Religion, he Fall of Sukarno and the Elimination of Communism in Indonesia : G30S PKI and the Mass Killings of 1965-66 by Joko Wicoyo

In Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia, Mr. Roosa has written a very good account of The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia. The September 30th Movement was filmed and I think it was a very famous film in Indonesia during Suharto’s Era. It was always shown on the eve of 1st October as the commemoration of the winner day of Pancasila as the philosophical and political principal of the Republic of Indonesia.
It tells about the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship.
Up to these days, for most Indonesian people especially scholars, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? I think, in this book, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime.
In my mind this book ignores the murders, the genocide, the pogroms, and instead focuses on the plot that was the pretext or excuse for unleashing the genocide. It insinuates that John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower were 'waiting' for the attempted Communist coup and used the killing of a few military officers to unleash the coup and the mass murder. But the U.S had no role in the mass murder that followed. The U.S was fed a lie by Suharto, namely that the Communists were trying to seize power, and thus Suharto was able to carry out his ethnic-cleansing. I think this book is essential reading for students of modern Indonesian history, and for anyone who is interested in political violence, the role of the military in politics, and U.S. foreign policy.