The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66

by Geoffrey B. Robinson

Overview

The Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century—the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965–66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention.

An expert in modern Indonesian history, genocide, and human rights, Geoffrey Robinson sets out to account for this violence and to end the troubling silence surrounding it. In doing so, he sheds new light on broad and enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? What are the social and political ramifications of such acts and such silence?

Challenging conventional narratives of the mass violence of 1965–66 as arising spontaneously from religious and social conflicts, Robinson argues convincingly that it was instead the product of a deliberate campaign, led by the Indonesian Army. He also details the critical role played by the United States, Britain, and other major powers in facilitating mass murder and incarceration. Robinson concludes by probing the disturbing long-term consequences of the violence for millions of survivors and Indonesian society as a whole.

Based on a rich body of primary and secondary sources, The Killing Season is the definitive account of a pivotal period in Indonesian history. It also makes a powerful contribution to wider debates about the dynamics and legacies of mass killing, incarceration, and genocide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691161389
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Series:	Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity , #29
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	456
Sales rank:	875,850
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Geoffrey B. Robinson is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali and “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton). Before coming to UCLA, he worked for six years at Amnesty International’s Research Department in London. Robinson lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Note on Spelling and Translation xv

Abbreviations and Foreign Terms xvii

1 Introduction 3

2 Preconditions 27

3 Pretext 54

4 Cold War 82

5 Mass Killing 118

6 The Army’s Role 148

7 “A Gleam of Light in Asia” 177

8 Mass Incarceration 208

9 Release, Restrict, Discipline, and Punish 237

10 Truth and Justice? 264

11 Violence, Legacies, Silence 292

Notes 315

Bibliography 391

Index 413

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In this masterly account . . . the killings receive the comprehensive, scholarly treatment they have long needed."—Tony Barber, Financial Times

"An authoritative and harrowing account of the massacres in Indonesia and their aftermath."—Gary Bass, Foreign Affairs

"Essential for understanding the Indonesian tragedy and why humans sometimes do terrible things on a vast scale."—Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles

"The first morally honest, timelessly brilliant history of the killings as a whole."—Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

"Robinson, a veteran historian of Indonesia. . . . captures the high stakes."—Margaret Scott, New York Review of Books

Editorial Reviews

02/26/2018
Relying on primary documents from governmental sources such as the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and foreign governments, as well as secondary sources on mass killings, UCLA professor Robinson (The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali) pulls back the curtain on a traumatic period in Indonesian history: the antileftist purges of the mid-1960s, during which half a million people were killed. After six Indonesian Army generals were assassinated on October 1, 1965, the army leadership blamed the Indonesian communist party, which had greatly increased in popularity and influence in the previous decade. What followed was a torrent of hellish violence, in many cases carried out by civilian militias associated with right-wing political parties, that was intended to destroy the communist party “down to the very roots” and unseat President Sukarno, the country’s first postcolonial leader. As Robinson explains, evidence indicates that the purges were orchestrated by the army and that the United States and other Western powers, extremely concerned about the high likelihood of yet another country embracing communism, countenanced the violence. This meticulous scholarly analysis of the country’s institutions comprehensively investigates the economic, religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors behind the arrests, rape, torture, and murder that were inflicted on communist true believers and innocents alike. Robinson’s authoritative scholarly work is an indispensable resource for specialists seeking a comprehensive overview of this little-studied period in Southeast Asian history. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the George McT. Kahin Prize, Association for Asian Studies

Winner of the Distinguished Book Award in Non-U.S. History, Society for Military History

Winner of the Raphael Lemkin Book Award, Institute for the Study of Genocide

Longlisted for the 2019 ICAS Book Prize in Humanities, International Convention of Asia Scholars

One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2018: History

One of Foreign Affairs' Picks for Best of Books 2018

From the Publisher

"Robinson’s The Killing Season is a vital work in documenting one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century — and exposing the complicity of Western governments."

Green Left Weekly

2017-11-22
A scholarly account of a forgotten bloodletting.Commemorated in Peter Weir's 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously, the Indonesian massacres of 1965-1966 are little known outside the archipelago. Robinson (History/UCLA; "If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die": How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor, 2009, etc.) works archives and interview sources to reconstruct what he characterizes as an "awful juggernaut of arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture, mass killing, and political exile." Though the ruling and founding president of the republic, Sukarno, was at least nominally on the left, he was more populist than socialist. In any event, his army, led by a general named Suharto—who deposed Sukarno not long after—rose up and killed at least 500,000 suspected communists, imprisoning 1 million others, many for more than a decade. It will come as no surprise to readers that the U.S. was actively involved in the anti-communist enterprise; it is sobering, however, to realize just how close this involvement was and how guilefully American agents worked the angles. Wrote an officer at the U.S. Embassy, "Army feels it has hands full restoring order and stability without creating impression it going to massacre Communists." It did, of course, massacre communists, burying them in mass graves. But more, old vendettas and scores were settled, ethnic and religious rivalries were exploited, and the military consolidated power while suppressing the media and other institutions. Robinson notes how this suppression played out in the hands of different army commanders. In Aceh, he writes, the army "opted to kill rather than detain alleged supporters of the [communist] movement," while in West Java, near the capital of Jakarta, relatively few supposed rebels were killed. Only in the following decade, writes the author in conclusion, did many Westerners pay attention to the massacres, and then as a result of human rights efforts to free political prisoners who were still detained.A useful contribution to regional history and a much-needed voice in the "path of silence" that followed a murderous time.

Kirkus Reviews