Global Research

The last century has been, unfortunately, a century of holocausts. The documentary “The Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both Indonesians and Americans — of one of the greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, the social functions of first suppressing the most excruciating victim memories, and then painfully beginning to recover them.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality,”² and I myself have called civilization “a great conspiracy/ of organized denial.”³ There is in truth so much violence and injustice in the world that to stay sane most of us have to ignore or suppress a good deal of it. But if we want to address the problems of violence and injustice, we have to seek out and deal with those crucial events of global significance, above all those in which we are involved – both directly and indirectly – and from which we can learn. If we are willing to face the truth.

“The Act of Killing” is about one of those crucial events, a half century ago and its reverberations down to the present. The film’s director, Josh Oppenheimer, has depicted not just the horror of the 1965 pogrom, but the weird craziness of today’s violent contemporary world. Chris Hedges has captured this craziness in his film review:

Oppenheimer, in the film’s strangest but most psychologically astute device, persuades the killers to re-enact some of the mass murders they carried out. They don costumes—they fancy themselves to be the stars of their own life movies—and what comes out in the costumed scenes of torture and killing is the vast disconnect between the image they have of themselves, much of it inspired by Hollywood gangster films, and the tawdry, savage and appalling crimes they committed.… The killers stage a scene at the end of the film in which actors playing their murdered victims hang a medal around the neck of [Anwar] Congo [the film’s protagonist] —who is dressed in a long, black robe and standing in front of a waterfall—and thank him for saving the country and “killing me and sending me to heaven.” This bizarre fantasy’s background music, specified by Congo, is the theme from the movie “Born Free.”⁴

There is a natural tendency for western viewers to blame this appetite for violence carried to bizarre extremes on the Indonesians. Indonesians themselves have done this. I quote in my poetic trilogy from the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had earlier been imprisoned by the Dutch from 1947-49. He was not killed in the great slaughter of 1965, however, he was imprisoned for fourteen years in its aftermath. One of the conditions of his imprisonment was that he write a confession of his culpability, and here is part of what he wrote:

        I myself am Javanese

I was educated to Javanese ideals
        guided by the Mahabharata
     at whose climax they bathe

in the blood of their own brothers
        while other peoples who
     have managed to slip their shackles

are the nations that rule the world
        Even in the belly of Dutch power
     Java still glorified

its narrow world culture
        they bathed in the blood of their brothers
     right up through 1966

And because Java was no longer
        in the belly of European power
     the slaughter reached an unlimited scale

without colonization my country
        would have ceaselessly spilled
     the blood of its sons and daughters

cultural integrity     a bogey
        for the countries stuffed with capital
     by which free peoples are enslaved

the unemployed become murderers
        with uniforms and badges of rank
     vast forests are torn apart 

It is necessary that I emphasize
        the problem of power
     that tends to turn people into bandits

above all if they have held it for decades
        and without ever knowing Verlichting
     Aufklaerung    remain in thrall 

everything that has happened
        will live on for centuries
     Once more — my apologies. ⁵

Pramoedya’s analysis has great merit: the Javanese culture in its dances and shadow plays indeed draws on a cultural tradition honoring bloodshed, warriors, and their instruments. He faults this tradition for never having experienced an 18^th Century Enlightenment (Verlichting in Dutch, Aufklaerung in German) to temper its traditions with reason.

But it can be said that if Indonesia represented traditional culture without modern Enlightenment, Washington represented ruthless modern Enlightenment without culture. Washington assisted and paid for the violence because it acted in a spirit of amoral Staatsraison, or untrammeled calculation for state purposes, without any cultural restraints. The record is now clear that American officials welcomed the violence, and provided needed assistance to help carry it out and legitimate it. Historian Bradley Simpson, in his important book Economists with Guns, supplies much conclusive evidence for what he calls this “disgraceful performance.”⁶

The film itself has been faulted for not exploring Washington’s role in the killings. I am glad it did not: it is urgent that North Americans know what happened on the ground in Indonesia in 1965, and the truth, if it is to reach this audience, can only be revealed a little at a time. But for Americans in particular, it is important to come to terms with the American role in coup and killings.

In an excellent on-line essay by Errol Morris, one of the film’s producers and himself an astute film-maker, Professor Simpson is quoted as saying:

It was an extraordinarily rapid genocide and the Johnson administration knew about the events as they unfolded, and they made a very deliberate decision to intervene on the side of the génocidaires. The documentary record is clear-cut. And Kai Bird in his biography of the Bundy brothers has McGeorge Bundy saying, basically, “I have a clear conscience. We knew what we were doing. We did what we were doing because we thought it was the right thing to do, and I sleep easy at night knowing that we played the role that we did.”⁷

The Bundys were not alone. In June 1966, after the slaughter was over, the New York Times commented on it with the headline, “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” TheTimes’ leading political journalist, James Reston, compared the discouraging news from Vietnam with “the more hopeful developments in Asia,” chiefly what he called “the savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto.” He added that

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.⁸

What were the Bundys and Reston celebrating? As Jonathan Weiner points out, it was a process whereby

paramilitary groups and assorted thugs deputized by the country’s soon-to-be dictator, General Suharto, executed at least half a million people [probably in fact more than a million]. Starving prisoners were dumped into rivers alongside corpses; women were molested and raped; victims were shot, beheaded with swords, and dismembered while still alive; thousands more, spared death, were forced [like Pramoedya] into concentration camps and prisons.⁹

I ask you to consider seriously, however, the fact that the irrationality and madness behind what was depicted in the film “The Act of Killing” were not confined to Indonesia.

To understand Reston’s remarks, we have to remember that this was the era not only of the Cold War but also of the Sino-Soviet split. All three of the world’s greatest powers feared each other; and, perhaps rightly, all three regarded Indonesia, whose Communist Party (the PKI) was the largest outside the Communist bloc, as a country whose allegiance would be an important factor in determining the Cold War’s outcome.

Indonesia, with its oil and other raw materials, was also a factor in America’s decision to launch a major war in Vietnam. And when the Indonesian Army moved to destroy the PKI, the US presence in Vietnam provided a shield against possible Chinese retaliation.¹⁰ American planning for Indonesia and Vietnam was synchronous and interrelated. As Bradley Simpson told Errol Morris,

[The U.S. Government’s] covert operations accelerated in the summer of 1964 in ways that connect with the expansion of the war in Vietnam. Johnson’s decision to sign off on expanded covert operations in Indonesia takes place right around the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. [In Washington] They were looking at all this as a piece.¹¹

American policies for both countries were reviewed at an important conference of March 1965 in Baguio, the Philippines.

In the 1970s Washington used the techniques that overthrew Sukarno to assist a similar army coup against President Allende. In this coup a CIA-backed psychological warfare group explicitly used the ominous words Djakarta se acerca — Jakarta is coming – to terrorize, destabilize, and polarize Chile, which once had been South America’s most stable and progressive democracy. Washington’s support for the Indonesian regime was made clear again in 1975, when “Suharto managed to gain Washington’s backing” for his invasion of East Timor, resulting in a “decades-long blood-bath.”¹²

How Academic Modernization Theory Paved the Way for the Killings

I have written elsewhere about the role of the U.S. in encouraging the massacre and supplying facilitating equipment; like Simpson himself, I shall not repeat those arguments here. The point of this essay is not to look at CIA or Pentagon involvement in the Indonesian murders, but the role of American and Canadian universities, especially in preparing a neoliberal economic development model that would provide a rationale for the ensuing Suharto regime.¹³

Simpson has I think one accurate explanation of why Washington’s “best and the brightest” accepted what he calls the “deeply flawed authoritarian development model” (p. 3) urged on Indonesia by United States advisers and social scientists, and eagerly adopted by the military in Indonesia and elsewhere. This derived from a fundamental deficiency in U.S. social scientific thought:

By the early 1960s modernization theory dominated social science thinking about political and economic development in both the academic and political realms. Modernization theorists drew in expected ways on deeply embedded discourses that emphasized both the uniqueness and the appropriateness of America’s developmental model for the rest of the world and the cultural superiority of the West in general and the Anglo-Saxon tradition in particular.¹⁴

He adds, correctly in my view, that

Although modernization theory as a social science paradigm may have originated in the United States in the postwar period, it was part of a larger, widely dispersed fabric of thinking about the process of becoming modern, the origins of which stretch back to the Enlightenment.¹⁵

Ironically America, the Soviet Union, and China all contemplated aid programs designed to promote modernization in Indonesia. The chief difference was that Moscow and Beijing emphasized industrialization whereas the US regarded Indonesia above all as a source of needed raw materials, chiefly oil. Thus,

U.S. officials and modernization theorists performed impressive acts of intellectual gymnastics trying to criticize the legacy of European colonialism while advocating development plans that continued colonial trade structures.¹⁶

The modernization promoted by all three countries (above all Maoist China, which was about to be convulsed in 1966 by its Cultural Revolution) emphasized material development in ways that were destructive of traditional culture. But it was the U.S. whose influence was dominant in the wake of the coup.

The U.S. was destructive of traditional culture in its energetic distribution of popular American films. In 1953 alone, as part of the United States Information Agency (USIA’s) cultural diplomacy program, “U.S. embassy officials estimated that 10 million Indonesians saw American films screened from the back of USIA trucks traveling around the country.”¹⁷ One of the results of this cultural “modernization” is seen in the film “The Act of Killing,” when the film’s protagonist Anwar Congo celebrates the macho values of Hollywood, which taught him how to strangle his victims with a piece of piano wire.¹⁸

There is, as I said earlier, an instructive irony here. Pramoedya lamented the failure of Enlightenment rationalism (perhaps represented in his mind by the Marxist PKI) to rethink a traditional Javanese culture, with its emphasis on the ksatriya or warrior. For his part, Simpson sees the same Enlightenment as a source for an amoral social science paradigm that contributed to the massacre. (By the 20^th Century the Enlightenment, like the church centuries earlier, had evolved from being a corrective of the status quo into a reinforcement of it.) So I believe one can say that a corrupted Indonesian culture without Enlightenment was being reinforced in the massacre by a debased Enlightenment lacking traditional culture.

During the Cold War, the paradigm of mindless and amoral modernization by violence was not uniquely American, but global. But of course American military and CIA plans and assistance were far more important than their counterparts from the Soviet Union and China to what happened in Indonesia in 1965. (Soviet aid was largely military; a projected steel mill was never constructed. Aid from China might have ensued after Subandrio’s return from Beijing in July 1965 with sixty Chinese economic advisers; but whatever projects they might have initiated were swiftly brought to an end after Gestapu in September.)¹⁹

For a decade and a half the same had been true of North American social scientists, who guided the thinking of their Indonesian counterparts. So much so, that when

Western-trained Indonesian technocrats and economists [who] readily accepted Soviet technical assistance, adopted a Soviet-style five-year development plan in 1957 [the plan was] written with the help of Canadian development economist Ben Higgins.²⁰

At the time Prof. Higgins had moved from McGill University (where he was one of my professors and my father’s friend) to the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT, a CIA-funded think tank. From this vantage point he became what Cornell Professor Benedict Anderson called “the doyen of the Indonesian economists.”²¹

We have to understand that, just as North American modernization specialists were a shaping force In Indonesia, so also Indonesia was a principal concern, or target, of North American development economists. It is not too much to say that the two – Indonesia and post-war development economics – helped shape each other.

I remember myself from my days at McGill in the 1950s accepting the claim that development economics was a science; but in retrospect I think we should see it also as a tool in the Cold War. And in many ways North American universities – not just those like McGill or MIT or Berkeley with close links to the CIA – were contributing to a mindset that was also part of the Cold War.

I was in the Canadian Foreign Service from 1957 to 1961. I recall that it was standard for my decent and honorable superiors to refer to most of the world as “backward” or “underdeveloped.” Those terms are more likely to be avoided now, but I would suggest that substitute terms, like “developing countries,” the “third world,” or even the “Global South,” perpetuate the same underlying thinking. For us North Americans to have called ourselves the “first world” – as if we were some kind of avant garde for the rest of the world to follow — seems to me now to be blatantly, even comically ethnocentric, or would be if its consequences were not sometimes tragic.

I say this after having lived parts of three years in Thailand, an experience that changed me profoundly. I came away thinking that though we have developed in many ways that can contribute to the well-being of Thailand, the reverse is also true: Thailand has a well-developed Buddhist culture from which the West can and perhaps must learn.²² And now, unfortunately, the conflict between culture and Enlightenment that convulsed Indonesia is afflicting Thailand as well in the wake of the 2014 military coup, though so far less violently.

Let us look anecdotally at how development economics flourished and was applied in Indonesia. The important Indonesian economist Subroto was selected to study in North America by Sumitro Djojohadikusoemo, a Dean at the University of Indonesia who was one of the CIA’s top assets in Jakarta. Subroto obtained his M.A. at McGill in 1956, then studied at MIT with Ben Higgins, then, with a Ford foundation Fellowship, studied at Harvard.²³ It is relevant that at this time

Ford Foundation consultant Richard Bissell (who would later became special assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles) and Chairman John McCloy conducted a series of financial transactions which enabled Ford Foundation money to be funneled into CIA organized fronts and vice versa.²⁴

Returning to Indonesia, Subroto became one of five economists – all trained by the Ford Foundation – at the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School in Bandung , which served before the 1965 coup as a training-ground for the takeover of political power by the army. Civilians were also trained at SESKOAD, and U.S. officials have confirmed that the civilians, who themselves were in a training program funded by the Ford Foundation, became involved in what the (then) U.S. military attaché called “contingency planning” to prevent a PKI takeover.²⁵

SESKOAD in this period had become a focal point of attention from the Pentagon, the CIA, RAND, as well as the Ford Foundation. And an important part of this program was “lectures in economics and business management” given by the five economists.²⁶ After the coup, Suharto used the same five (by then known in the new government as the “Berkeley Mafia,” because four of them had trained at UC Berkeley under Prof. Guy Pauker) to implement IMF-style economic reforms; in this they were “working alongside Ford-sponsored American economists – this time from Harvard’s Development Advisory Service.”²⁷

These efforts were of little benefit to Indonesians:

A Ford report in 1978 declared that despite “massive foreign investment” based on “concessions,” very few new jobs had been created. In addition, the armed forces “remain massively involved in illegal tax collection, smuggling and commercial activities.”²⁸

One of the chief smugglers was Suharto himself, assisted by his civilian commercial partner Bob Hasan. Even before the coup,

Hasan worked with Suharto to develop a wide range of side businesses, controlled by the military, that provided much of the funding for the Division as well as extra income for its officers. After Suharto took the presidency in 1966, he initiated a massive expansion of Indonesian commercial logging, especially in the islands outside of Java. In the 1970s Hasan served as the required Indonesian “partner” for foreign companies wanting to harvest timber in Indonesia, working most notably with the United States corporation Georgia Pacific.²⁹

Georgia-Pacific is a corporation notorious for clear-cutting, whose practices in Indonesia and elsewhere have been condemned by environmentalists:

Indonesia has over 60 percent of Asia’s tropical forests and harbors the largest number of endangered bird and mammal species in the world. … U.S.-based Georgia Pacific has dammed rivers, destroyed ancestral grave sites of the Dayak peoples, and stripped their forest habitats. Threats and intimidation have forced many of these people to protest with very little success. “In a haunting climate of fear, the Bentian are now trying to survive the forced seizure and clear-cutting of their forested land, the demolition of their gardens, and burning and bull-dozing of community grave sites.”³⁰

What right have we to give the name “development” to these fruits of university and Ford Foundation efforts? Now that it is clear that the clear-cutting of forests has contributed to global warming, and that the fantasy of reshaping the world to the model of North American petroleum-based culture, is it not imperative that universities do more than they have been doing to change our notions of what constitutes development with an eye to protecting the environment and ultimately animal and human life?

University professors did not just offer a skewed notion of economic development; some of them also advocated military takeovers in order to achieve it. Before the 1955 Indonesian election, most US Indonesianists, above all those who were faculty at Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, had naively assumed that U.S. advice and aid would enable Indonesia to evolve into a more and more western-oriented nation willing to engage in western-style economic development.³¹ The same naïve hope may have initially inspired those professors at the University of Chicago training the economists who implemented Pinochet’s privatization programs after the overthrow of Allende in 1973.³² (The program linking South Vietnam to Michigan State was however plagued with controversies from its outset, with one visiting economist subsequently suggesting that “a military coup may be the only means” of saving Vietnam.)³³

By 1958, however, the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party) had emerged as the largest mass movement in the country, and everyone expected that they might come to power in the next election. At this point Pauker and other American social scientists in the U.S. Air Force and CIA-subsidized “think-tanks” began to argue in favor of military-led economic development, and to urge this new notion, successfully, on their military contacts in Indonesia and Brazil.

Specifically, they

began pressuring their contacts in the Indonesian military publicly, often through U.S. scholarly journals and presses, to seize power and liquidate the PKI opposition.40 The most prominent example is Guy Pauker, who in 1958 both taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as a consultant at the RAND Corporation. In the latter capacity he maintained frequent contact with what he himself called “a very small group” of [Indonesian university] intellectuals and their friends in the army.³⁴

A key event was an August 1959 conference organized by RAND on “The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries,” which produced a book with the same title published by Princeton. In this book,

Pauker urged his contacts in the Indonesian military to assume “full responsibility” for their nation’s leadership, “fulfill a mission,” and hence “to strike, sweep their house clean.” Although Pauker may not have intended anything like the scale of bloodbath which eventually ensued, there is no escaping the fact that “mission” and “sweep clean” were buzz-words for counterinsurgency and massacre, and as such were used frequently before and during the coup. The first murder order, by military officers to Muslim students in early October, was the word sikat, meaning “sweep,” “clean out,” “wipe out,” or “massacre.”³⁵

Eleven months before the coup, Pauker signaled even more blatantly in a RAND publication to his Indonesian army friends, expressing disappointment for their not “carrying out
 a control function,” and for lacking “the ruthlessness
that made it possible for the Nazis to suppress the Communist Party, a few weeks after the elections in which the Communist Party
won five million votes.”³⁶

Such rhetoric in retrospect seems deplorable, even if not actionable under international law. The important point, however, is that I do not see that universities in general have yet emerged from old habits of Cold War thinking. In saying this I am not thinking of particular academics like the late Fouad Ajami, an advocate and defender of the Iraq War, or John Yoo, author of the so-called “Torture memos.” I am thinking primarily of institutions like Harvard’s Harvard Institute for International Development, which continue to devise ways of projecting American economic influence abroad. (A signal example of this was a privatization program in Russia under Yeltsin, which soon became corrupted and led to Justice Department charges, which Harvard and one of its professors settled for $26 million.)³⁷

I raise this issue tentatively, as something for readers to ponder. Universities are part of an invaluable mixture of tradition and scientific inquiry. But because the role of the university is so very important, so also any problems or defects in university culture are also very important.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy, published by Rowman & Littlefield. He is also the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, and American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Related articles

• Benedict Anderson, Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy

• Geoffrey Gunn, Suharto Beyond the Grave: Indonesia and the World Appraise the Legacy

Notes

¹ An earlier version of this essay was a talk delivered March 27, 2014, as the F.R. Scott Memorial Lecture at Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Quebec.

² T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 176.

³ Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness: a poem for the year 2000 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 137.

⁴ Chris Hedges, “The Act of Killing.”

⁵ Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness: a poem for the year 2000 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 212-14; excerpting from Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “My Apologies, in the Name of Experience,” Indonesia, Volume 61 (April 1996), 1-14. I think that the translator merits credit.

⁶ Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with guns: authoritarian development and U.S.-Indonesian relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 189. He quotes Howard Federspiel, the US State Department’s intelligence staffer for Indonesia, as saying, “No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered” (Ibid., citing Federspiel quote in Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents Say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians,” States News Service, May 19, 1990.

⁷ Bradley Simpson, in Errol Morris, “The Forgotten Mass Killings That Should Have Stopped the Vietnam War.”

⁸ New York Times, June 19, 1966.

⁹ Jonah Weiner, “The Weird Genius of ‘The Act of Killing’,” New Yorker Culture Desk, July 16, 2013.

¹⁰ Cf. General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America’s military role in Vietnam (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 173: “The fact that the United States had committed its power in Vietnam was undoubtedly a major factor in the success of the countercoup.”

¹¹ Errol Morris, “The Murders of Gonzago.”

¹² Jussi Hanhimäki, The flawed architect: Henry Kissinger and American foreign policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 401.

¹³ For the coup, see e.g. Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs (Vancouver, B.C.) 58.2 (Summer 1985); Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, editor, Violence and the state in Suharto’s Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2001); Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and its Discontents: U.S. Double-Mindedness About Massacre,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: Ending the Culture of Impunity (London: Zed Press, 2004). Simpson is quite dismissive of myself and other authors who have studied U.S. involvement in the coup itself (as opposed to its consequences), with this passing comment: “American historians in particular have spilled much ink on the question of Washington’s involvement in these events” (Simpson, Economists with Guns, 173; cf. 311n2).

¹⁴ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 6.

¹⁵ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 8.

¹⁶ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 26.

¹⁷ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 29.

¹⁸ Benedict Anderson, Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 15, No. 4, April 15, 2013

¹⁹ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 149.

²⁰ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 28.

²¹ Simpson, Economists with Guns, 85.

²² Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: wealth, empire, and the future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xii-xiv.

²³ David Webster, Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a decolonizing world (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 91. Subroto attended McGill on a fellowship from the CIA-funded World University Service (John Simons, the Executive Director of the WUS, was “a full-fledged CIA agent” (Karen M. Paget, “From Cooperation to Covert Action: The United States Government and Students, 1940-1952,” in Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds. The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: the state-private network [London and New York: Routledge, 2006], 77). The WUS cannot be simply dismissed as no more than a CIA asset: In the 1970s, for example, it helped relocate in other countries numbers of Chilean academics who had fled from the Pinochet regime.

²⁴ Naomi Verbong Roland, “Funding Transatlantic Exchange between the Arts and Politics“, Transatlanitc Perspectives, 12 September 2012 (updated 4 October 2012). Cf. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 134-43; Jason Epstein, “The CIA and the Intellectuals“, New York Review of Books, 20 April 1967.

²⁵ Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967”; citing former U.S. Military Attaché Willis G. Ethel.

²⁶ Damien Kingsbury, Power Politics and the Indonesian Military (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 199.

²⁷ Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). A parallel “McGill Mafia” of religious scholars worked to channel traditional Muslim energy into economic development. McGill graduate Abdul Mukti Ali, who became Suharto’s Minister of Religion, “called on local religious leaders (ulamas) to transform themselves into ‘heavenly technocrats’…. Technocrats trained at the planning bureau and American universities underpinned one part of the New Order’s structure of power; religious scholars trained at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies underpinned another” (Webster, Fire and the Full Moon, 160).

²⁸ Parmar, Foundations of the American Century.

²⁹ Wikipedia, “Bob Hasan.”

³⁰ Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi, ed., Deforestation, environment, and sustainable development: a comparative analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 10; citing Schwartzman and Kingston, 1997, 27-28.

³¹ In contrast most of the Indonesianists at Cornell, such as George Kahin, Ben Anderson, and Ruth McVey, adopted a more critical view. As a result these academics became in time increasingly alienated from both Jakarta and Washington.

³² See Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists : the Chicago School of Economics in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

³³ Frank C. Child, “Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour,” The New Republic (December 4, 1961), 14–16. After ensuing protests from Diem the MSU program was shut down in 1962.

³⁴ Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.”

³⁵ Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967;” citing Guy J. Pauker, “The Role of the Military in Indonesia,” in John H. Johnson, ed., The role of the military in underdeveloped countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 221-23.

³⁶ Guy J. Pauker, Communist Prospects in Indonesia (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, November 1964, RM-5753-PR).

³⁷ Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998 (New York : Palgrave, 2001) ..