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Book Cover for: Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia, John Roosa

Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia

John Roosa

In 1965-66, army-organized massacres claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia. Very few of these atrocities have been studied in any detail, and answers to basic questions remain unclear. What was the relationship between the army and civilian militias? How could the perpetrators come to view unarmed individuals as dangerous enemies of the nation? Why did Communist Party supporters, who numbered in the millions, not resist?
Drawing upon years of research and interviews with survivors, Buried Histories is an impressive contribution to the literature on genocide and mass atrocity, crucially addressing the topics of media, military organization, economic interests, and resistance.

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
  • Publish Date: Sep 13rd, 2022
  • Pages: 344
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 0.90in - 1.15lb
  • EAN: 9780299327347
  • Categories: Asia - Southeast AsiaModern - 20th Century - GeneralHuman Rights

About the Author

John Roosa is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'État in Indonesia.

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Praise for this book

"In compelling prose and with heartbreaking intimacy, Roosa offers the most important collection of case studies of the Indonesian massacres ever published. This is an essential, masterful, and devastating book for anyone who cares about the history and mechanics of human evil."--Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
"This is a rigorous study graced with absorbing and poignant stories. Roosa presents the subjectivity of the perpetrators, bystanders, resisters, and victims with a rare sense of subtlety. Attentive to the contingencies of history, he shows how nothing was inevitable in the tragic muteness of countless disappearances."--Karlina Supelli, Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta
"Roosa portrays a tense political environment that gave no real hint of the killing that was to follow. This book represents a major breakthrough in presenting the killings in their immediate context and in the richness of its oral history data."Robert Cribb, Australian National University
"In a meticulously researched and compellingly argued study, John Roosa presents, for the first time from up close, the history of Indonesia's anticommunist massacres in 1965-1966. Through personal narrating, he details the experiences emerging from small, individual stories and connects them in an original attempt to help us understand this national event as an instance of genocide or mass atrocity against civilians. . . . By unearthing the details of the massacres, the book sheds light on one of the world's most atrocious tragedies of the twentieth century."--Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia