Treating the communists

I thoroughly enjoyed the Oct. 3 edition of The Jakarta Post, which true to its tradition of slavishly following the New York Times and The Guardian had a lovely selection of articles telling us how hard done by were the poor little communists of Indonesia following their attempted coup in 1965. I imagine it must have been dreadful for the communists to find themselves on the receiving end of popular anger and subject to torture, mass arrest and summary execution, after all for the previous fifty years they had assumed that was precisely what they were supposed to do to their opponents.

Well Indonesia can be proud to claim that unlike so many other supposedly developed nations they did not fall to the Red Terror, their people resisted and saved themselves from the dreadful fate that befell the Russians, Ukranians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Balts and other European peoples who meekly accepted the jackboot of communist thugs and sheepishly allowed themselves to be led to the gulag to disappear forever from the face of the earth.

One only has to look at what happened nearer to home, the communist takeover of North Korea and Vietnam to this day have ensured millions of people face starvation and arbitrary arrest and murder according to the whims of their commisar overlords. The sheer horrors inflicted by Mao on the Chinese people before, during and after the Cultural Revolution defy belief, yet it was to Mao that the Indonesian communists looked for support and whose model they would have presumably emulated. One cannot even contemplate what Indonesia would have looked like today if we had our own home grown Pol Pot to take control in 1965 and institute his much acclaimed agrarian reforms.

No, it will not do, the communists cannot be allowed to put themselves forward now as the victims, as somehow comparable to the Jews under the Nazis, the communists were the aggressors, they were soundly beaten and thank heavens for that. Indonesia under Soeharto may not have been Shangri La but there were no gas chambers, and unlike the communist nations the Indonesian people were free to leave at any time and as I recall there were not too many Indonesian boat people fleeing the Indonesian killing fields during Soeharto's time.

So please desist from this whitewashing of the communists' history, tell the full unvarnished truth about this murderous ideology. It is an insult to our intelligence to think that after forty years we forget what the communists were and what they stood for.

MICHAEL HILLS, Jakarta