Summary On September 30, 1965, a group of officers and soldiers of uncertain provenance executed six of Indonesia’s top military generals and one lieutenant, throwing the country into chaos.

Parts of what became Indonesia had been under European colonial pressure since the early 16th century, but for a brief moment after WW2 ended, Indonesia was left without a master. Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta stepped up and issued a proclamation of independence. The Netherlands, their previous colonial rulers, were none too pleased and attempted to restore their control over the country. They ultimately failed, facing local resistance and strong pressure from the United Nations and the United States.

Sukarno would continue to lead Indonesia in an authoritarian manner for the next 20 years. Sukarno was a charismatic leader and sought to lead and include Indonesia in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). NAM was largely a reaction to the Cold War era, in which every state would face enormous pressure to support the East or the West. The countries inside NAM represented two-thirds of the nations in the UN and roughly 55% of the world population.

This went squarely against the US’s foreign policy at the time, which left very little room for ambiguity when it came to communism. Sukarno was facing difficulties at home; there were two major factions vying for influence. On the left was the PKI, a communist group, and on the right were local majority-Muslim groups that opposed the atheist ideology held by the communists. The military leaned toward the right. Afraid of losing Indonesia to the communists, the CIA directly supplied certain military leaders and made promises of support if they were ever needed. Meanwhile, the PKI was mostly nonviolent and gaining popularity in the urban centers; simultaneously, local conservative elements were growing more distrustful and fearful of their rival’s growing popularity. Sukarno was in some ways pinned between these two movements. The military, being right wing, was the more apparent threat. Sukarno began to vocally support the PKI party, in part to shore up support against the military. Tensions escalated between the two factions, and Sukarno drifted further and further left to compensate. This did not go unnoticed by Washington.

This brings us back to the attempted coup on September 30, 1965. The group claimed the executions were meant to keep the military from taking control of the government. Sukarno did not support them, and so their movement quickly fizzled out…and the military took control of the government. Major General Suharto quickly capitalized on the situation and seized control of the government. Suharto then mythologized the execution of the top generals, turning it into a rallying cry for anti-PKI forces across the country. A political purge ensued, in which any person related to the PKI or said to be related to the PKI was rounded up and executed. The purge started at the top, with civilian and military leadership. Leaders suspected of having PKI sympathies were removed, with some being summarily executed. The massacres started in October. The participants varied from place to place but were always encouraged by the army and leadership. By the time the dust settled, the killings had reached somewhere between five hundred thousand and one million. Most of these victims would turn out to be middle-to-low-income civilians who had committed no crime other than having ties, no matter how small, to the PKI party.

The reaction from Western diplomats was appalling. They viewed the killings as a sort of necessary cleansing of the dangerous ideology of communism. The killings ended up being largely ignored by the West and papered over. To this day, the Indonesian state has not fully reckoned with the scale of the killings, and no formal apology has been issued.

Bevins goes on to make the case that Washington viewed this whole operation as a success and that Indonesia became a model for anticommunist violence elsewhere. In Latin America and Africa, the US would do what it could to topple pro-communist leadership, no matter the consequences.

Thoughts

As an interesting bit of trivia, Obama lived in Indonesia for several years as a child shortly after these massacres occurred. His Indonesian stepfather never talked about them. After reading this book, I don’t blame him.

In 2026, it is difficult to conjure up the fear that so permeated the West at the specter of communism. Now, with hindsight, we can see many threats were imagined or exaggerated; it often feels as if we were only really fighting ourselves. This, of course, is not true. The USSR and China were, in fact, deeply interested in controlling the leadership of countries to bring them under the influence of the East. Yet this serves as cold comfort when one looks back at what was done to combat this influence. The tacit support of the US State Department for these killings has to hit the top ten list of foreign policy disasters. There were a few voices, like Robert Kennedy, who protested against these killings, but for the most part they were accepted as the cost of doing business.

Bevins’s central theory, that Indonesia became a model for later anticommunist violence across Latin America and Africa, is persuasive but a little too neat. “Jakarta” did become a threat used by far-right movements, but the causal chain behind that transmission is not always as clear as the framing implies. In Indonesia, anticommunism was not simply imported by the CIA. The PKI’s rise, land-reform agitation, secular revolutionary politics, and Sukarno’s leftward drift threatened existing military, religious, and local power structures. If the goal is to criticize US foreign policy, it makes sense to focus on Washington’s choices. But if the goal is to understand how political movements develop, the local reaction has to be weighted properly too. The US encouraged and exploited these forces, and should be held accountable for doing so, but the reaction itself had deep local roots.

This episode is just one of many in the ’60s and ’70s where the mandate to beat communism at all costs arguably created conditions that were as bad as, or worse than, those that the US was ostensibly trying to avoid. Bevins vividly tells this story that is truly undercovered, I had no idea this had happened until this book came on my radar.