Killings and purges of Communists in Indonesia in 1965

To Western governments, the killings and purges were seen as victory over communism at the height of the Cold War. Western governments and much of the West's media preferred Suharto and the "New Order" to the PKI and the increasingly leftist "Old Order".^[129] The British ambassador, Andrew Gilchrist, wrote to London: "I never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change."^[130] News of the massacre was carefully controlled by Western intelligence agencies. Journalists, prevented from entering Indonesia, relied on the official statements from Western embassies. The British embassy in Jakarta advised intelligence headquarters in Singapore on how the news should be presented: "Suitable propaganda themes might be: PKI brutality in murdering Generals, ... PKI subverting Indonesia as agents of foreign Communists. ... British participation should be carefully concealed."^[131]

One of the most powerful pictures I've ever seen.

A headline in U.S. News & World Report read: "Indonesia: Hope... where there was once none".^[132] Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt commented in The New York Times, "With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place."^{[133][3]: 177} The nationalist oilman H. L. Hunt proclaimed Indonesia the sole bright spot for the United States in the Cold War and called the ouster of Sukarno the "greatest victory for freedom since the last decisive battle of World War II."^[10]: 244 Time described the suppression of the PKI as "The West's best news for years in Asia,"^[134] and praised Suharto's regime as "scrupulously constitutional."^[135] "It was a triumph for Western propaganda," Robert Challis, a BBC reporter in the area, later reflected.^[135] Many Western media reports repeated the Indonesian Army's line by downplaying its responsibility for and the rational, organised nature of the mass killing. They emphasised the role of civilians instead, invoking the orientalist stereotype of Indonesians as primitive and violent. A New York Times journalist wrote an article titled "When a Nation Runs Amok" explaining that the killings were hardly surprising since they occurred in "violent Asia, where life is cheap."^[136]

^{Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366#Religious_and_ethnic_factors}