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I remember believing this lie, until I learned more about the US enacting political violence against socialists domestically and abroad.
#WellThisFuckingSucks
“The United States won. Here in Indonesia, you got what you wanted, and around the world, you got what you wanted,” he said to me in 2018, sitting on the floor of his modest home in Solo, constantly shifting his weight, trying to avoid further inflaming a painful back injury. I had gotten to know him fairly well over years of interviews he helped organize. He continued, “The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won. Moreover, we all got the US-centered capitalism that Washington wanted to spread. Just<br>look around you,” he said, gesturing to his city, and the entire Indonesian archipelago around him.<br>How did we win, I asked.<br>Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us." The members of Taman 65 know that there’s a reason none of the tourists know about the violence that took the lives of so many of their relatives. The government has buried that history deep, even deeper than it was buried on the island of Java. The tourism boom, which started in the late 1960s, required that. Before Suharto, a huge amount of Bali’s land was communal, and often disputed. “They needed to kill the communists so that foreign investors could<br>bring their capital here,” said Ngurah Termana.<br>“Now, all visitors here see is our famous smile,” he continued. “They have no idea the darkness and fire that lurks underneath.”
As we have seen, in the years 1945–1990, a loose network of US-backed<br>anticommunist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they<br>carried out mass murder in at least twenty-two countries (see Appendix Five).<br>There was no central plan, no master control room where the whole thing was<br>orchestrated, but I think that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia,<br>Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras,<br>Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea,<br>Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be seen as<br>interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War. (I am not<br>including direct military engagements or even innocent people killed by<br>“collateral damage” in war.)
#WellThisFuckingSucks
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