 Thank you everybody for being here. It's really exciting to be in this, like Zoom with people, so many people from like all over the world, like we're seeing, to talk about, so the title of this talk is, Silencing the Left, Anti-Communist Extermination in the Global South. And before I introduce our speakers, just a couple of notes that, thank you everyone who's introducing themselves in the chat, please keep doing that. And please also put your questions in there. So we will have introductions from Sutan and from Vincent, and then we'll have a bit of a back and forth and I'll ask some questions. But then we're going to do like, hopefully quite a meaty, long Q&A from the chat. So if you ask your questions there, we will be reading them and coming back to them then. You can ask them in English, Indonesian, Spanish or Portuguese. Any other languages? This is it, isn't it? This is a lot, so. And we'll answer them in English, but like feel free to write in whatever language of those is best for you. And it says here, but just so everybody knows that it's recording as well. So, yeah, I'm really excited to introduce Sutan Marching, who is a senior lecturer in Indonesian at South West University in London. She's also a creative writer and award-winning composer of avant-garde music. Very cool. Her latest book is The End of Silence, accounts of the 1965 genocide in Indonesia. Her latest novel about the 1965 genocide, Dari Delam Kabuk inside the grave was published in September, 2020. And then Vincent Bevin, who's also here. Vincent is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region, but paying a special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America. And before that, he worked for the Financial Times in London. Among other publications he has written for are The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, Foyle de San Paolo, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, The Owl, The Baffler, and New York Magazine. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Jakarta. I'm gonna let you both introduce your books and talk for a while about them. So, Vincent, take it away. Okay, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Yara, for doing this and for that introduction. For those of you who don't know, Yara herself is a novelist from here in London. And I really recommend her first book, Stubborn Archivist, which is about being from England but also having a Brazilian background. And she's now working on a second book and looking into Brazil's dictatorship in the dark history of the anti-communist violence that me and Suchan looked at. So, I'm really grateful that she's here to do this with us. So, as she said, I'm gonna briefly explain what my book, The Jakarta Method, is about. Talk a little bit about how it's been received over the last five months since it came out. And then pass things over to Suchan and explain why I'm so glad that she's doing what she's doing and why I'm happy that she's here. So, The Jakarta Method is a book about anti-communist mass murder. That is the intentional extermination of leftists or people accused of being leftists, carried out in the service of constructing authoritarian capitalist regimes in the 20th century. And I found in my research that in at least 20 countries around the world, allies of the United States rounded up and killed people using anti-communism as their justification. And that this was done intentionally and with a purpose and that this purpose was ultimately, then they were ultimately successful in what they were trying to achieve. Now, the most important event in this story, the apex of this anti-communist violence took place in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, when the US backed military killed approximately one million innocent civilians. So, as I see it, this was a major turning point in the 20th century. I claim that it was probably the most important victory in quotes for the United States and the West in the Cold War, at least according to what they believed their interest to be in the Cold War. Though in the Western English-speaking world, we have largely pushed this event sort of into the back of our collective memories, into our collective memory. At the time, everybody understood how incredibly important this was. This was the third-largest Communist Party in the world, the largest Communist Party in the world, not to have an army in a state as the Soviet Union and China did. US officials in Washington all understood in the early 1960s that Indonesia was far more important than Vietnam in the Cold War and the Battle for Southeast Asia in particular. And when this happened, when the Indonesian Communist Party was decimated through, as I said, intentional extermination of innocent civilians, people around the world took note and drew lessons from it. So on the left, people came to the conclusion that it was impossible to have a peaceful path to socialism, that you had to become self-defensive and armed and rigidly organized and always prepared for imperialist attack if you were going to try to reform capitalism at all. And not everybody took this path, but a lot of people drew this lesson from Indonesia, 1965. And then on the right, the side that I believe ultimately was victorious in the Cold War, people looked at it in a very different way. Far-right groups, radical anti-communist groups, allies of the United States, potential allies of the United States looked to what had happened in Indonesia and thought, oh, that worked, it's something we can do. And not only can we do it and succeed at crushing our enemies and sort of clearing the ground for the construction of our right-wing dictatorship, the United States will help us do it and then they will help us explain it away and cover for us on the international stage after we're done with this horrible path. And especially in Brazilian Chile, the word jacarta became used to signify this tactic, this method to kill your enemies, more specifically by routing them up, arresting them and then disposing of them without anybody knowing initially what happened. This is a very effective way to terrorize your population. And this is where the title of our books comes from, right? This is the idea that it was not just this one case but it was something that was employed over and over throughout the 20th century in order to construct the world that we live in now. And I claim in the book, and I claim now, that this tactic, this jacarta method was such a fundamental part of the way the West won the Cold War that it shaped life almost everywhere on planet Earth to this day. Now, jacarta was not actually the first time that a US-backed country employed mass murder against leftists. There was the immediate aftermath of the CIA-backed Guatemala coup in 1954. There was the Ba'ath coup in Iraq in 1963 in which the CIA and Saddam Hussein participated in a horrible purge of the Iraqi Communist Party which was an incredibly important part of the left in the 20th century as well. But I picked this powerful metonym, jacarta, to sort of tie everything together for this book to point to this most horrible and most emblematic time that this method was employed and show mostly all the ways that it affected things afterwards. And I traced this from jacarta over to South America, the creation of anti-communist dictatorships in Brazil and Chile, the creation of Operation Condor, international terror network set up with US-backing to explicitly eliminate perceived enemies of these dictatorships and then the export once more of the jacarta method up to Central America where it was employed with most terrifying ferocity in the Western hemisphere. The numbers in Central America started to come close to the numbers in Indonesia that they didn't quite get there. So simplifying as much as possible, I believe that what happened last century is that in 1945, the end of the Cold War, two things happened. The era of formal European colonialism ended and the era of US hegemony truly began. And then from 1945 to 2000, we saw that this new hegemon, the most powerful nation by far, the United States, interacted with the global South in a slightly different way than the Western Europeans had over the previous centuries of formal colonialism. But I think ultimately it's right to say that the United States employed tactics, the use of violence and economic force upon the third world that were neocolonial and imperialist, right? So again, taking the hugest step back possible, I think you have a shift last century in the way the global North interacts with the global South, a shift from Western Europe to North America as the site of the real seat of power on planet Earth. But the relationship didn't change at its core. And I think the most, in the most horrible tactic or method, the mass murder of leftists is the one that I really center in my book. And so that is all a way to start to say that what I really try to do in the Jakarta method is to summarize and globalize the story of 1965 to put it into the widest context possible and explain how important all of this is. I really, for the main narrative, I really summarized an existing body of research and the story that had been established by careful academic work over decades. I also did interviews in 12 countries to try to humanize the story, to try to fit this planetary phenomenon, this loose network of terror that I describe into a story that the average person can read. But I really always want to recognize that for the book, especially when discussing 1965, I really rely on the heroic work done by academics and Indonesian activists and survivors of the violence over the last 55 years. What I did was very minor compared to what they allowed us sort of newer on the scene to do. And Suchen is all three of those things, an academic and activist and family member of a victim of the violence. As far as I know, there are two books in English that recount the stories of survivors of 1965. One is by Basgar Wardaya, great manager as a priest in Joe Jakarta who helped me. And then there's this one, The End of Silence, that's Suchen wrote and has been out for a while in English. And it's just a really important and courageous volume for reasons I think that I'll ask her to get into later in the discussion. And it was a lot easier for me to do my work than for everybody who came before me. I think I really want to make that clear. And we just found out this week that Suchen and I will have the same publisher in Indonesia. And I think that's interesting because her new book, Dari Dalam Kubur, From the Grave or From the Side of the Grave was going to be published with Gramedia, the largest commercial publisher in Indonesia. But then she had problems with what would be allowed to be published by someone like that. And eventually she went to Margin Kitty which will also publish the Jakarta Method. And I think that story of why Gramedia really, I don't know if it was intentional or it was fear or foot dragging made it very difficult for her to even publish a novel that speaks about what happened in 1965 as a really powerful reminder of how much the story is real and how much it's not over in the fourth largest country in the world by population. And so then finally, one thing about the way that I've seen my book received over the last five months, I've been incredibly like grateful and surprised and gratified to hear people tell me that they actually read this thing either in the United States or around the world that people enjoyed it, which is a strange way to describe it or found it moving or that they found it accessible or that it moved quickly. All these things were really great to hear. But I really always want to stress one thing and is that this is not like some disembodied, fantastical tale from a faraway land that exists in some other universe. It's not some sort of magical, part of the world that we've conjured up to tell this story that doesn't affect people now. It's a very real thing. The people that have suffered are still suffering and there's tens of millions of people that I believe still do not have the justice that should have been delivered to them in 1966, let alone 2020. I'm not sure if it will ever happen. These are people I talk with all the time. These are people Sucheng knows, this is her family. So I'm really happy that Sucheng continues the work that she's doing very bravely and that she's here today to maybe hopefully help make it real again for those that are new to this story. So thank you to her and hopefully now she can talk a little bit about what she's been up to now. Thank you. Okay, thanks a lot, Vincent. I know some of you haven't read Vincent's book. So I'm going to show it here. This is the Jakarta method. And I know this is not an academic book, but I'm gonna tell you why this is in a way, it's really, really important because for an academic book, usually you have to be quite specific here, talking about a specific thing, whereas Vincent doesn't have to do that. So he can talk about something in general and relate a lot of things. So we can see the connection between what happened to one country and another. And I think this is the plus of this book, which you may not be able to find in academic books. And that's why this is really important. So please, if you haven't read it, please read it. And for people in Indonesia, if you have problems, I know I can see some people here from Indonesia. If you have problems reading English, this will be translated in Indonesian soon by Margin Kiri, which is my publisher as well, publisher of my book. Now, first I'm going to talk about a certain term, which is quite important. Can you see my screen now? Yeah, good. Okay, now some people actually ask, this genocide happened over 50 years ago, over 60 years ago, over 40 years ago, but why you talk about it now? Why didn't you talk about this before? And that's why I'm going to explain about declassification. And this is why we start talking about this now. So declassification is, oops, sorry, is the process in which documents that used to be classified as secret are revealed under the principle of freedom of information. Now all documents are revealed, of course, only the one selected by the government in power at that time. The rules of declassification vary from one country to another. In the UK, every 30 years, some documents have to be declassified. In the USA, some documents have to be declassified every 10, 25, 50 and 75 years. Now, the year 2015 is 50 years after 1965, the year in which the genocide of about one to three million left-wing people took place in Indonesia. Why did I write here one to three million? Because no one can be sure how many were murdered. But I mentioned one million here because one expert estimated one million, but I wrote three millions here because the commander, the main commander of the mass murder mentioned that he murdered three million people. Anyway, I'm going to show you one of the documents that has been declassified. In 2015, there were 3,000 pages of documents that were declassified in relation to like this left-wing genocide here. And this is just one of them. I didn't acquire this myself, by the way. I got this from Brad Simpson who testified in the 1965 International People's Tribunal which happened in November 2015 and I was involved in it. And he gave me one of these, yeah? Only this, he gave me only about two or three, but he has like hundreds and thousands of them. Okay, so if you think that this is not a clear indication, it's because it's only one. There are thousands of them, but you can see here just to show you this one, yeah? I'm going to read it. Number one, if we pursue the wait and see policy announced in CRL telegram number 2514 throughout the period of the current international struggle in Indonesia, we may well be missing a golden opportunity to turn events the way we want. It seems to me that all we're doing is holding off to allow Sukano to settle his own internal troubles so that he can reemerge strengthened by quelling internal dissidents and pursue his confrontation with renewed figure. One can almost hear the speeches already and I expect the inspiration of recent troubles will undoubtedly be put out as coming from the neckline. Now, is this what we want? I strongly advocate that we should take a much more aggressive line to try and ensure continuing civil war in Indonesia, our aim being the destruction and putting to flight of the PKI by the Indonesian army. The PKI is the Indonesian Communist Party, by the way. Sukano, by not ceasing the opportunity given him, has clearly shown that he doesn't want to break with the communists. Are we going to sit back and allow him to succeed? If we do aid it, it will make sure it comes off properly next time, okay? So I believe we have everything to gain from early and careful planned propaganda and civil activity to access break internal strife and blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can see this from CIFE, yeah? America to M-O-D, UK, yeah? So you can see it. Now, this is just one of the documents that has been declassified and that's why we know now how far was the involvement of the United States and also other Western countries like Australia and also UK and also some European countries like Germany and the Netherlands and also Denmark, yeah? So I'm going to talk about my book a bit today actually. My book actually shows how the event that happened over 50 years ago still have impacts today. So my book is not only about the accounts of the victims but also their siblings, children and grandchildren. But the desire to write about this or anything related to the 1965 genocide had started far earlier actually because my father was one of the victims like what Vincent said. However, my mother kept asking me not to write about this. Her trauma of witnessing her husband being dragged from our home by Suarez troops one day in 1966 makes a belief that silence is a virtue. Unfortunately, I'm the other way around. I keep talking and for my mother, I'm just like a broken record, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we have quite a lot of arguments about this actually. And my mother is supported by my elder sister in this case and recently she scolded me again, by the way. So, but the terror continues. When I interviewed my respondents, what I discovered was the terror from decades ago still lingers to these days. Suharto, the president of Indonesia was installed by the US government and was arguably involved in the massacre, sat down in 1998 and died in 2008. However, the cronies are still in power in Indonesia. Over half a century after the genocide, the term communist is still used today to vilify people, communist equate with evil and atheist in Indonesia. And by the way, I know for some of you, atheists are fine, but not in Indonesia. Yeah, atheists are not fine in Indonesia. What I witnessed when I was interviewing my respondents was the internalized fear. Out of fear, the victims have become the hands of the authoritarian regime, helping to sustain its ideology. The state does not forbid these people from writing because the banning is already there, internalized, psychologically embedded and personalized. And this is what happened to me as well when my mother said, no, don't you dare talking about this at all. That's what she said. And my elder sister said that, oh, by the way, my brother too said that too, yeah, forgot to mention him. But anyway, only a few are willing to open up and my respondents who decide to reveal the truth often have to face resistance, not from the government this time, but from the people close to them who fear that future disasters might befall them. I do not say that the government and the people in authority have no impact on their lives of these individuals. However, the Long Terror and Reconciliation Rule in Indonesia had huge impacts on the mind of the people. And that's what I've been arguing. Several of the memoirs I've gathered depict how the parents ban the children from getting involved in politics or challenging the government. Siblings as their brothers or sisters not to get involved in my project and some grandparents who want the family to never speak up. So even the people who were willing to be interviewed by me said to me, don't tell my family, okay, I tell you this. Sometimes they said that. So fear produced by the state seem serious and obviously threatening. However, there is another form of fear. The fear internalized within the family. Many of these people who forbid others to speak up have also been victims of the 1965 atrocities. Such mutation of fear is very effective and inexpensive confederation for maintaining the power of despotic rulers. Sometimes the victims even blame each other. They blame any effort to reveal what happened to them as dangerous, stirring up trouble and chaos. There's a commitment in the ideology that led to their persecution actually. So they just, you know, like what my mother said to me, it's not like I ask you to shut up, but I love you. Yeah, so don't do this. It's because of love. And that's what I've been hearing from them. It's because of care, because of love, because they care about their members of the family, so they must shut up. So this is the internalized fear and it mutates to become something else, you know? And the impacts, the inability of victims to communicate well amongst each other, even the victims blame each other and also with their family members. Yeah, there's always tension among the victims and within the victim and the other family members. So it's quite complicated. And secrets upon secrets for decades, even to the present. So of course, suspicion and tension are quite high. Even now many survivors and activists are still threatened. And when people feel threatened, they tend to see others as either friends or foes. And to protect themselves, they tend to discriminate as well. And no wonder, racism and discrimination persist in Indonesia because of this. So my experience is somehow a kind of a replica of what Vincent describes in his book about the operation of the U.S. government in exercising its power around the world to be communism. So in this case, the U.S. government just start up problem here and there. And it's quite effective. They does not have to send their troops to different countries. And those countries did whatever the U.S. intended by themselves. So it was very efficient. The U.S. just basically instructed them to do whatever they had to do. And then that's it. Yeah, the coup happened. The genocide happened. The murder happened. And then the government sponsored by the U.S. in several countries suddenly. And the U.S. government can somehow sit back and relax, not quite like this, but somehow sit back and relax. And if necessary, they can say, oh dear, look at what these uncivilized countries have done. They were murdering each other. What kind of society is that? And this is the question that people ask me after they saw the film, The Act of Killing. What kind of society is that? Well, yeah, but who sponsored them? It's not just a society. You have to see the wider picture. And that's why the Jakarta method describes this really well. Although in a much smaller scale, one of the victims in this huge political upheavals and incidents is my novel. Six years ago, I interviewed several people for my book, The End of Silence. One of the women I interviewed said to me, I will tell you as much as I can about myself, but please do not publish it. With her consent, I published a story in my novel because I thought this is just too important to just ignore. You see, she told me that she was raped, basically. She was raped by the new order troops and then she got pregnant and she had to bring up the baby together with the other children. Yeah, so. And of course, it has caused quite a lot of complication in the family. And I just think this has to be known by the people. So I asked her consent. I said, look, I'm gonna give you a pseudonym, yeah, fake name, I will change your details and I'll publish your story in my novel. And she agreed. She was actually quite proud of it actually, but even in fictional form, her story still underwent a long struggle. My novel was first accepted for publication by the biggest publisher in Indonesia, Gramedia, at the end of 2018. However, a few months later, the publisher told me that some details had to be altered or even omitted because of the shock criticism against the Suhaibos cronies. So you can see it had to struggle, yeah, even in fictional form. I was bargaining with Gramedia for months, nearly gave up, because I was tired of it. And in the end, I had to chat with Margin Kiri, a much smaller publisher, but they promised not to censor my novel. And that was more important for me than being published by this biggest publisher in Indonesia. More prestigious, some of my friends said, oh no, no, no, no, you shouldn't go with a much more public, Gramedia is the best. Everyone wants to be published by Gramedia. And I said, no, but it's more important for me not to be censored, yeah. So in the end, I went with Margin Kiri. As I was writing my novel, actually, that woman once told me her hope that one day it would be safe for her to reveal what she has inspired, that she has inspired my novel. She was actually quite proud of it, yeah. She was like, at some point she kept asking me, so when are you going to finish my novel? I just started at that time and she already asked when I'm going to finish it. So like, it will take a few years. So please be patient. And at that time, the president of Indonesia, Jokowi, promised that, oh, we will deal with the human rights violation in the past, which he, in the end, he didn't do. Yeah, of course, he hasn't done anything much, to be honest about the past human rights violation. But at that time, this woman had a lot of hope and she said, you know, probably one day I could be more open. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen because she passed away before my novel was published. Before I finished my novel, she passed away, actually. And yeah, so it was really sad for me. And another thing is this morning, about five hours before this discussion, four or five hours, I had a discussion about my novel. Yeah, about this Dari Dalam Kupur, with the Indonesian people. And it was hacked. So it's still happening. Yeah, it's still happening, the terror continues. It was hacked, just this morning. So that's all I'm going to say. And you can ask me questions, Vincent, if you want. And I will ask you questions later, if it's okay with you. Yeah, great, that sounds great. I'm going to stop here now, okay. Great, yeah, thank you so much for that. I want to, yeah, like you said, I want to respond to a couple of things. Yeah, I want to say two things about what Sujen just said. I want to really thankful for her to show sort of the documents and explain how much we really know now because outside of Indonesia, it's kind of been established for a while that the case is really clear. But in Indonesia itself, you still have to really fight and be like, no, no, no, look at this, it's right there. The United States government published these on their website. It is, it absolutely happened this way. And it absolutely had the full support of the United States. In my book, I picked sort of a select few of the ones that I think would be most impactful or get the point across. The best, for example, like right after the clash these sort of the confusion of the September 30th movement starts, the US ambassador says about the chance to crush the Indonesian left, it's now or never. And then they get detailed reports, encourage in very clear terms, the continued use of horrible violence against the Indonesian left. But like, it's, we have to keep saying it over and over even though it's just undeniably clear and just to share something from one of those other academics that I said that I rely upon so much to do the sort of simple introductory work that I do in Jakarta Method. We haven't talked with John Russo the other day, who just came up with a new book years ago. He published pretext for mass murder, which was probably the best attempt in an account of the September 30th movement that led to the mass murder. And he's come up with a new book of buried histories. And he was asked in one of our events the other day, okay, but if you had to explain why this happened, why did they kill all these people? If you had to give the simplest answer possible, what would you say? And John Russo said, the Indonesian military did it to impress the United States, to show the US government that they were serious about building this type of society that they believe the US wanted them to build. And they were right. It did impress them and they did get the aid that they were hoping for. So while there are undeniable, and John Russo is very careful and very academic in the way that I'm not, identifying all the things that made it possible, all of these fights over land, fights between the Indonesian left and the military, all of these political struggles from 1958 to 1965, when asked, okay, but in the simplest terms possible, why do they do it? And the answer is the United States. And another thing I'm really thankful to Sutan for is that her work is really effective in demonstrating something that I think is really familiar to people that have lived in countries that have had dictatorships, but people, those of us in like the privileged, you know, democratic West have a hard time understanding is that the terror of 1965 and 1966 succeeded in forcing the citizens of Indonesia to reproduce lies and propaganda even though they knew, even when they knew that it was not true, right? That the terror was so effective that people either shut up about things they knew or said things they knew that weren't true. And this is an essential dynamic of the worst authoritarian regimes is that the citizens are not only victimized by it, they're basically help me victimize or be a victim, right? Like you, and this happens also, you know, in, there was this dynamic in the killing itself, a kind of kill or be killed, right? Like get on board with this mass roundup of leftists, sign off on what we're doing or you're gonna be a very quickly accused of being a communist yourself and then you could be next. And in a, you know, it's not as extreme now, you know, but something like that is still at work, right? It's still very easy. The last thing you want if you're an Indonesian and not privileged like me to live just like, you know, if you live in Indonesia, but you can't just run away like I can, you really do not want to be accused of being a communist or bought by anybody. It's really going to mess up your life, mess up your family's life. And this is why a lot of people that I spoke to for the book didn't want to talk and that was fine. I found the people that did want to talk and she mentioned on one part of this propaganda story, which was especially egregious and especially racist that was also reproduced with the help of the Indonesian elites and the media in the region. This idea that like, oh, well, that's just what they're like over there. Like life is cheap in that country. They're buying, they do that to each other, which has no basis in historical reality whatsoever. This is not happening beforehand in Indonesia. It was not just like a mass war of everyone against everyone. And that kind of racist stereotype was used in the New York Times all throughout the Western media to wave away was actually the US backed and coordinated mass murder of approximately a million innocent people. And as Tuchuan says, could it have been 3 million? Sarwebi said that it was, we don't know. And I think the fact that we don't know is really tragic and telling, right? Because the reason we don't know is because there was never a massively funded internationally recognized truth commission that there could have been and should have been, right? The fact that we have to guess is quite tragic in the first place. And in my own really small way, I like felt what it was like or saw what it was like in Indonesia for people that could maybe be accused of being on the left. And I'm gonna tell this story just because I saw one of the participants in this reading group is in the call now. But when I first got to Indonesia because I'm American and had a journalist salary being paid for from the United States, I could afford a pretty nice place. It was ended, I know I'm not liking it that much, but some of my Indonesian friends had a political theory reading group, where every week they would meet to read sort of the big works of political thought. Because some of those books were Marxist, they were afraid that they were going to be discovered by the police and get in trouble. So they had their meetings at my hotel because for one it was big enough, but also because they said, hey, you're white and this is like an expat like neighborhood, it's way less likely the police are gonna bust in and arrest us for reading sort of like Hegel and Adam Smith and Marx or whatever. So it is very real even if you're in sort of the Jakarta elite, even if you didn't have any direct connection to the people that were victims and a lot of Indonesians do have direct connections because about a third of the country was somehow affiliated with the Communist Party in 1965. But it's very much alive. And I don't know exactly what is gonna happen next and that's how I wanna throw it back to Suche. And I wanna ask you, do you think there's a chance that this situation can be improved in the near future? What do you think will happen how and when, if ever will Indonesia sort of recognize officially, nationally the truth of what happened and allow for people to tell the truth about what their lives were up until 1966? Do you, what do you think the prospects are Suche? I really can't answer that because, you know when Joko we first got elected, I had such a big hope because he promised that he would deal with the past human rights violations and he promised a lot of things here to us, to activists and we were actually, we were really positive about him at the beginning. And in the end, perhaps he realized that to hold on power he has to be kind of like polite and nice and sweet to these new order cronies. And that's what he's done, to hold on power. That's what he's done. And he hasn't kept his promise at all. And the sad thing is people are still being terrorist in Indonesia and only last year when I was back to Surabaya and we held a meeting with them with the ex political prisoners and the families some fundamentalist group came and disband our meetings the police was there and said, oh, you have no, you know you have no rights to this meeting and then you have to go home, you know and it was only last year. And recently my friend told me that it happened again and also with my novel like this morning it happened and this is the sad thing because there's still, you know the victims and their families are still being terrorized and, you know, many of them still live in poverty. I am, so don't think that I'm typical, typical, you know family member victim. I'm probably one of the very lucky ones. And I experienced poverty as well when I was young my family was really poor as well. And my sister told me that they even had to struggle just to eat, yeah. I was born after my father was released from the prison so I'm one of the luckiest in the family and I'm actually the luckiest in that I could eat properly. Yeah, I could eat properly since I was quite young but my brother and sister couldn't eat properly when they were young. Yeah, so many of them are still like this many of them are still like that many of them are still suffering a lot and they still sometimes find it difficult to find jobs because of the stigma. If people find out that they are all related to this Communist Party, it's still hard for them to find jobs but I have a lot of hopes for the young people because more and more people now start questioning the history because they're more books and they read more books, they read the alternatives so I think they start questioning it and if more and more people start questioning this history eventually it will change, I don't know when but I can see it now that more and more people start saying this history is rubbish. Yeah, so it is not as bad as before. People still scold me and threaten me but it's not as serious as before because before it was really serious. Yeah, how about answer your question? Yeah, definitely and I would just add one more thing before Yara maybe jumps in with her questions is that poverty, it's still the condition for a lot of survivors, right? So the people that I spent a lot of time with I spent people, some people over the place put in solo for example, I've been for a long time trying to organize sort of a big attempt to raise money for all of the survivor organizations but I've gone too slow because the people that I know in solo have twice been like, hey, we need money now or we won't be able to feed, distribute rice and oil to people during the pandemic or we're gonna run out of rent for this incredibly cheap little base that we have our meetings in so these people can feel connected to each other. So it's really people that are living with this every single day. Yeah, would you have any thoughts or questions Yara? Yes, I wanna come back to the question of poverty because I think it's part of both of the texts and kind of emblematic of the different approaches you take, so Vincent in your appendix you have the big tables which show relative wealth of different countries and such and you have these accounts where so much of what the people are saying is about food it's actually remarkable, but I wanna come back to that and first, Vincent I was just wondering given that there are a lot of Indonesians and Americans on the call maybe you could summarize what happened in Brazil in 1964 and also just like give some background on that so that we just know what's going on. Yeah, so that's the other big clue and the other big event that I claim in the book is one of the most important of the Cold War and there's a lot that is really similar with Indonesia some that is I think so similar that it's suggestive of some kind of relationship but again, you know, we don't know there's so much we still don't know but the short version of the story is that in 1964 there was a center left, left leaning a little bit of president of Brazil that was overthrown by the military with the support of the United States and the Brazilian military had, unlike the Indonesian military a very long history of anti-communist almost belief systems almost kind of like an official religion for the Brazilian military going back to the 1930s and their coup, which started basically on a 1962 phone call between President JFK and his ambassador, you can listen to that phone call if you want, where he tells the US ambassador to get the Brazilian military to let them know that they can start or laying the groundwork for a coup if the left gets out of hand. This is eventually what happens. That coup that actually comes together in 1964 is kind of like one of the most fully successful and finally in final, I suppose, coups of the early Cold War because the middle class supports it, the military fully gets power and the United States is not even really required to show its hand, right? So the United States and something called Operation Brother Sam now under Lyndon Johnson because John F. Kennedy has been assassinated, authorizes the military assistance to Brazil but it's not needed. And this I think is one of the key turning points where Brazil shows like the best way to do a coup is to really have a Gemini in the military and to get some section of the local elite really on your side rather than sort of crashing in there and throwing everything from side to side like they did in Iran and Guatemala in 53-54. And the reason this comes back into the book within Indonesia is because it is in the early 70s during the presidency of Salvador Allende that both Brazil and Chile, in both those countries, you see the use of Jakarta to signify the mass murder of leftists and this is important because Brazil at that time, Brazil didn't just sort of receive a coup imposed upon it from the United States and then just sit and be a compliant partner. They were very active in South America in flipping other countries into the anti-communist camp. So Bolivia and Uruguay were sort of, they had some involvement in the establishment of dictatorships there. And then when Allende was in power, they were really active behind the scenes with the Chilean military to make that coup possible. So when these, so it was, is that point where the Brazilian story in the Indonesia sort of kind of come back together again and lead to the creation of Condor and the mass murder network that very much unlike Indonesia was eventually sort of revealed and apologized for and the victims got some kind of justice, right? This is one thing that was really interesting when I spoke to still speak to Indonesian victims is that they can't, they're often shocked to find that former Lee and prison gorillas or leftists in Latin America came back and had some role in politics. This is something that was totally aborted in Indonesia to this day. But yeah, as you said, poverty is a big condition of that to the stay and Sutan does pays more, I guess, more granular attention to that than I do because I try to do this, I try to make this really huge point where here's the 25 biggest countries in the world before the Cold War starts, the same countries afterwards, how many of these went from third world or underdeveloped to first world zero? And the only countries that did just outside of that, they're on top 25, but they're close are Taiwan and South Korea, which had the explicit support of the US in sort of giving it exceptions to the rules of the game as everybody else in the global South experienced them. Thank you. That's hopefully gonna give some good context with people who don't know or understand the history. And having your books side by side, I really appreciated, I wanna talk to you about kind of how you put your texts together and how you decided like how you would tell the stories that you wanted to tell. And for those people that haven't read both or either of the books, Su Chen hasn't sort of, she has not acknowledgements, but an apology at the start, which I think is very interesting. And it's a apology to your mother, which is something you've talked about before and the choice you made between being a good activist and a good daughter. And you also have a timeline which lays out the events of the 30th of December and the first of October and then a few months after that. And then you have largely these oral histories, including from yourself. And you approach them and cluster them in kind of relational terms. So the survivors, the siblings, the children, their grandchildren. And again, like you jump in and tell me if I'm some reason correctly, but what's really, you pay a lot of attention to the trauma and the fear and the psychology, which I think is really important, particularly in a situation where it's been repressed and also weaponized. Whereas what Vincent does is you have this sort of zooming out, which I guess is incredible that, I mean, both of your texts could only have been produced by each of you in some ways, right? Because Vincent does this thing where you zoom out and you connect these two stories, which you're able to do because you learn Indonesian and you speak Portuguese. And there are presumably not that many people who can do that. And although you have different people's stories woven in, you also have a lot of information about the CIA and the sort of like Americans who are personally involved, the CIA guy, Frank Wisner, and the ambassador in Indonesia, Howard Jones. So I guess my question is, I think these two approaches are really complementary and particularly important when you wanna understand what people's experiences are, but also be able to trace the, I don't know, culpability, but also like be accountable for these larger forces. So you're not just saying like, how do these people get so, why are these people so uncivilized and doing this to each other? So how did you decide what kind of texts to write? Like what responsibilities did you have and then how did you like manifest those in the texts that you created? Okay, so basically how I choose respondents are just whoever was willing to talk to me. Yeah, whoever was willing to tell their stories to me. That's all, because not everyone was willing to do that. And actually some people who were willing to do that, there were actually some of them are really, you know, they have the spirit of telling the truth because there's it, if not now, when else? Yeah, it's been over 55, well, I did it five years ago. So there's it, it's already half a century after that. If we keep quiet, then the lies will continue. And that's what I feel and that's why I insist on doing what I'm doing, no matter what, no matter what people talk to me, it doesn't matter if they scold me, if they threaten me, it's gonna be useless. That's what I'm going to tell them. If you threaten me, it's useless. Sorry, you're wasting your time because what I believe in is if I don't speak the truth, it's not going to happen. I have to do it. And with this position, you know, as I said, I'm one of the lucky ones. So I feel that I have the responsibility to speak up. Otherwise, I'm gonna be betraying other victims. It's gonna be such a betrayal to other victims if I don't speak up. So no matter what, whatever the risk is, I'm going to keep going. That's all. And yeah, so the way I organize the book is, first, I write about the victims and then other than the siblings and then the children and grandchildren. So I organize it, so it's from the earlier one to the most recent one. And as you can see, the terror doesn't actually diminish. Even the grandchildren still feel the terror. And as you see, one of the grandchildren there uses a pseudonym. She said, yes, interview me, but use a pseudonym. Publish my story, but use a pseudonym. So she's still frightened. She's still really frightened. And my mother is one of the examples. She's still frightened and I can understand it. Yeah, I can understand if she's still frightened, but it doesn't mean that I have to stop. It doesn't mean that I have to be frightened as well. I refuse to be frightened and that's all. Yeah, Su Chen touched on something that for sure I felt as well. I felt like a real burden of responsibility to these people that like, once the people had told me, okay, I want to do this. This is my story, you know, and then trusted me to go out and like write this book for the English-speaking world. And they knew, you know, they knew like, oh, okay, well, this guy, he has like some affiliation with these American newspapers. So maybe that's why people pay attention to him. I felt like a real, more responsibility not to get it wrong. And so I was really careful in selection and also like very much willing to like go to like, not that I had to fight with the editor or whatever, but there were certain things I was like, no, no, no, no, this needs to be expressed. So we can't soften this. And I think that relates to the question you asked me sort of more directly, which is, you know, how do you, how do I weave this together, put it together? So I hadn't done something like this and I wasn't quite sure that it was going to work at all. But I knew that I wanted the story to be big enough and like with a wide enough lens that people that it would connect to things that other people, the people, regular like English speakers would already know about, like I think often it's hard to like read a book about this country that you don't like it's new, but it makes it, it's a lot easier to understand if it connects to things that are already in your brain, like, you know, memory works, repetition, association, and so if you can tie it into all this other stuff, oh yeah, I know kind of about the Cubeness of Crisis and I know about, and I know about John F. Kennedy and stuff, I really wanted the story to be global. So finding stuff that would fit into that very global story seamlessly, but also paying, but also to be respectful of the real stories that were shared with me, took me probably an extra two years, like doing it that way took me two more years than it would have if I'd just been like, this is what we know about America, this guilty or whatever. Because basically my method was just like, do lots of interview, talk to everyone and see what can fit into a sort of an international picture that would end up making sense for a regular person. But yeah, I mean, it was very, it was a lot, it was like a big, not burden, it was like a privilege, but it was, it's hard and like, it's a lot easier for me than it was for Susan, as I've said before. So if it was very difficult for me psychologically, and it was to do all of this, I can't imagine what it's like for people that are sort of going to be in Indonesia, be in Indonesia forever, or have a personal relationship to this. But it was, yeah, it's not an easy like needle to thread. And do you want to go to audience questions now or keep going in discussion? Will not, yeah. Yeah, I have a, yeah, is there a switch and have you seen a question? There's one for you that I think will be interesting switch, have you seen this one? Yeah, okay, yeah, here about the Chinese indonation, yeah. I'm going to read it. May I ask what do you think, what do you think the impact is, the impact of the 1965 to how the Chinese Indonesian community perceived and positioned themselves within the framework of imagination of Indonesian nationality or nationalism? It's quite interesting. It's quite complicated. Yeah, talking about Chinese indonation is quite complicated because Chinese indonation is not a homogeneous group. Yeah, and in the 1965, yes, there are a lot of victims who could be identified as Chinese indonation because I never believe in the term Chinese indonation as permanent, as fixed. It can always be questioned. But at that time, there are a lot of people who could be identified as Chinese indonation. And the Chinese indonations were in prison were mainly the so-called Chinese who were Toto. And Toto means who were not mixed, who comes in not mixed with the indigenous people, with the Indonesian people. Those were the ones who were more of a target, yeah? Who still had Chinese name, who still had, you know, like who still had strong Chinese identity. That was the target at that time. Why? Because they were related to China, to the communist China. However, this is the interesting thing. This is what I noticed. The stigma amongst the Chinese indonation is not actually as strong compared to the non-Chinese in Indonesia. Because amongst Chinese indonation, they also believe that the Chinese who were in prison was not only because they were communist, but because they were Chinese. And that's why the stigma was not as strong because they said, well, yeah, communist as well as Chinese. So at that time, my father's friends didn't actually kind of stigmatize my father that much. Although they knew, they were like, oh yeah, okay. And they just didn't talk about it, but they were still friends and they were still okay. And this is the difference between the non-Chinese because they were stigmatized more. Their friends didn't wanna be friends with them. They were even scolded, but it didn't really happen with my father. Most of his friends were okay. Also with my mother, most of my mother's friends were okay. We didn't talk about it at all. They didn't talk about it. My mom told me, well, we just don't talk about it. But there were still friends with me. My mom said like that. Only a few probably didn't wanna get close to me just after your father got out of prison because they were frightened of the implication. But after that, they were fine. They were friends. We were friends again and we were invited everywhere. So it was okay. Whereas the non-Chinese, sometimes they weren't invited to parties or weddings that on relatives' weddings. You know, so yes, it was in a way harder because the Chinese was, it can be said that the Chinese, Indonesian, they were doubly stigmatized because they were Chinese and then communist as well. Like my father, if people knew that he was, he had been imprisoned and there's Chinese and communist. Fuck that. But at the same time in the Chinese community, the stigma wasn't that big. So, yeah. So is there another question for me or maybe you can pick your question. Yeah, I found one. Yeah. Yeah, so Puso, the cat has a question about the role of Malaysia and Singapore and all of this, which I think is interesting because it really leads us right to the role of the UK, which I think is interesting for a talk posted by SOAS. So Malaysian Singapore were very important to this entire story, which requires us going back a little bit further to 1955 when the CIA starts to really mess with Sukarno in the left when they really believe that Sukarno's brand of left-leaning anti-imperialist nationalism is not an acceptable way for Indonesia to be run. So what they first do is they're funding money to the right-wing Muslim party, Masumi, hoping to stop the PKI from winning elections, which are winning more and more votes in every year. That doesn't work. The PKI just keeps doing better and better and CIA and MI6 indeed files indicate that they know that the reason the PKI is doing better is because they're just sort of the most organized and most trusted party among certain segments of the population. The PKI is the least corrupt, which as everyone in Indonesia and most of the global south knows this is very important. They really deliver on their promises to the PKI. It can't be stopped by bribing other parties. In 1958, the CIA covertly, secretly, launches an actual invasion of Indonesia and starts bombing the country, assisting so-called regional rebellions, basically causing a civil war, hoping to break up the country of Indonesia. This doesn't work. But where are these American pilots that end up dropping bombs on innocent civilians, launching their flights from Singapore? And this becomes one of, not the only, but points of contention between Sukarno and Nekanyu and Malaysia as it later forms that Singapore has really assisted the CIA to try to destroy Indonesia in 1958. That also fails. They catch this American pilot, island pop crash landing into the island of Ambon. The game is up. Everybody that has been saying that the Americans can't be trusted and are trying to destroy Indonesia are proven right. Karno moves closer to the socialist world internationally. What really causes the breakdown of relations between the US again in the early 60s that leads to the mass murder is the creation of Malaysia. So Malaysia is created in such a way, Sukarno believes, that various bits of former British possessions are being lumped together so that the left and anti-perceived anti-British forces in Southeast Asia will be weakened. He is absolutely right about that. Everybody knew at the time that grouping in sort of what is mainland Malaysia with the north of Borneo at the time was a British imperial strategy to weaken its perceived enemies. And the Sukarno chooses to really pick a fight with Malaysian Britain over. This is called confrontation or confrontation in Indonesia. And this is the one fight he picks where he really doesn't win. He's taken on the Dutch previously, gotten West Papua. He believes that he maybe can take on the British in the case of opposing Malaysian, Malaysia's creation as it ends up being created. Britain does not like this. Britain goes to the United States behind the scenes and says, hey, look, the Sukarno guy, we both know he's been a problem for a long time. This is now unacceptable. He's crossed the line. We, Britain, will continue to back your obviously kind of stupid war in Vietnam if you back us on this Malaysia thing. If you really help us crush Sukarno who is now a bigger problem we're willing to tolerate. So when 1964, 1965 come around, the creation of covert strategy to create a clash between the Indonesian unarmed left and the very well armed army was engineered by the CIA and MI6. So this was a US and UK operation to act in ways we still don't fully understand to create the clash that ultimately led to the mass murder of 1965. And sort of one of the main factors for the UK's involvement was protecting the process that created Malaysia in the way that it wanted it to be created. And then if you wanna read the International People's Tribunal that came out a few years ago in the Netherlands, Britain and indeed Australia are also judged as complicit in a wide range of crimes against humanity. But yeah, the connection to Malaysia is right there. It has to do with Britain's attempts, successful attempts to decolonize Malaysia in the way that it wanted to. And just to jump in there and add to that, that so often like in Brazil also, the US was the kind of leader in kind of backing whatever the coup, but the British would still train torturers and things like that. And that's in the truth commission report when it's on the BBC. So they would often like do a sort of the colonial grandpa and then there's the 20th century double act. Yeah, that's really that dynamic I think is underappreciated. Well, some people get it if you read the Korean novels and things, but one really simple way to summarize the relationship between CIA and MI6 in the beginning of the Cold War is that the MI6 had centuries of know-how and the Americans were stupid but had loads of money. And the Americans had sort of an insecurity complex. A lot of them like went to like American versions of Eaton. They went to like wannabe Eaton's in New England, right? And they really looked up to MI6 and MI6 would often, especially in the case of Iran, Britain, not just MI6, but Britain would push America to act in a certain way knowing, well, they have the guns and the money to do it. Yeah, like in my book, I focus more on the US for sure because I think that's the hegemon and that's the country that I'm publishing the book in, but Britain is really often there, if not with like the huge pile of cash with the know-how and the training and the strategizing and definitely in the case of Indonesia, like with the prestige media. So the BBC was really important in reproducing the lies that led to the mass murder in 1965. Sush, I'm seeing some good questions that for you, have you seen any of these you wanna answer? Yeah, I want to answer this one actually, then the two, okay, I'll answer this one first. I don't agree with the following, perhaps both of us can answer this. I don't agree with the following and the ends don't justify the means, but was there a real and valid fear as to what the communists would do with the communists if they took over lead to as many casualties and deaths means something needed to happen in Indonesia and Brazil. Does the thinking apply then and still remain today? Now, this really completely disagree with this kind of thinking, of course, because you can use any ideology to mass murder if you want. There is a nationalism, communism, capitalism has killed so many people even without we realize it, just by paying cheap labors and legally, yeah, and that's the danger of capitalism in a way, they do it legally and we don't know how many victims there are. We can't even be bothered counting because all they do seems legal, but people have been starving, people have been poisoned by factories and it's been happening, it's still happening all over the world and it's legal, it is legal. It's legal, genocide, legal mass murder under capitalism. Now back to communism, you can murder with what? With religion, you can use religion as well, you can use anything and please remember what happened in Indonesia? I saw it not just between communism, not just between East and West, the CIA, the American big companies, actually what they wanted was Papua as well, yeah, because Papua was really rich, it's the money actually, the wealth in Papua that they wanted. So they didn't really care actually, if communism was there as long as they sided with them, if communism gave Papua to them then they would say, oh yeah, Popu communism was fine. And in Indonesia they like to say, oh, look at what happened in Russia, China and interestingly, they also mentioned Cambodia, Cambodia, Pol Pot, they say, look at what happened to Pol Pot and actually it's the other way around because Pol Pot and again, I don't justify this. So after Pol Pot heard what happened in Indonesia in 1965 was one of the reasons in a way that made him carry out the genocide of non-communist people in Cambodia. I don't justify this, but you can see here, it's actually the other way around, yeah, with genocide in Indonesia, we can say that the genocide in Indonesia had a role in pushing Pol Pot to do the genocide in Cambodia, yeah. So, yeah, and the communist party in Indonesia at that time, they were actually, they had this approach of non-violent, of being cooperative with the government. So they had no plan of doing the coup at all. This kind of excuse only came up later when they started to do the mass murder and they started doing the propaganda and saying, if we don't kill, then we will be killed, yeah. That's what happened then. Yeah. Maybe Vincent can add something. Yeah, I'd love to. I think that you did a great job. I think this is, the question is like, based on poor assumptions, but it's also really important to answer it because like those assumptions are almost built into the way we understand the world. And so I always think it's good to answer this question. I'm grateful someone asked it. So, two parts. One, as Suchuan said, anybody can justify whatever they want by saying, if we didn't do that, they were gonna do something worse, right? Like, again, the Nazis said this, anyone's gonna, anybody that is going, that has done horrible atrocities, you can bet if you look, they told themselves or told everyone else, oh, we had to do this or something else was going to happen. If the speculative theoretical assertion that crimes against humanity are always justified or justified when I think that someone else might do them, then we're gonna have a lot of crimes against humanity on planet Earth. But just historically, and looking at the case of the Indonesia Communist Party and the regional context and the global context, there's very little reason to believe that a ultimately successful takeover of the country by the Indonesian Communist Party would have ever led to something like this. I mean, so if you look at the case, if you look at what the Communist Party was in Indonesia, what its ideology was, and even the cases that of much more hard line parties taking over, you just didn't get anything much like what Sohar ended up doing. So first of all, they were for a very long time an unarmed moderate party that just wanted to participate in parliamentary democracy. So I think the question, the real question is not to ask is not, what happens if in 1965, after all these simmering pressures explode, what if one side wins? I think the right question to ask is, what happens if you allow throughout the 1950s parliamentary democracy to exist as it was intended and just allow the Indonesian Communist Party to do pretty well, but to not control everything? That was what was unacceptable to the United States. And that was what led us down the path to violent conflict in 1965. But even if you could somehow imagine the PKI coming out of 65 with full hegemony and doing like a communist revolution, two things, one, their ideology was that socialism should be implemented 40 to 50 years later. They believed that they believed they were sort of an old school Marxist party and that they believed that their job was to help in the establishment of capitalism alongside the national bourgeoisie. And then later transition to socialism, they said in the year 2000, more or less. But then if we look at just like, look over at Vietnam in Cambodia, the country's, geographically and temporally situated in proximity Indonesia. Vietnam, after a 30, Vietnam, the communist party of Vietnam was definitely radicalized by 30 years of war with France and then the United States. They did not in 1975 take over with some kind of a purge of a million people. It was, you know, things were not great in Vietnam from 1975 to 1979, but they certainly like that it did not happen there. And this was a much more militarized party. And number two, the case of Cambodia is really instructive because not only, as Suchin said, Cambodia radicalized because they were so afraid of what had happened in Indonesia. The horrible things that took place under the Khmer Rouge in Pol Pot were stopped by the Vietnamese Communist Party. And then in 1979, when the Vietnamese Communist Party or the Vietnam as the new country Vietnam invaded Cambodia to overthrow Pol Pot, stop, liberate Cambodians from the killing fields, tell the world about what was happening in Cambodia. What did the United States do? They didn't turn around and say, oh, that's great. We are opposed to mass murder committed by the left. No, they encouraged the China to invade Vietnam as punishment for getting involved in Cambodia. And then the United States was explicitly backing and keeping alive the Khmer Rouge from 1979 to the end of the Cold War. So the United States took the side of the Khmer Rouge, despite the fact that they had done by far the worst thing that a puttively left-wing movement had done in Southeast Asia. And even then, what Suharto did in East Timor was worse than what can happen in Pol Pot. So Suharto, when he took over East Timor using anti-communism as justification, he killed a larger percentage of people that died under Pol Pot, got the big, I think they called it the big wink, but got the full backing if not explicit, certainly concrete from the United States and Australia to do that. So the idea that something worse would have happened than this, if the moderate unarmed communist party that had been winning elections for 15 years had been able to take over, it's just not borne out by facts. And even if it were, and I think it really isn't, even if it were, that wouldn't justify mass murder because then everybody gets to kill everyone anytime they think that the bad guys are getting close to power. Yeah. Yeah, do you wanna add anything, Yara? Well, I was just gonna add, I suppose thinking about the Brazilian context, that I think, yeah, a lot of people were and are scared of communism, like my granddad, who is like, he actually turned 100 this year. And he's, yeah, he's a well-off white Brazilian in Sao Paulo, of course he's scared of communism. And I think it's important to, you can sometimes accept that people's fear is real, but still criticize it and still have a kind of materialist analysis of it. It's just class interests. And particularly in the Brazilian context, I think it's important to remember that Brazil has like Vincent points out in his book, a kind of innate anti-communist class or feeling because it's a settler colony. And we can certainly link it to that, right? It's a colony that was based in genocide of indigenous people, like forced migration slavery of, up to five million African people and was still like a slave stay until like almost the 10th of the 20th century. So it's important to, you might well meet people who are genuinely anti-communist and scared, but it's important. That doesn't make it okay for them to violently act on those fears. Yeah. And actually fear is quite effective in this case here to control people. I just saw one question which may be interesting for all of us actually. This one, can you talk a bit about the necessary it's up there? Can you talk a bit about the necessary interplay between official killers and unofficial killers, the paramilitary Pemude Pancesila organized crime. What I found particularly fascinating about the Jakarta method was the recurrence of the officials relying on the unofficial actors for the actual killing, not just in Indonesia, but in other instances of leftist mass killings as well. Why does this collusion recur in these many instances? And how do the different groups benefit from this collusion? Do you wanna answer that first Vincent? Yeah, I'm glad you saw that one because I wanna do that one as well. So this is an important dynamic in Indonesia but also across the Cold War, right? So like in Indonesia, the way that the murders were actually carried out varied from area to area. That question talks about Pemude Pancesila which is probably he got her here. She got from active killing because in Sumatra that was quite important. But in other parts of Indonesia, it was different. It was different groups in Bali, it was different groups in central Java. But as a really general rule, what you would say is that it wasn't the soldiers that were plunging the knife into the flesh or throwing people into rivers. It was often local, the word translates just as sort of assassins that they would make use of people that they kind of pressured into doing this or that they kind of thought would be up for doing it or that they could threaten into doing. And there's some chilling accounts that even the people that were up for participating in this had to like dead in their senses with alcohol afterwards even in very Muslim organizations. And then of course in Central America, South America, we know all about death squads, right? People that like wanna go further above and beyond what the military is doing but with the active support of the military. So like one of the most famous is like the AAA in Argentina which is formed actually before the really bad dictatorship, the Delhi dictatorship is formed. And this is an important dynamic, I think for two reasons. Again, both these reasons are speculative, but one, I think it works, right? I think it's effective to have another group which is acting a little bit sub-officially that has a little bit more that gives the officials a little bit more ability to plausibly deny that this is going on. And you get some real radicals or sort of kind of the people that you wouldn't even want in your military because they're really like the real sick people, you know, the people that are really like willing to do it. And what I found a lot of, in my research, a lot of the people that even like celebrated the arrival of violence when it got there, they didn't like what they had unleashed. Like it's really hard for people to do this. So to sort of outsource it to the most desperate and depraved parts of society, I think like is effective. And yeah, I guess what's the second one is that we do see the reproduction. And this is a point that I try to make in my book all the time. It's not just the left in the communists that we're an international movement. We do see the reproduction of tactics from country to country. Things that kind of worked here are imported over here and death squads are trained and formed by people that have expertise from this part of the world. And I outlined the Jakarta method like John Russo, the historian, believes that disappearances were first used in Asia in 1965 and 66. And then Greg Rand in the historian in Latin America believes that the exact same tactic was used in 1966 in Guatemala and US officials like moved exactly from that region to the other region at that time. So it strongly suggested that maybe they brought over this tactic with them. So I think that you see this proliferate for two reasons, one, it works and two, because officials, including US officials or anti-communist international organizations bring them from country to country and sort of copy what's been effective, horribly effective elsewhere. Yeah, I definitely agree with you. And by involving the paramilitary in this case, by involving the people, the so-called civilian, the paramilitary, in a way they're civilians, right? In a way, they make this stigmatized people, the people that they're aiming as the enemy of the people, yeah? So the communists become the enemy of the people. So it's not between the military or Fonsen Suharto against the communists. No, it's communist against the people and it works because when you involve the civilians, then in a way, everyone is involved. Everyone is either against or not, yeah? So either you are the communists or you are the ones either murdering or implicated in the murder of the communists. So this can really defy the society and that's why this can sustain the stigma, it's very effective. And this was used also by Hitler. You know, when Kristallnacht, I don't know whether you've ever heard of it, Kristallnacht when they were like a group of people attacking the Jewish shops and actually there were just Hitler's people pretending to be civilians and that happened in Indonesia. Some military pretended to be civilians and then they involve civilians and then more and more civilians were involved and in the end, the paramilitary had so much power and in the end you create a society where it's, where it is the communists or against the communists, not non-communists, but against the communists. So this is the very effective strategy for me. Yeah, and I'll jump in real quickly to say that certain of the, some of the death squads in Indonesia were inspired by Hitler. So the armed wing of Anu, the Muslim organization that helps carry out a lot of the killings in central Java was named Bansur, but like the leader said that he liked that it rhymed with Bansur because he'd been reading Mein Kampf and he liked the way that the Germans had dealt with the communists. So again, like this is all people that you learn from each other. Just these tactics are reproduced over and over. I saw a question. I don't know if Suchen you want to take this one. Can you please discuss the role of the arts, visual, art, music, theater, literature and remembering 65 and empowering survivors? I thought this might be one for you. Yes, a lot, okay. So that's why arts is very important. Yeah, and in Indonesia it's quite funny because if people are doing arts, they say, my God, what are you doing? You're doing something useless. Yeah, so anything in relation to arts people will just look down on them. Yeah, they just say, oh, you know, literature, whatever, arts, not important. Engineering, yes, that's important. But actually during the 1965, a lot of artists were imprisoned. So there was a group of artists called Lekra that was linked to the Indonesian Communist Party. And a lot of the artists were imprisoned and even murdered and then they replaced these artists. Before then actually, there was already a conflict between the so-called left-wing artists and the ones who opposed to this left-wing artists. And the non-left-wing artists wrote a letter criticizing the left-wing artists and this group was actually in the end banned by Sukarno. Okay, so Sukarno was quite authoritarian as well at that time. And then after 1965, a lot of these left-wing artists were murdered in prison. And then there was a group of the new artists who did not touch anything about socialism and Marxism. And even if they touch anything about socialism and Marxism, they stigmatize this, yeah, communism, socialism, what is Leninism, they're the same. Ethics and they're the same in Indonesia. They're the same and the bad, they're evil. And most of the writings state this and also the paintings, the arts basically, yeah. And what was quite interesting was during the new order, abstract paintings and abstract poems were really popular. Why? Because when you say something so abstract, you don't really know sometimes who you criticize, right? So abstract that it's just up there. Whereas if you criticize the government, then you have to be somehow more kind of real, yeah. And that's why the abstract painting, the abstract poems about love, about some philosophical ideas of discussing like existentialism, something like that, without touching, you know, so they talk about existentialism, but without touching Marxism or anything like that. So for instance, this is the funny thing. Animal Farm, by, oh, who's the author of Animal Farm? George Orwell, yeah. Orwell, Orwell was quite left wing, yeah. But suddenly they could pick Animal Farm that criticizes communism. And then that's it. They translated this Animal Farm in Indonesia and it's such a huge number. And actually I had to read it as well, but they never mentioned 1984 or any other writings of George Orwell. So that's what they did. Yeah, I think it's, sorry, just to jump in, I have to mention that Animal Farm was actually translated and distributed in Indonesia by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was the front organization set up by the CIA that like if you just want to Google, if you can just Google Congress for Cultural Freedom, they warped the 20th century art world in ways that are still really hard to comprehend. But yeah, they were the ones that pumped Animal Farm throughout Indonesia. And you know, it's really interesting for you to say that they made sure to get that one out there, but not Orwell's other works. That's really interesting. Yeah, and the people who were kind of like opposed to the left-wing writers and whatever, they become quite famous. And one of them is, you know, one of the most famous author in Surabha in my city, his name is Buddhidharma. And at one point when we discuss Pramudya Anandato, he just said, oh, but he's a communist, just like that. Yeah. So they're still really against the so-called left-wing authors. These authors have been persecuted, but they still stigmatize them. It's just unbelievable sometimes. Yeah, I mean, the way Animal Farm is deployed in the UK and US is also really funny. I wanted to, before we finish, I wanted to end, I picked this question very selfishly because I relate to it, but also because I guess I wanted to end maybe in like a forward-facing hopeful point as well, like no. So this question, for Indonesians in their 20s like me, because of what Sochen described before as the internalized fear and with limited access to discussions around the event and limited history education, the 1965 stories are just unreachable for most of us. Sad that I just recently found out that my grandfather was labeled as C2, a member of organizations that align vision with the PKI after 1965 and received a lot of discrimination afterwards. So thank you for sharing that with us. And then it goes on, what I want to say is, alternative sources about the event and what actually happened like your works are extremely important for us. My question, what do you think we can do to continue reproducing alternative narratives about 1965 to counter the narrative that's strongly made up by authority, especially targeting the young generation, say third and fourth generation to be involved in this conversation? So I'll answer really quickly and like. You can do it first, you can answer. I'll answer glibly and selfishly and then I'll give Sochen the bigger answer. You know, like so poor with Margin Keery, Margin Keery is doing over the next like months, like they're being very brave and taking a real risk and putting out Sochen's book and hopefully mine as well. But like they're doing it and like it's tough now with, for the, it's tough for the Indonesian military now and I can sense that they know this, that it's tough with sort of documents being dumped by the US government and like Wikipedia telling the truth and like these works like ours being summarized and reproduced in the major US media, it's tough for them to really insist that it's, that their version is right. So to just, you know, insist that these aren't even alternative sources, that this is the real, you know, it's the mainstream truth. It's based on really hard stuff and don't, you know, help Margin Keery to and anybody else that's sort of struggling in a more personal way than I am to establish that, no, this is actually the real story, not the counter story. But Sochen, you're a lot closer to this struggle. So what would you say? I said that spread the word, yeah. Like what you said, spread the word and ask them to think logically because, you know, the excuse is, oh, you know, we don't have facility, we don't know the truth, whereas the history, the government, the new order version of history is everywhere. So that's the excuse is, but if you just think logically the version of the history is actually so illogical. Yeah, so for instance, Sukano, there was a coup against Sukano and then Suharto was the one, you know, trying to save the country from the coup. But then why Suharto became the president, not Sukano, you know, if there's a coup against Sukano by the communist party, then Sukano had to keep being the president, right? So again, you know, it just, that doesn't make sense. Secondly, if the Indonesian communist party was about to carry out the coup, then they would have been ready with weapons, right? And you must remember that the Indonesian communist party at that time was the third largest in the world outside of China and Russia. The members were about over three millions and there were the majority as well, yeah, political party and if they were ready with the coup, would there be mass killing and mass imprisoning like that easily? No, there would be civil war, a bloody and long civil war. So it was impossible. So just by thinking logically, the history is impossible, it just, it doesn't make sense. And if you wanna go further, if you wanna go to the museum and check about the new order version of history that states that the generals were mutilated by Gurwani women, by the left wing women and that their eyeballs were plucked by the left wing women, you should go to the museum there, see the photos of the generals corpses and you'll see that the eyeballs are intact on the photo, yeah? And you see there's still wearing trousers, no blood there on the penis or anything, no. So, yeah, I mean, after some, for God's sake, if someone has been, you know, if someone's penis has been mutilated, there should be blood somewhere, yeah? At least you could see some blood on the trousers or anything, no blood at all on the trousers. So you can just think logically and you'll know that this version of history is stupid. And, you know, just spread the word, please, spread the word that this is just, this just doesn't make sense. Yeah, do you wanna add anything? Well, I guess we're thinking of wrapping up now. So just say thank you to everyone who's come and for your questions and your comments and we can't get through all the questions, unfortunately. And I guess to say that I found it very powerful reading both your books, I guess because, Su-Chen, like your story, like my mum lived during the dictatorship in Brazil and resisted it, but also doesn't really talk to me about it. And then Vincent, part of the Brazil bit of your book, we started what's happening about. So yeah, I found it very powerful. And I think that like the last person who asked a question said, there is a generation of young people who are like out here talking about this, talking about the origins a long time ago and what's happened in the 20th century and doing all kinds of storytelling from like YouTube videos to memes to novels. So yeah, I guess I'm hopeful. And yeah, thank you everybody. Yeah, I'll just say thank you so much for anybody that took the time to come to this or took the time to read either of our books or the three of our books or feel like doing some of the future. But yeah, just really, I'm really humbled and grateful for anybody's interest in all this work. Yeah, and if you're in Indonesia doing activism, like you can at Vincent and Sochan and they'll share it and get out there as well. All right, thank you so much then.