to their inability to cohere. Similar to the Salem Witch Trials, the labeling of witches and the involvement of witchcraft is being implemented to spread fear and hatred of the alterized subject. In the case of Indonesia in 1965, the blame of the Gerwani women had harsh and historically extremely relevant consequences.
The scapegoating that was fabricated by both the CIA and Suharto in blaming the PKI for the military coup “using deliberate and incendiary falsehoods to whip up hatred” (133), the new leader of the Indonesian Republic resulted in a mass killing of all communists or communist-affiliated Indonesians for the next two years. Ultimately, this led to the victory of the US against their ideological enemy of communism in the Southeast Asian nation.
The scapegoating after the coup on September 30, 1965, resulted in media manipulation and the blame of the Gerwani women and the PKI as organizers and committers of the deaths in the coup. The scapegoating affected the Gerwani women most severely, where the US-backed Suharto fabricated the claim that the indigenous women “danced naked while the women mutilated and tortured the generals, cutting off their genitals and gouging out their eyes, before murdering them” (133), leading to members of the Gerwani or women workers’ unions across Indonesia to be harassed and killed. Although this is all proven to be entirely fake news, international media outlets spread this story and increased Suharto’s credibility as a respected source. (134). As Bevins writes: “Benedict Anderson was able to prove not only that the account of the torture of the generals was false, but that Suharto knew it was all false.” (134).
The accusations against the Gerwani women are proven to be fabricated lies. This uncovered knowledge carries great relevance concerning the immense impact it had on the nation, resulting in huge dimensions of enmity, played out in a massacre that killed half a million Indonesians. Therefore, the exclusion of communists from the global scale became successful through the means of scapegoating.
The community of communists that were attacked by the US and Americanized forces that acted against the Modernization theory but had progressive and well-functioning beliefs about constructing society. The PKI was neither closely affiliated with the Soviet Union nor with Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China. Moreover, Indonesia under the rule of Sukarno, the first precedent of an independent nation, hosted the Bandung Conference, a global phenomenon of African and Asian states coming together to form a non-aligned movement amidst Cold War politics. It is important to understand the progressive ways in which Indonesia and many other young left nations were approaching global politics and foreign policy before Sukarno was abducted by the cooperation of the CIA and Suharto. The Asian-African Association and other international organizations were founded during this time, with Indonesia as their hub. These are, in retrospect, extremely advanced and respectable politics that were antagonized by the American Cold War ideology.
Knowing this, it is not surprising that the Indonesian communist community resisted their alterization in some form. Unfortunately, the resistance was short-lived and shallow because they were disadvantaged. The conflict they were a part of was not theirs but rather the Cold War between the US and the USSR. They attempted short gasps of resilience before being eliminated. The Jakarta Method includes a transcription of a song that the young men of the PKI on the Indonesian countryside sang when imprisoned, unaware of their sentence to death:
“Move forward undaunted
Defend what is right
Forward, together,
Of course, we win
Move forward, move forward
All together, all together” (128)
Charged with the benefit of hindsight, there is a heavy melancholy in reading these words, a melody of unity that had no momentum anymore. The methods of information warfare applied by the US go beyond the methods of alterization, scapegoating and enmity, and have resulted in bloody conflicts around the world, including Vietnam, Guatemala, Thailand, Ghana, Cambodia. Encompassing knowledge of these events would fully illustrate how ruthlessly the United States, and the CIA in particular, acted against their ideological enemy.
Concluding, the events in Indonesia in the 1960s that led up to the violent massacre of all communists offers an insightful understanding of the alterization of an ideological group that the United States aimed for during the period of the Cold War. Through scapegoating and enmity, the American community managed to convert an entire nation from communist-friendly and politically independent to a follower of the Modernization theory. Furthermore, the country’s geographic location makes it evident that the United States intended to exclude its opposing ideology from the global community rather than the national community only. Unfortunately, these events illustrate the immense and very real effect that alterization of communists has had on a global scale. It is now part of our duty as actors in this global community to seek awareness and decide whether we want to remain part of the identified system of power.
