Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 5: Human Rights: The Pragmatic Criterion Segment 8/9
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Fortunately, relief was soon on its way. A week later, under the heading "Indonesia 1965: Year of U.S. Irrelevance," Rosenfeld wrote that he had received in the mail an "independent account" by a historian "without political bias" -- that is, one who could assure him that the state he loves had done no wrong. This antidote was "full of delights and surprises," concluding that the US had no responsibility for the deaths or the overthrow of Sukarno. It "clears Americans of the damaging lingering suspicion of responsibility for the Indonesian coup and massacre," Rosenfeld concludes happily: "For me, the question of the American role in Indonesia is closed."23

How easy is the life of the true believer.

The article that closed the books, to Rosenfeld's immense relief, was the Brands study reviewed earlier. That Brands is an "independent" commentator "without political bias" is demonstrated throughout: The US war in Vietnam was an attempt "to rescue South Vietnam"; the information reaching Washington that "The army has virtually destroyed the PKI" in a huge massacre was "good news"; "the most serious deficiency of covert warfare" is "its inevitable tendency to poison the well of public opinion," that is, to tar the US with "bum raps" elsewhere; etc. Much more significant are the "delights and surprises" that put any lingering doubts to rest. Since the study closes all questions for good, we may now rest easy in the knowledge that Washington did all it could to encourage the greatest massacre since the days of Hitler and Stalin, welcomed the outcome with enthusiasm, and immediately turned to the task of supporting Suharto's aptly named "New Order." Thankfully, there is nothing to trouble the liberal conscience.

One interesting non-reaction to the Kadane report appeared in the lead article in the New York Review of Books by Senator Daniel Moynihan. He fears that "we are poisoning the wells of our historical memory," suppressing unpleasant features of our past. He contrasts these failures with the "extraordinary period of exhuming the worst crimes of its hideous history" now underway in the Soviet Union. Of course, "the United States has no such history. To the contrary." Our history is quite pure. There are no crimes to "exhume" against the indigenous population or Africans in the 70 years following our revolution, or against Filipinos, Central Americans, Indochinese, and others later on. Still, even we are not perfect: "not everything we have done in this country has been done in the open," Moynihan observes, though "not everything could be. Or should have been." But we conceal too much, the gravest crime of our history.24

It is hard to believe that as he was writing these words, the Senator did not have the recent revelations about Indonesia in mind. He, after all, has a special personal relation to Indonesian atrocities. He was UN Ambassador at the time of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and takes pride, in his memoirs, in having forestalled any international reaction to the aggression and massacre. "The United States wished things to turn out as they did," he writes, "and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." Moynihan was well aware of how things turned out, noting that within a few weeks some 60,000 people had been killed, "10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Thus he took credit for achievements that he compares to those of the Nazis. And he is surely familiar with the subsequent US government role in escalating the slaughter, and the contribution of the media and political class in concealing it. But the newly released information about the US role in mass slaughter did not stir his historical memory, or suggest some reflections on our practices, apart from our single blemish: insufficient candor.

Moynihan's successes at the UN have entered history in the conventional manner. Measures taken against Iraq and Libya "show again how the collapse of Communism has given the Security Council the cohesion needed to enforce its orders," Times UN correspondent Paul Lewis explains in a front-page story: "That was impossible in earlier cases like...Indonesia's annexation of East Timor."25

There was also a flicker of concern about Indonesia after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. It was hard not to notice the similarity to Indonesia's (vastly more murderous) aggression and annexation. A decade earlier, when glimmerings of what had happened finally began to break through, there had been occasional notice of the comparison between Suharto's exploits in Timor and the simultaneous Pol Pot slaughters. As in 1990, the US and its allies were charged at most with "ignoring" Indonesian atrocities. The truth was well concealed throughout: Indonesia was given critical military and diplomatic support for its monstrous war crimes; and crucially, unlike the case of Pol Pot and Saddam, these could readily have been halted, simply by withdrawal of Western aid and breaking the silence.

Ingenious efforts have been made to explain away the radically different response to Suharto, on the one hand, and Pol Pot and Saddam, on the other, and to avoid the obvious explanation in terms of interest, which of course covers a vastly wider range. William Shawcross offered a "more structurally serious explanation" for the Timor-Cambodia case: "a comparative lack of sources" and lack of access to refugees, Lisbon and Australia being so inaccessible in comparison with the Thai-Cambodian border. Gérard Chaliand dismissed France's active support for the Indonesian slaughter in the midst of a great show of anguish about Pol Pot on grounds that the Timorese are "geographically and historically marginal." The difference between Kuwait and Timor, according to Fred Halliday, is that Kuwait "has been up and running as an independent state since 1961"; to evaluate the proposal, recall that the US prevented the UN from interfering with Israel's invasion of Lebanon or following through on its condemnation of Israel's (virtual) annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and that, unlike Suharto in Timor, Saddam had offered to withdraw from Kuwait, how seriously we do not know, since the US rejected the offers instantly out of fear that they might "defuse the crisis." A common stance is that "American influence on [Indonesia's decision to invade] may easily be exaggerated," though the US "averted its eyes from East Timor" and "could have done far more than it did to distance itself from the carnage" (James Fallows). The fault, then, is failure to act, not the decisive contribution to the ongoing carnage by increasing the flow of arms as atrocities mounted and by rendering the UN "utterly ineffective" because "The United States wished things to turn out as they did" (Ambassador Moynihan), while the intellectual community preferred to denounce the crimes of official enemies. Others tried different techniques to evade the obvious, adding further footnotes to the inglorious story.26


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23 Budiarjo, letters, WP, June 13; Rosenfeld, WP, July 13, July 20, 1990.

24 Moynihan, NYRB, June 28, 1990.

25 See TNCW, ch. 13. Lewis, NYT, April 16, 1992.

26Shawcross, see MC, 284f.; for more detail, Peck, op. cit. Chaliand, Nouvelles littéraires, Nov. 10, 1981; Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, Feb., June 1982. Halliday, Guardian Weekly, Aug. 16, 1992.