North American Universities and the 1965 Indonesian Massacre

University professors did not just offer a skewed notion of economic development; some of them also advocated military takeovers in order to achieve it. Before the 1955 Indonesian election, most US Indonesianists, above all those who were faculty at Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, had naively assumed that U.S. advice and aid would enable Indonesia to evolve into a more and more western-oriented nation willing to engage in western-style economic development. The same naïve hope may have initially inspired those professors at the University of Chicago training the economists who implemented Pinochet’s privatization programs after the overthrow of Allende in 1973. (The program linking South Vietnam to Michigan State was however plagued with controversies from its outset, with one visiting economist subsequently suggesting that "a military coup may be the only means" of saving Vietnam.)

By 1958, however, the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party) had emerged as the largest mass movement in the country, and everyone expected that they might come to power in the next election. At this point Pauker and other American social scientists in the U.S. Air Force and CIA-subsidized "think-tanks" began to argue in favor of military-led economic development, and to urge this new notion, successfully, on their military contacts in Indonesia and Brazil.

Specifically, they

began pressuring their contacts in the Indonesian military publicly, often through U.S. scholarly journals and presses, to seize power and liquidate the PKI opposition. The most prominent example is Guy Pauker, who in 1958 both taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as a consultant at the RAND Corporation. In the latter capacity he maintained frequent contact with what he himself called "a very small group" of [Indonesian university] intellectuals and their friends in the army.

A key event was an August 1959 conference organized by RAND on “The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries,” which produced a book with the same title published by Princeton. In this book,

Pauker urged his contacts in the Indonesian military to assume "full responsibility" for their nation's leadership, "fulfill a mission," and hence "to strike, sweep their house clean." Although Pauker may not have intended anything like the scale of bloodbath which eventually ensued, there is no escaping the fact that "mission" and "sweep clean" were buzz-words for counterinsurgency and massacre, and as such were used frequently before and during the coup. The first murder order, by military officers to Muslim students in early October, was the word sikat, meaning "sweep," "clean out," "wipe out," or "massacre."

Eleven months before the coup, Pauker signaled even more blatantly in a RAND publication to his Indonesian army friends, expressing disappointment for their not “carrying out a control function,” and for lacking “the ruthlessness that made it possible for the Nazis to suppress the Communist Party, a few weeks after the elections… in which the Communist Party still won five million votes.”