Victimhood and Denial: Recent Scholarship on the Legacy of the Indonesian Mass Murders of 1965-66

Abstract

Recent scholarship continues to shed light on the 1965-66 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia, as well as its effect on Cold War politics around the globe. John Roosa’s Buried Histories: The Anti-Communist Massacres of 1965-66 in Indonesia (2020) is his third book on the subject, and explains, through rigorous case studies, some of the variation in the scope of the killings due to the role of the military and militias. Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (2020) argues that the Indonesian case became a “playbook” for other right-leaning forces to crush communism in Latin America and elsewhere, and has left a legacy of legitimized violence from which many have not yet recovered.