Book Review: Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966
| DOI | 10.1177/0020881719857888 |
| Author | Anirban Chatterjee |
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian
Massacres, 1965–1966 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018),
456 pp., US$35.00. ISBN: 978-0-691-16138-9 (Hardcover).
Geoffrey Robinson, a historian, in his latest book, seeks to unpack the hitherto
least investigated events of modern Indonesian history. The author undertakes a
painstaking research to account for the most organized and gruesome anti-left
purge that took place in 1965–1966, in which half a million communists and their
sympathizers/supporters were killed, and another million were detained. The
book repudiates the prevailing myths about the mass violence, which were based
on socio-cultural and religious fissures in an ethnically diverse Indonesian state.
Instead, the author argues, the mass killings were a consequence of a smear cam-
paign by the Indonesian army to annihilate the members of the Communist Party
‘down to the very roots’. The author attempts to locate these events in the context
of Cold War by highlighting the conniving role of Western powers, like the USA
and Britain in facilitating these mass killings. As against the conventional
approaches, the book aims to situate the events in Indonesia in a comparative
historical perspective. It deals with and contributes to the theoretical propositions
revolving around the legacies and dynamics of mass killing, genocide and incar-
ceration, and their ramifications for society. The book throws new light on an
important episode in modern Indonesian history by meticulously researching the
myriad aspects of the killings.
It may be interesting for those who are not well acquainted with this particular
episode in Indonesian history, as to what actually triggered the brutal crackdown
on the Left. Although, there are competing interpretations about the abortive coup
of 1 October 1965, in which six senior Indonesian army officers were allegedly
killed by junior army officers, who called themselves the Thirtieth of September
Movement. The Indonesian army led by General Suharto, who became the second
president after Sukarno in 1966, as well as various right-wing and militia groups
were quick to blame the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) for orchestrating the
coup with Chinese support in a bid to take over the state. The army responded
with what Robinson calls an ‘awful juggernaut of arbitrary detention, interroga-
tion, torture, mass killing, and political exile’, to systematically obliterate the
communists and their supporters. However, the evidence now available in the
public domain indicates that General Suharto masterminded the coup by murdering
International Studies
56(4) 308–316, 2019
2019 Jawaharlal Nehru University
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DOI: 10.1177/0020881719857888
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