Vietnam, Protest, and Counterculture 46142,000 troops. “Communism” had been prevented from coming to the DR,
but more importantly Bosch was not in power and pro-U.S. business and
military forces were.
While Johnson had exaggerated the threat of Communism to justify the
invasion of the DR, that country was nearby and “subject” to the Monroe
Doctrine. Much further away, in Indonesia, the U.S. took similar actions with
far bloodier consequences. Sukarno was still in power in Indonesia and, though
not a Communist himself, had the support of the Indonesian Communist
Party, the PKI. In October 1965, a coup led by anti-Sukarno generals in the
army, Nasution and Suharto, failed, though it killed 6 generals loyal to Sukarno.
Then, the frustrated military and right-wing “civilian” forces that hated the
PKI unleashed a massacre, considering it “noble” to kill Communists. Within
about a year, an estimated 500,000 to 2 million Indonesians were dead,
accused of being Communists or disloyal. A later CIA report described it as
“one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet
purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War,
and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.” U.S. forces themselves were
not in Indonesia and not part of the brutal killing frenzy, but it had American
fingerprints on it [The 2013 documentary The Act of Killing is a chilling rec-
reation of some of the events of 1965 in Indonesian, with many of the right-
wing assassins boasting of their behavior and even recreating the murders they
committed].
As noted in chapter 7, the U.S. hated Sukarno’s neutralism and wanted
easier access to the wealth of resources on the various islands that made up
the country, and to put a stop to plans to nationalize foreign, including U.S.,
companies. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Americans undermined the
Indonesian economy. The U.S. limited and then cut off aid to Sukarno, while
military aid to anti-Sukarno forces amounted to $39.5 million between 1962-
65 [total military aid was only $28 million for the 13 years before that]. In
March 1964 Sukarno, aware that the U.S. wanted him gone, told the Americans,
“go to hell with your aid.” By late 1965, just weeks before the failed coup,
the U.S. increased pressure on Sukarno, speculating in Indonesian currency
and destabilizing the economy so much that “the price of rice quadrupled
between June 30 and October 1, and the black market price of the dollar
skyrocketed, particularly in September.” Even though Suharto’s group had
failed to overthrow the government in October 1965, the subsequent killing