“Most of the Western press repeated the narrative being peddled by the new Indonesian government, which Washington was enthusiastically welcoming onto the world stage. That story went, more or less, that some spontaneous violence erupted when regular people found out about what the communists had done, or been planning. These articles said that the natives had ‘run amok’ and engaged in bloodshed. Because the word ‘amok’ originated in Malay (the language that formed the basis for both Indonesian and Malaysian), this made it easier for Western journalists to employ Orientalist stereotypes about Asians as primitive, backward, and violent people, and blame the violence on a putative sudden, irrational outburst.
On April 13, 1966, C. L. Sulzberger penned a piece, one of many in this genre, with the headline ‘When a Nation Runs Amok’ for the New York Times. As Sulzberger described it, the killings occurred in ‘violent Asia, where life is cheap.’ He reproduced the lie that Communist Party members had killed the generals on October 1, and that Gerwani women slashed and tortured them. He went on to affirm that ‘Indonesians are gentle ... but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.’
The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally. But there's no reason to believe that the mass violence of 1965-66 has its roots in native culture. No one has any evidence of mass murder of this kind happening in Indonesian history, except for when foreigners were involved.
This story of inexplicable, vaguely tribal violence— so easy for American readers to digest— was entirely false. This was organized state violence with a clear purpose. The main obstacles to a complete military takeover were eliminated by a coordinated program of extermination— the intentional mass murder of innocent civilians. The generals were able to take power after state terror sufficiently weakened their political opponents, who had no weapons, only public sympathy. They didn't resist their own annihilation because they had no idea what was coming.
In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie, the man who ambushed Sukarno in March, once bragged that the military had killed three million people. There's a reason we have to settle for estimates. Because, for more than fifty years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either. Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.
Their silence was the point of the violence. The Armed Forces did not oversee the extermination of every single communist, alleged communist, and potential communist sympathizer in the country. That would have been nearly impossible, because around a quarter of the country was affiliated somehow with the PKI.”
— The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins
