They mean Democrat President Lyndon Johnson. Total putz.
LBJ was president. How many people would have communist killed? You would never find out.
500k Comunists dead vs 20-50m dead from a Communists revolution if they had won. Sounds like an appropriate trade off.
Hollywood even made a movie about it, The Year of Living Dangerously, sympathetic to the commies, of course.
Secret? I remember hearing about this back in 1966!
Maybe this setback to the worldwide march of Communism is what drew Obama’s mother to Indonesia, to help re-ignite the revolution.
She was raised as a Communist by her parents.
“We would like to focus on what went wrong as a society that we were able to conduct such violence and such killings in such large numbers in such a short time.”
Dude...you’re muzzies.
“completely clean up” the Communist Party and leftist groups.
He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, when I said it was communists...
This is no surprise. And the massacres were well known at the time, but there was no access there to the foreign press. It was a dictatorship before and after.
Indonesia was its own country, non-aligned, with no US forces or ability to influence their internal policy.
“(barf alert)”
Screw that. “PRIDE ALERT!!!”. I’m damn PROUD of our country, LBJ or whoever, for dealing with the Communists in Indonesia. And did anyone bother to try to figure out just where HALF A MILLION Communists came from? Did they just get converted after a Friday afternoon at the mosque? I think not...more likely they had some ‘help’ identifying their ‘Inner Socialist’...help from our enemy.
As far as I can tell, the ONLY REASON the Left has an issue with this, as with every other country we saved from the Sickle is that they have NO CLUE as to the stakes involved with the Cold War - either that, or the Left understood the stakes, but simply wanted to LOSE THE COLD WAR (which I’m sure was the case and still have no reason to doubt it).
What started as an anti-Communist purge turned into an ethnic cleansing exercise against Indonesian ethnic Chinese, who were wealthier and occupied the merchant class, who were feared of being close to Communist China.
We already had a Southeast Asia communist problem that had our full attention. It was called Vietnam or has the author of the article forgotten?
The U.S. was engaged in Vietnam, a war that liberals increasingly despised & were turning the youth against it who ion turn were demonstrating against it. Johnson sure as heck didn’t want to start another war in Indonesia. But this also means that England knew what was going on as well. Unless their diplomats were blind they surely communicated what was happening in Indonesia to their government. Matter of fact diplomats from various countries that had Embassies there had to have relayed the very same information. Just the BBC trying to make America as the only silent government.
It was no secret, reported at the time without editorial condemnation. I remember reading about it as it happened and was reported.
It wasn’t any kind of secret then. I described it during an oral presentation in high school while it was going on.
Gosh, they should make a movie about it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Living_Dangerously_(film)