High Principles
excerpted from the book
Year 501
The Conquest Continues
by Noam Chomsky
South End Press, 1993, paper
p99
... consider the response when General Chun's military dictatorship
in South Korea crushed the democracy movement in Kwangju in May
1980. Paratroopers "carried out three days of barbarity with
the zeal of Nazi storm troopers," an Asia Watch investigative
mission reported, "beating, stabbing and mutilating unarmed
civilians, including children, young girls, and aged grandmothers."
Two thousand people were killed in this rampage, they estimate.
The US received two requests for assistance: the citizens committee
that had called for democracy requested help in negotiations;
General Chun requested the release of 20,000 troops under US command
to join the storm troopers. The latter request was honored, and
US naval and air units were deployed in a further show of US support.
"Koreans who had expected help from
Carter were dumbfounded," Tim Shorrock writes, as "the
news of direct support from the US was broadcast to the people
of Kwangju from helicopters and proclaimed throughout the nation
in blazing newspaper headlines." A few days later, Carter
sent the head of the Export-Import Bank to Seoul to assure the
military junta of US economic support, approving a $600 million
loan. As Chun took over the presidency by force, Carter said that
while we would prefer democracy, "The Koreans are not ready
for that, according to their own judgment, and I don't know how
to explain it any better."
Chun arrested thousands of "subversives"
calling for democracy, sending them to military-run "purification"
camps. Hundreds of labor leaders were purged; new legislation
severely weakened unions, leading to a 30 percent drop in membership.
Censorship became even more harsh. Gratified with this progress,
the Reagan Administration honored Chun by selecting him as the
first head of state to visit after the inauguration. Visiting
Korea in 1986, Secretary of State George Shultz praised the "terrific
job being done in security" and in the economy, and the "impressive
movement" towards democracy. He expressed his strong support
for General Chun. He harshly criticized the democratic opposition,
refusing to meet with its leaders Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam,
and explaining that "how [countries] design things can vary
and you can still call it democracy."
To show how much has changed with the
Cold War over, President Bush chose the amiable Mobutu of Zaire
as the first African leader to be received at the White House,
hailing him as "one of our most valued friends" and
making no reference to human rights violations. Among others rewarded
for their contributions to democracy and human rights were Bush's
friends in Baghdad and Beijing, and Romania's mad dictator Ceausescu.
p104
... development economist Lance Taylor observes: "In the
long run, there are no laissez-faire transitions modern economic
growth. The state has always intervened to create a capitalist
class, and then it has to regulate the capitalist class, and then
the state has to worry about being taken over by the capitalist
class, but the state has always been there." Furthermore,
state power has regularly been invoked by investors and entrepreneurs
to protect then from destructive market forces, to secure resources,
markets, and opportunities for investment, and in general to safeguard
and extend their profits and power.
With the conventional pretext gone, Washington
sought new ways to maintain the subsidy to advanced industry.
One method is foreign arms sales, which also help alleviate the
balance-of-payments crisis. As the Cold War came to a definitive
end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade
to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees
of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms. The Defense
Security Assistance Agency was reported to have sent more than
900 officers o some 50 countries to promote US weapons sales.
Pentagon officials trace the policy to a July 1990 order that
Embassy officials should expand their assistance to US arms exporters;
the Gulf war was then prominently featured as a sales promotion
device. At a Pentagon-industry conference in may 1991, industry
officials asked the government to pick up the costs of us military
equipment and personnel sent to contractor trade shows around
the world for sales promotion. The Pentagon agreed, reversing
a 25-year policy. The first taxpayer-funded display was at the
June 1991 Paris Air Show.
Lawrence Korb of the Brookings Institution,
formerly Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of logistics,
observed that the promise of arms sales had kept stocks of military
producers high despite the end of the Cold War, with arms sales
rising from $12 billion in 1989 to almost $40 billion in 1991.
Moderate declines in purchases by the US military were more than
offset by other aims sales by US companies. Since "President
Bush called last May [1991] for restraint in weapons sales to
the Middle East," AP correspondent Barry Schweid reported
in early 1992, "the United States has transferred roughly
$6 billion in arms to the region," part of the $19 billion
in US weapons sent to the Middle East since Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait. From 1989 through 1991, US arms exports to the Third World
increased by 138 percent, making the US far and away the leading
arms exporter. The sales since May 1991 are "fully consistent
with the president's initiative and the guidelines" in his
call for restraint, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher
announced-quite accurately, given the actual intent.
Bush Administration calls for restraint
were timed for the triumphal celebration of the Gulf war, as part
of the PR campaign on the new era of peace and tranquility that
we are entering, thanks to the valor of our grand leader. On February
6, 1991, secretary of State James Baker told the House Foreign
Committee that the time had come for concrete steps to stem the
flow of armaments to the Middle East, "an area that is already
overmilitarized." On March 6, in his triumphant address to
a cheering joint session of Congress, the President announced
that control of arms sales would be one of his major postwar goals:
"it would be tragic," he said, "if the nations
of the Middle East and Persian Gulf were now, in the wake of war,
to embark on a new arms race."
In recognition of the scale of the tragedy,
the Administration, a few days earlier, had provided the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee with a confidential listing of planned
sales reaching to record levels, more than half for the Middle
East; and informed Congress of a $1.6 billion sale of advanced
fighter aircraft to Egypt. A week after the speech, Congress was
informed of a $760 million deal for Apache helicopters to the
United Arab Emirates. The Pentagon then used the Paris Air Show
for an unprecedented sales pitch, displaying with pride (and hope)
the goods that had so magnificently destroyed a defenseless Third
World country. Secretary of Defense Cheney announced new arms
transfers to Israel and plans to stockpile $200 million worth
of US weapons there; another $7 billion in weapon sales, mainly
to the Middle East, was announced in July. The UK followed the
same path. China was the only weapons exporter to call for concrete
limits on arms sales to the Middle East, a proposal quickly dismissed
by the US and its allies?
Military Keynesian initiatives have not
been limited to the taxpayer subsidy (R&D) and a state-guaranteed
market. While the US lags far behind nations like Japan and Germany
in per-capita spending on foreign economic aid," William
Hartung points out, about one-third of its foreign aid budget
'is devoted to direct grants or loans to foreign governments for
the purchase L of U.S. military equipment"; other programs
are shaped to the same ends.
Such considerations, however, should not
obscure the more fundamental role of the Pentagon system (including
NASA and DOE) in maintaining high-tech industry generally, just
as state intervention plays a crucial role in supporting biotechnology,
pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, and most competitive segments of
the economy. The Reagan Administration sharply increased protectionist
measures along with steps to support failing banks and industries,
and generally to assist US corporate power.
By IMP standards, the United States, after
a decade of Reaganite folly, is a prime candidate for severe austerity
measures. But it is far too powerful to submit to the rules, intended
for the weak.
p107
... the Times business section carries an item on a confidential
memo of the World Bank leaked to the Economist. Its author is
the same Lawrence Summers. He writes: "Just between you and
me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of
the dirty industries to the [Third World]?" This makes good
sense, Summers explains: for example, a cancer-producing agent
will have larger effects "in a country where people survive
to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-5 mortality
is 200 per thousand." Poor countries are "under-polluted,"
and it is only reasonable to encourage "dirty industries"
to move to them. "The economic logic behind dumping a load
of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we
should face up to that." To be sure, there are "arguments
against all of these proposals" for exporting pollution to
the Third World: "intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral
reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc."
But these arguments have a fatal flaw: they "could be turned
around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal
for liberalisation."
"Mr. Summers is asking questions
that the World Bank would rather ignore," the Economist observes,
but "on the economics, his points are hard to answer."
Quite true. We have the choice of taking them to be a reduction
ad absurdum argument and thus abandoning the ideology, or accepting
the conclusions: on grounds of economic rationality, the rich
countries should export pollution to the Third world, which should
cut back on its "misguided" efforts to promote economic
development and protect the population from disaster. That way,
capitalism can overcome the environmental crisis. Free market
capitalism is, indeed, a wondrous instrument. Surely there should
be two Nobel prizes awarded annually, not just one.
Confronted with the memo, Summers said
that it was only "intended to provoke debate"-elsewhere,
that it was a 'sarcastic response" to another World Bank
draft. Perhaps the same is true of the World Bank "consensus"
study. In fact, it is often hard to determine when the intellectual
productions of the experts are intended seriously, or are a perverse
form of sarcasm. The huge numbers of people subjected to these
doctrines do not have the luxury to ponder this intriguing question."
p108
Arthur MacEwan observes in a review of the uniform record of industrial
and agricultural development through protectionism and other measures
f of state intervention: "Highly developed nations can use
free trade to extend 1 their power and their control of the world's
wealth, and businesses can use it as a weapon against labor. Most
important, free trade can limit efforts to redistribute income
more equally, undermine progressive social programs, and keep
people from democratically controlling their economic lives."
p109
One aspect of the internationalization of the economy is the extension
of the two-tiered Third World model to the core countries. Market
doctrine thus becomes an essential ideological weapon at home
as well, its highly selective application safely obscured by the
doctrinal system. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated
among investors and professionals who benefit from internationalization
of capital flow and communication.
Services for the general public-education,
health, transportation, libraries, etc.-become as superfluous
as those they serve, and can therefore be limited or dispensed
with entirely. Some, it is true, are still needed, notably prisons,
a service that must in fact be extended, to deal with useless
people. As care for the mentally ill declines, prisons become
"surrogate mental hospitals," a study of the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Ralph Nader's Public Citizen
observes. The psychiatrist who led the research observes that
"there were far fewer psychotic people in jail 100 years
ago than we have today," as we revert to practices reformed
in the 19th century.
Almost 30 percent of jails detain mentally
ill people without criminal charges. The drug war has also made
a major contribution to this technique of social control. The
dramatic increase in the prison population in the late 1980s is
largely attributable not to criminal acts, but to cocaine dealing
and possession, as well as the harsher sentencing favored by "conservatives."
The US has by far the highest rate of imprisonment in the world,
"largely because of drug-related crimes" (Mathea Falco).
How fortunate we are not to be in China, where the "lingering
police-state mentality leaves little room for the kinds of creative
solutions the West favors in addressing social maladies such as
drug addiction," the Wall Street Journal explains.
Prisons also offer a Keynesian stimulus
to the economy, both the construction business and white collar
employment; the fastest growing profession is reported to be security
personnel. They also offer a method of economic conversion that
does not infringe on corporate prerogatives and hence is acceptable.
"Fort Devens top pick for US prison," a front-page Boston
Globe headline happily proclaims; the new federal prison may overcome
the harm to the local economy when the army base closes.
High on the list of targets for the New
Evangelists is public education, dispensable, since the rich can
buy what they want in the "education market" and the
thought that one might be concerned about the larger society has
been relegated to the ashcan of history along with other ancient
prejudices. An upbeat story in the liberal Boston Globe describes
an experiment in the "desperate city" of Baltimore,
where schools are collapsing. Several schools are being handed
over to a for-profit company that will introduce the "entrepreneurial
spirit": "private-sector efficiency and a new educational
model...means, for example, hiring nonunion custodians and placing
special education students into mainstream classrooms." The
former special education teachers, and the union custodians with
their higher benefits, will be picked up by the schools that remain
public. Another achievement of the "entrepreneurial spirit"
is to replace high-cost teachers with low-wage interns and volunteers
(parents). These miracles of capitalism should "provide valuable
lessons as America seeks ways to improve its education system.
A central feature of the recent ideological
offensive has been the attack on "big government" and
pleas for relief for the poor taxpayer-undertaxed (with the least
progressive taxes, by a good margin) in comparison with other
developed countries, 15 a major reason for the steady deterioration
of education, health, highways, indeed anything that might benefit
the irrelevant public. At the same time, protectionist devices,
subsidy, bail-outs, and other familiar elements of the welfare
state for the rich are quietly extended, while praise for the
free market resounds to the skies. The combination is a major
achievement of the state-corporate-media alliance.
p120
... one might look into the correlation between US aid and the
human rights climate. That was done by the leading academic scholar
on human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, who found that
US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American
governments which torture their citizens, ...to the hemisphere's
relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights."
The flow of aid includes military aid, is not correlated with
need, and runs through the Carter period, when at least some attention
was given to human rights concerns. A broader study by Edward
Herman found the same correlation worldwide. Herman carried out
another study that directs us to the reasons. Aid is closely correlated
with improvement in the Investment climate, a result commonly
achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants
trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and soon.
We therefore find the secondary correlation between aid and egregious
violation of human rights. These studies precede the Reagan years,
when the questions are not even worth posing.
Another approach is to investigate the
relation between the source of atrocities and the reaction to
them. There is extensive work on that topic, again with sharp
and consistent results: the atrocities of official enemies arouse
great anguish and indignation, vast coverage, and often shameless
lying to portray them as even worse than they are; the treatment
is the opposite in all respects when responsibility lies closer
to home. (Atrocities that do not bear on domestic power interests
are generally ignored.) Without comparable inquiry, we know that
exactly the same was true of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.
p122
After an alleged Communist coup attempt on September 30, 1965,
and the murder of six Indonesian generals, pro-American General
Suharto took charge and launched a bloodbath in which hundreds
of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, were slaughtered.
Reflecting on the matter in 1969, Pauker noted that the assassination
of the generals "elicited the ruthlessness that I had not
anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large
numbers of Communist cadres."
The scale of the massacre is unknown.
The CIA estimates 250,000 killed. The head of the Indonesia state
security system later estimated the toll at over half a million;
Amnesty International gave the figure of "many more than
one million." Whatever the numbers, no one doubts that there
was incredible butchery. Seven-hundred-fifty-thousand more were
arrested, according to official figures, many of them kept for
years under miserable conditions without trial. President Sukamo
was overthrown and the military ruled unchallenged. Meanwhile
the country was opened to Western exploitation, hindered only
by the rapacity of the rulers.
The US role in these events is uncertain,
one reason being the gaps in the documentary record. Gabriel Kolko
observes that "U.S. documents for the three months preceding
September 30, 1965, and dealing with the convoluted background
and intrigues, much less the embassy's and the CIA's roles, have
been withheld from public scrutiny. Given the detailed materials
available before and after July-September 1965, one can only assume
that the release of these papers would embarrass the U.S. government."
Ex-CIA officer Ralph McGehee reports that he is familiar with
a highly classified CIA report on the agency's role in provoking
the destruction of the PM, and attributes the slaughter to the
"C.I.A. [one word deleted] operation." The deletion
was imposed by CIA censorship. Peter Dale Scott, who has carried
out the most careful attempt to reconstruct the events, suggests
that the deleted word is "deception," referring to CIA
propaganda that "creates the appropriate situations,"
in McGehee's uncensored words, for this and other mass murder
operations (citing also Chile). McGehee referred specifically
to atrocity fabrication by the CIA to lay the basis for violence
against the PM.
There is no doubt that Washington was
aware of the slaughter, and approved. Secretary of State Dean
Rusk cabled to Ambassador Marshall Green on October 29 that the
"campaign against PM" must continue and that the military,
who were orchestrating it, "are [the] only force capable
of creating order in Indonesia" and must continue to do so
with US help for a "major military campaign against PM."
The US moved quickly to provide aid to the army, but details have
not been made public. Cables from the Jakarta Embassy on October
30 and November 4 indicate that deliveries of communications equipment
to the Indonesian army were accelerated and the sale of US aircraft
approved, while the Deputy Chief of Mission noted that "The
embassy and the USG were generally sympathetic with and admiring
of what the army was doing.
p124
The "good news" was not long in coming. "American
officials soon recognized that the situation in Indonesia was
changing drastically and, from their perspective, for the better,"
Brands continues. "As information arrived from the countryside
indicating that a purge of the PM was beginning, the principal
worry of American officials in Jakarta and in Washington was that
the army would fail to take advantage of its opportunity,"
and when the army seemed to hesitate, Washington sought ways "to
encourage the officers" to proceed. Green recommended covert
efforts to "spread the story of the PKI's guilt, treachery,
and brutality," though he knew of no PM role. Such efforts
were undertaken to good effect, according to McGehee's account
of the internal CIA record. George Ball, the leading Administration
dove, recommended that the US stay in the background because "the
generals were doing quite well on their own" (Brands's paraphrase),
and the military aid and training programs "should have established
clearly in the minds of the army leaders that the US stands behind
them if they should need help" (Ball). Ball instructed the
Jakarta embassy to exercise "extreme caution lest our well-meaning
efforts to offer assistance or steel their resolve may in fact
play into the hands of Sukamo and [his political associate] Subandrio."
Dean Rusk added that "If the army's willingness to follow
through against the PM is in anyway contingent on or subject to
influence by the United States, we do not want to miss the opportunity
to consider U.S. action."
Brands concludes that US covert aid "may
have facilitated the liquidation of the PM," but "at
most it speeded what probably would have happened more slowly."
"Whatever the American role in these developments,"
he continues, "the administration found the overall trend
encouraging. In mid-December Ball reported with satisfaction that
the army's campaign to destroy the PM was 'moving fairly swiftly
and smoothly.' At about the same time Green cabled from Jakarta:
'The elimination of the communists continues apace'." By
early February 1966, President Johnson was informed that about
100,000 had been massacred. Shortly before, the CIA reported that
Sukamo was finished, and "The army has virtually destroyed
the PM."
Nevertheless, Brands continues, "Despite
that good news the administration remained reluctant to commit
itself publicly to Suharto," fearing that the outcome was
still uncertain. But doubts soon faded. Johnson's new National
Security Adviser Walt Rostow "found Suharto's 'New Order'
encouraging," US aid began to flow openly, and Washington
officials began to take credit for the great success.
According to this skeptical view, then,
"The United States did not overthrow Sukarno, and it was
not responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved
in the liquidation of the PM," though it did what it could
to encourage the army to liquidate the only mass popular organization
in Indonesia, hesitated to become more directly involved only
because it feared that these efforts would be counterproductive,
greeted the "good news" with enthusiasm as the slaughter
mounted, and turned enthusiastically to assisting the "New
Order" that arose from the bloodshed as the moderates triumphed.
The public Western reaction was one of
relief and pride. Deputy Undersecretary of State Alexis Johnson
celebrated "The reversal of the Communist tide in the great
country of Indonesia" as "an event that will probably
rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps the most historic
turning point of Asia in this decade" (October 1966.). Appearing
before a Senate Committee, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
was asked whether US military aid during the pre-coup period had
"paid dividends." He agreed that it had, and was therefore
justified-the major dividend being a huge pile of corpses. In
a private communication to President Johnson in March 1967, McNamara
went further, saying that US military assistance to the Indonesian
army had "encouraged it to move against the P1(1 when the
opportunity was presented." Particularly valuable, he said,
was the program bringing Indonesian military personnel to the
United States for training at universities, where they learned
the lessons they put to use so well. These were "very significant
factors in determining the favorable orientation of the new Indonesian
political elite" (the army), McNamara argued. A congressional
report also held that training and continued communication with
military officers paid 'enormous dividends." The same reasoning
has long been standard with regard to Latin America, with similar
results.
p126
There was no condemnation of the slaughter on the floor of Congress,
and no major US relief agency offered aid. The World Bank restored
Indonesia to favor, soon making it the third largest borrower.
Western governments and corporations followed along.
Those close at hand may have drawn further
lessons about peasant massacre. Ambassador Green went on to the
State Department, where he presided over the bombing of rural
Cambodia, among other achievements. As the bombing was stepped
up to historically unprecedented levels in 1973, slaughtering
tens of thousands of peasants, Green testified before Congress
that the massacre should continue because of our desire for peace:
our experience with "these characters in Hanoi" teaches
that only the rivers of blood of Cambodian peasants might bring
them to the negotiating table. The 'experience" to which
he referred was the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi, undertaken
to force those characters in Hanoi to modify the agreements reached
with the Nixon Administration in October but rejected by Washington,
then restored without change after the US stopped the bombing
because it proved too costly. The events and their remarkable
aftermath having been concealed by the Free Press, Green could
be confident that there would be no exposure of his colossal fabrications
in the interest of continued mass murder."
Returning to Indonesia, the media were
pleased, even euphoric. As the army moved to take control, Times
correspondent Max Frankel described the delight of Johnson Administration
officials over the "dramatic new opportunity" in Indonesia.
The "military showed power," so that "Indonesia
can now be saved from what had appeared to be an inevitable drift
towards a peaceful takeover from within"-an unthinkable disaster,
since internal politics was not under US control. US officials
"believe the army will cripple and perhaps destroy the Communists
as a significant political force," leading to "the elimination
of Communist influences at all levels of Indonesian society."
Consequently, there is now 'hope where only two weeks ago there
was despair.
Not everyone was so enthusiastic about
the opportunity to destroy the one popular political force in
the country. Japan's leading newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, urged caution:
"In view of the fact that the Communist influence is deeply
entrenched among the Indonesian grassroots, it would cause further
deterioration in the confused national state of affairs if a firm
crackdown were carried out against them. "' But such more
somber reflections were rare.
In mid-1966, well after the results were
known, U.S. News & World Report headlined a long and enthusiastic
story "Indonesia: 'HOPE.. .WHERE ONCE THERE WAS NONE.'"
"Indonesians these days can talk and argue freely, no longer
fearful of being denounced and imprisoned," the journal reported,
describing an emerging totalitarian terror state with hundreds
of thousands in prison and the blood still flowing. In a cover
story, Time magazine celebrated "The West's best news for
years in Asia" under the heading "Vengeance with a Smile,"
devoting 5 pages of text and 6 more of pictures to the "boiling
bloodbath that almost unnoticed took 400,000 lives." The
new army regime is "scrupulously constitutional," Time
happily announced, "based on law not on mere power,"
in the words of its "quietly determined" leader Suharto
with his "almost innocent face." The elimination of
the 3 million-member PM by its "only possible rival,"
the army, and the removal from power of the "genuine folk
hero" Sukarno, may virtually be considered a triumph of democracy."
The leading political thinker of the New
York Times, James Reston, chimed in under the heading "A
Gleam of Light in Asia." The regular channel for the State
Department, Reston admonished Americans not to let the bad news
in Vietnam displace "the more hopeful developments in Asia,"
primary among them being "the savage transformation of Indonesia
from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukamo to a defiantly anti-Communist
policy under General Suharto":
Washington is being careful not to claim
any credit for this change in the sixth most populous and one
of the richest nations in the world, but this does not mean that
Washington had nothing to do with it. There was a great deal more
contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and
at least one very high official in Washington before and during
the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized. General Suharto's
forces, at times severely short of food and munitions, have been
getting aid from here through various third countries, and it
is doubtful if the coup would ever have been attempted without
the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without
the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.
p129
... the Indonesian generals [1977], in
addition to compiling one of the worst human rights records in
the world at home, had escalated their 1975 attack on the former
Portuguese colony of East Timor to near-genocidal levels, with
another "staggering mass slaughter," which bears comparison
to the atrocities of Pol Pot in the same years. In this case,
the deed was done with the crucial support of the Human Rights
Administration and its allies. They understand "reasons of
state" as well as the Times editors, who, with their North
American and European colleagues, did what they could to facilitate
the slaughter by suppressing the readily available facts in favor
of (occasional) fairy tales told by Indonesian generals and the
State Department. US-Canadian reporting on Timor, which had been
substantial before the invasion in the context of Western concerns
over the collapse of the Portuguese empire, reduced to zero in
1978 as atrocities peaked along with the flow of US arms.
p131
When the victims are classified as less than human ... Communists,
terrorists, or whatever may be the contemporary term of art -
their extermination raises no moral qualms. And the agents of
extermination are praiseworthy moderates-our Nazis ...
p131
In 1990-1991, several events elicited some uncharacteristic concern
over US-backed Indonesian atrocities. In May 1990, States News
Service released a study in Washington by Kathy Kadane, which
found that
The U.S. government played a significant
role [in the 1965 Indonesian genocide] by supplying the names
of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army,
which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats
say... As many as 5000 names were furnished to the Indonesian
army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who
had been killed or captured, according to U.S. officials... The
lists were a detailed who's who of the leadership of the party
of 3 million members, [foreign service officer Robert] Martens
said. They included names of provincial, city and other local
PM committee members, and leaders of the "mass organizations,"
such as the PM national labor federation, women's and youth groups.
The names were passed on to the military,
which used them as a "shooting list," according to Joseph
Lazarsky, deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta at the time, who
adds that some were kept for interrogation or "kangaroo courts"
because the Indonesians "didn't have enough goon squads to
zap them all." Kadane reports that top US Embassy officials
acknowledged in interviews that they had approved of the release
of the names. William Colby compared the operation to his Phoenix
program in Vietnam, in exculpation of his own campaign of political
assassination (which Phoenix clearly was, though he denies it).
"No one cared as long as they were
Communists, that they were being butchered," said Howard
Federspiel, then Indonesia expert for State Department intelligence;
"No one was getting very worked up about it." "It
really was a big help to the army," Martens said. "They
probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of
blood on my hands, but that's not all bad." "There's
a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
p133
The article that closed the books, to Rosenfeld's immense relief,
was the Brands study reviewed earlier. That Brands is an "independent"
commentator "without political bias" is demonstrated
throughout: The US war in Vietnam was an attempt "to rescue
South Vietnam"; the information reaching Washington that
"The army has virtually destroyed the PEI" in a huge
massacre was "good news"; "the most serious deficiency
of covert warfare" is "its inevitable tendency to poison
the well of public opinion," that is, to tar the US with
"bum raps" elsewhere; etc. Much more significant are
the "delights and surprises" that put any lingering
doubts to rest. Since the study closes all questions for good,
we may now rest easy in the knowledge that Washington did all
it could to encourage the greatest massacre since the days of
Hitler and Stalin, welcomed the outcome with enthusiasm, and immediately
turned to the task of supporting Suharto's aptly named "New
Order." Thankfully, there is nothing to trouble the liberal
conscience.
One interesting non-reaction to the Kadane
report appeared in the lead article in the New York Review of
Books by Senator Daniel Moynihan. He fears that "we are poisoning
the wells of our historical memory," suppressing unpleasant
features of our past. He contrasts these failures with the "extraordinary
period of exhuming the worst crimes of its hideous history"
now underway in the Soviet Union. Of course, "the United
States has no such history. To the contrary." Our history
is quite pure. There are no crimes to "exhume" against
the indigenous population or Africans in the 70 years following
our revolution, or against Filipinos, Central Americans, Indochinese,
and others later on. Still, even we are not perfect: "not
everything we have done in this country has been done in the open,"
Moynihan observes, though 'not everything could be. Or should
have been." But we conceal too much, the gravest crime of
our history.
It is hard to believe that as he was writing
these words, the Senator did not have the recent revelations about
Indonesia in mind. He, after all, has a special personal relation
to Indonesian atrocities. He was UN Ambassador at the time of
the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and takes pride in his
memoirs, in having forestalled any international reaction to the
aggression and massacre. "The United States wished things
to turn out as they did," he writes, "and worked to
bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United
Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook.
This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable
success." Moynihan was well aware of how things turned out,
noting that within a few weeks some 60,000 people had been killed,
"10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties
experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War."
Thus he took credit for achievements that he compares to those
of the Nazis. And he is surely familiar with the subsequent US
government role in escalating the slaughter, and the contribution
of the media and political class in concealing it. But the newly
released information about the US role in mass slaughter did not
stir his historical memory, or suggest some reflections on our
practices, apart from our single blemish: insufficient candor.
Moynihan's successes at the UN have entered
history in the conventional manner. Measures taken against Iraq
and Libya "show again how the collapse of Communism has given
the Security Council the cohesion needed to enforce its orders,"
Times UN correspondent Paul Lewis explains in a front-page story:
"That was impossible in earlier cases like... Indonesia's
annexation of East Timor. "
There was also a flicker of concern about
Indonesia after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. It was hard
not to notice the similarity to Indonesia's (vastly more murderous
aggression and annexation. A decade earlier, when glimmerings
of what had happened finally began to break through, there had
been occasional notice of the comparison between Suharto's exploits
in Timor and the simultaneous Pol Pot slaughters. As in 1990,
the US and its allies were charged at most with "ignoring"
Indonesian atrocities. The truth was well concealed throughout:
Indonesia was given critical military and diplomatic support for
its monstrous war crimes; and crucially, unlike the case of Pol
Pot and Saddam, these could readily have been halted, simply by
withdrawal of Western aid and breaking the silence
Year 501
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