As Indonesia prepares to release a new official national history, an Australian historian’s account of the 1965–66 mass killings threatens to reopen a long-suppressed debate about power, violence, and memory.

Indonesia’s reputation for tolerance is about to be tested by an Australian academic. Queensland historian Greg Poulgrain says he isn’t seeking fame or notoriety, just “telling the truth”, but fears his name will be trashed and research shredded. That’s if the Indonesian government responds furiously to a foreigner challenging the official account of frenzied killings as “one of the darkest turning points in Indonesia’s modern history.”

The Indonesian government-approved version of the past six decades has a surprise Moscow-engineered Communist plot to take over the Republic. This was thwarted by the military and courageous General Soeharto, who was then rewarded with the presidency, a position he held for 32 years.

The US Central Intelligence Agency claimed: “The (1965-66 anti-Communist) massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”

In 1966, Australian PM Harold Holt callously quipped: “With 500,000 to one million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to say a reorientation has taken place.”

This month Jakarta plans to launch a new official history of the world’s fourth largest nation by population (285 million) with 88 per cent Sunni Muslims.

US and UK-educated former journalist Fadli Zon is Indonesia’s Minister for Culture. He’s ordered the writing of his nation’s history in ten volumes by more than a hundred academics pounding laptops. The section dealing with the 1965 crisis should be on the streets before 2025 departs.

Also to be released this month by Kompas, the nation’s premier publisher, is Poulgrain’s Blood and Silence – the Hidden Tragedy 1965.

His account has the plot known ahead of time by Soeharto, who launched the genocide backed by Washington. He’s just been awarded National Hero status by his former son-in-law, current President Prabowo Subianto.

Nations tack together myths about themselves that become so embedded they morph into truths and resist scrutiny.

Ours is that we’re tough Ozzies, big on mateship and giving all a go, sturdy upholders of the Anzac spirit, larrikins who value independence.

Indonesia’s pride is a nation of friendly folk, humble and helpful, accepting those who follow different gods, values and opinions.

That’s the opposite of the ghastly reality that still stains memories and stirs fears of a repeat in the land next door, once red with the blood of executions. This writer has been shown bunkers on riverbanks, allegedly mass graves from the 60s, undisturbed lest they release vengeful ghosts.

The excuse for the slaughter is that the wee folk were impetuously aroused to slitting neighbours’ and relatives’ throats because the godless Communists were about to overthrow the government and ban Islam. They didn’t need encouragement.

Poulgrain’s account doesn’t follow that script. He has US capitalists and right-wing politicians in cahoots with Muslim big business, determined to rip out the land rights movement rooted in Marxism, not through legislation and debate but violence.

During his 20-year reign, founding President Soekarno had grown close to the Partai Komunis Indonesia and away from the West and foreign corporations. His home-grown ideology was Nasakom, a contrived blend of nationalism, Islam and Communism. No reference to the military.

“Nasakom remained illusory,” writes Poulgrain. “Soekarno’s political opponents took every opportunity to label him as a Communist, though (President) John Kennedy knew this was untrue.

“This worried the PKI’s fierce rivals, the Indonesian Army, whose power waned as the PKI grew.”

The story of Asia’s largest genocide is one that few Australians know and many Indonesians don’t want told. On the last day of September 1965, Indonesians woke to news that six generals had been seized from their homes by soldiers, shot, and their bodies dumped in a well at an air force base after being castrated and their eyes gouged by naked dancing women.

This was an embellishment to pique outrage – autopsies found no traces of torture and mutilation. Nor were there any nudies.

The killers were alleged to be Communists, and the mastermind was supposed to be Moscow. Russia and China were rivals seeking the support of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, then the world’s largest Communist party outside the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

That afternoon, the public was reassured by radio that the government of the first President Soekarno was intact, though the military was in charge through a ‘Revolutionary Council’.

This was led by General Soeharto, who later became the second president and held his job for 32 years. During this time, he and his family allegedly amassed US $35 billion of public money through widespread corruption.

In 1965, he ordered the nation cleansed of the ungodly PKI, so the military broke out its armouries for the killing squads. Modern weapons weren’t always necessary, as scythes and other farm tools were used to murder villagers the Army had labelled Reds. They helpfully distributed lists of those doomed to die.

Poulgrain quotes a distressed Soekarno saying: “Those people instigating the anti-PKI massacres, namely, the Army and the CIA, ought to be brought to trial.” That didn’t happen. Soekarno’s power was waning, and Soeharto’s narrative of a spontaneous and unstoppable grass-roots uprising prevailed.

Poulgrain’s research has Soeharto well prepared ahead of the coup. “At no time during his two decades in the military (prior to 1965) did Soeharto acquire a reputation of being anti-PKI … (he was) more concerned with business than politics.”

Poulgrain claims the unarmed Communists allegedly threatening the State were in reality “landless rice-farmers (petani) whose very existence depended on getting some land to grow rice. They comprised the bulk of PKI membership … supporting legal land reform in the hope of securing a small patch to grow their own food.

“On the other side were Muslim landlords for whom land reform was seen as a threat to their livelihood, wealth and status, their very existence.

“Most petani had no land at all … 60 to 70 per cent were pursuing subsistence-based agriculture.”

Sixty years on, land reform and inequality remain weeping wounds. In the 2024 presidential election campaign, The Jakarta Post commented: “Economic inequality, notably in income and wealth ownership, should have been discussed vigorously because of its connection to economic instability and political unrest.

“(There’s a) correlation between economic inequality and slow economic income disparity; last year was the worst in the last five years … remaining among the highest in Asia.”

If this gulf isn’t bridged, sociologists fear another volcano of violence could erupt.

G30S remains a compulsory annual national holiday with all flags at half-mast, including those on residents’ gates.

There are sickening dioramas in a special Jakarta museum celebrating the horrors, influencing school kids on compulsory visits. There’s a huge statue of the six murdered generals looking formidable. Doubts voiced by outsiders get ridiculed with the easy slur that critics are Fellow Travellers.

Poulgrain’s 122-page book is based on years of research and interviews held with key participants in Indonesia and overseas for his PhD in the last century, when many witnesses were alive. He writes:

“Australia’s biggest contribution to the Army’s anti-communist campaign was broadcasting and supporting Indonesian Army propaganda.

“The Army seized control of virtually all of Indonesia’s media after the attempted coup. It began an aggressive and pervasive anti-PKI campaign, spreading dangerous disinformation to discredit and dehumanise the Communists.  The party and its principles are still banned.

“Radio Australia fed the Indonesian population an Indonesian Army-approved political narrative that Ambassador Mick Shann said ‘should [be thumped] into Indonesians’ as much as possible.”

Those words are the advice of Australia’s then leading diplomat in Jakarta.

The first edition of Blood and Silence will be in English. Whether Kompas will be forced to abandon its promise to publish in Indonesian will be a test of the nation’s tolerance for dissenting views, a pillar of democracy.