Kahin, George McT. and Kahin, Audrey R. Subversion as Foreign Policy: The
Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia. New York: The New Press,
1995. 318 pages.
George Kahin has taught at Cornell University since 1951 and is one of
the leading scholars of Southeast Asian history. This book covers Indonesian
history from the end of the colonial period through the Eisenhower years. It
stops short of the 1965 coup, which a CIA study described as follows: "In
terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one
of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges
of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the
Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s." To get anything else out of the CIA
about Indonesia, you still need a crowbar, even if you leave out 1965.
But George Kahin was personally acquainted with most of the key players
in Indonesian politics during the 1950s, and he managed even without the
CIA's documents. The importance of this work is that it exposes the covert
policy of Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers in Indonesia during the 1950s.
This policy set the stage for the 1960s. The events of 1965-1966, dismissed
at the time by the world's media as an "abortive Communist coup," are still
hotly disputed, and appear suspicious by any reasonable standard -- the
whole thing could have been set up by the CIA. That's a book that cannot
yet be written, but at least we're off to a reliable start.
ISBN 1-56584-244-8
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