The US’ Violent, Cookbook-Inspired Coup
Back to Indonesia we go
TGIThursday, subscribers!
Once more, we head back to Indonesia: this time to explore the impact of the “Berkeley Mafia” in shaping the country’s economy today. I should warn you, my Italian accent is... flavorful:
You can also watch on Instagram here. And ICYMI here’s our last episode on the 1953 US-led coup in Iran.
This week’s story comes from The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and The Jarkarta Method by Vincent Bevins. I recommend a stiff whiskey for containing your rage while reading the former, and several bottles of red for drowning your sorrows after perusing the latter.
Next time on Skipped History…
We’ll investigate how after US soldiers returned home from Vietnam, they continued to fight communists in places like Greensboro, North Carolina. It is a titillating tale that helps explain the rise of the alt-right.
One bit of skipped history that I didn’t mention this week? How the 1965 coup in Indonesia ties to the “gentlemen’s coup” in Brazil in 1964. Next week, I’ll tell divine paying subscribers how coup-mongers in both countries learned from each other, and not for the better.
If you’re keen on that kind of info, sign up below! Otherwise, see you in two weeks on our journey to Greensboro.
Cheers,
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the 1965 military coup in Indonesia. I read about it in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.
To start, I’d like to discuss the Berkeley Mafia, and I don’t mean the notorious goon squad who’ll roast you on Twitter if they catch you sipping an unfair trade macchiato. No, I mean a group of Indonesians who studied at the University of Berkeley in the 50s and who became known as the Berkeley Mafia. While most of the curriculum at the time focused on how to recycle and ostracize family members who use styrofoam—what is wrong with you?! (seriously)—at the time, Berkeley also had a conservative, pro-business economics department that instructed the young mafia members. Afterward, they returned home to build a similar-styled economics department at the University of Indonesia, where they began to draft economic “contingency plans” just in case Indonesia’s president, Sukarno, happened to lose his grip on power. And you’ll never believe this, but with the CIA’s help, Sukarno’s government did suddenly fall in 1965, and the Berkeley Mafia’s “contingency plans” laid an economic blueprint for Indonesia still in place to this day.
To see what I mean, and I should warn you this is a violent story, let’s rewind to 1958 when as we explored in the first episode of Skipped History this season, the Dulles Brothers led the US’ first effort to overthrow Sukarno. Their plan, which included equipping the Indonesian military in the hopes that it would turn against Sukarno, didn’t work out so well. However, thanks to the JFK and LBJ administrations’ continued financial support, the Indonesian military emerged as a potent political force that acted as a right-wing counterbalance to Sukarno, whom US officials detested for his tolerance of Indonesia’s communist party, called the PKI.
What did the US government have against the PKI? Well, the PKI had a lot of concerning political goals. For example, it was committed to nonviolence, union organization, women’s rights, and had a stated goal of maybe “by the end of the century”—which is to say on the same timeline as New York State’s for completing construction on the bridge behind me.
Of course, there was another reason US officials remained eager to topple Sukarno: after surviving the events of 1958, he reduced the power of multinational corporations by, for example, rewriting the country’s oil regulations to make them more favorable to Indonesians. In response, LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who by the way also studied at Berkeley, led a push to curtail foreign aid to Indonesia, which soon sent Indonesia’s economy into a tailspin. Sukarno replied that US officials wanted to attach political demands to their generosity, then, as he said, “Go to hell with your aid!” which didn’t exactly improve his standing with the US government. Indeed, declassified documents show that the CIA received high-level directions to “liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities.”
That opportunity came in October 1965, when an Indonesian general named Suharto began the process of seizing power and eradicating the Indonesian left. At the time, most Indonesians hadn’t heard of Suharto, a taciturn 44-year-old army general, but the CIA had, describing him in a secret cable in 1964 as one of the generals most “friendly” to US interests. Their assessment proved correct: when provided with “shooting lists” by the CIA, Suharto sent out his soldiers to kill four to five thousand members of the PKI. Meanwhile, the US Embassy received regular reports on the troops’ progress, with US Ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green declaring his “increasing respect for [the army’s] determination and organization in carrying out this crucial assignment.” And as another member of the US Embassy at the time added, the army “probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.” Um, that’s not? What percentage bad is it, and what accounts for it being under 100% bad? Did you get a free Google Home? Did they put Friends back on Netflix? Was Jesus reincarnated, and it turns out he’s actually just Javier Bardem as I suspected all along? Because even with all of those things, that’s still 100% bad!
So Sukarno excelled at eradicating the left, but he had no idea what to do about Indonesia’s deteriorating economy. Enter the Berkeley Mafia, who, surprise, surprise, had worked with the military in drafting their contingency plans and had developed enormous sway over Suharto. According to one member of the Berkeley Mafia, they presented Sukarno with “a cookbook of recipes for dealing with Indonesia’s serious economic problems,’” which included classics like business-privatizatione-ai-Frutti-di-Mare and let-other-countries-steal-our-resources scallopine. According to Fortune Magazine, the Berkeley Mafia even recorded audiotapes of economics lessons for Suharto to listen to at home, which went something like this. [video]. Anyway, by March 10th, 1966, the army was firmly in control of Indonesia, and Sukarno fled the country. Within days, Suharto arrested Sukarno’s remaining cabinet members and replaced them with members of the Berkeley Mafia, who soon passed laws allowing foreign companies to own 100% of Indonesia’s oil and mineral wealth. Companies based in the US have controlled and operated Indonesia’s largest oil wells and gold mines ever since.
In March 1966, Suharto also banned the PKI—that is what was left of them, and this is where things get really violent. Dating back to October when the coup began, there’d been a steady stream of politically motivated killings. In fact, after the Indonesian military completed the CIA’s “shooting lists, they trained religious students to “sweep” the countryside of communists. Those sweeps led to the deaths of an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,0000 people, virtually none of them guilty of any crime, other than being on the wrong side of a CIA-backed coup. A tribunal later assembled in the Netherlands found the Indonesian military guilty of a litany of war crimes, all carried out to “prop up a violent, dictatorial regime” with the assistance of the “US, UK, and Australia.”
And as gruesome, tragic, and unfathomable as these events are from a humanitarian perspective, from the CIA’s perspective, the coup was a success. The fact that the strategy had entrenched US business interests and a radical, anti-communist regime, “meant it would be repeated again and again,” as a high-ranking CIA official stated. And he was right: over the ensuing decades, US-backed anti-communist extermination programs occurred all over the world, some of which maybe we’ll explore in future episodes if I’m not too busy authoring a cookbook called The Joy of Duping People into Thinking Skipped History is a Comedy Show.
But, in sum, hundreds of millions of people live in countries shaped by bloody events that can all be traced, as the same CIA agent said, “to the way Suharto came to power.” And that includes the US, because eventually citizens participating in these horrific events abroad have to come home, and their radical anti-communist beliefs don’t just fade away.
Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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