Approximately one million
innocent Indonesians were killed by their fellow nationals,
neighbours and kin at the height of an
anti-communist campaign in the mid-1960s. This book investigates the
profound political consequences of these mass killings in Indonesia upon
public life in the subsequent decades, highlighting the historical
specificities of the violence and comparable incidents of identity politics in more recent times.
Weaving a balance of theory
with an empirically based analysis, the book examines how the spectre of
communism and the trauma experienced in the latter half of the 1960s
remain critical in understanding the dynamics of terror, coercion and
consent today. The book investigates what drove otherwise apolitical
subjects to be complicit in the engulfing cycles of witch-hunts. It argues
that elements of what began as an anti-communist campaign took on a life
of their own, increasingly operating independently of the violence and
individual subjects who appeared to be manipulating the campaigns in the
1980s and 1990s.
Despite the profound
importance of the 1965–6 events, it remains one of the most difficult and
sensitive topics for public discussion in Indonesia today. State
Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia is one of the first
books to fully discuss the problematic representation and impacts of a
crucial moment of Indonesia’s history that until recently has been largely
unspoken.
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