New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres

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And it was reported in the United States as good news. It was reported in The New York Times and Time magazine fairly accurately in terms of the death tolls, but with headlines like "A Gleam of Light in Asia," "The West’s Best News for Years in Asia." So, inevitably, these events have been forgotten in the West, because how do you remember the killing of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people as good news? It doesn’t make sense as a story, and so we forget it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. role at the time, something that is—

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —very much—if people even know about what happened here, it’s a story that isn’t as well known.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yes. The U.S. was—and the West, in general, particularly the U.K., probably Australia, were very much involved with supporting and encouraging the genocide. The U.S. provided money. It provided some weapons. It provided radios so that the army could coordinate the killings across this vast archipelago that is Indonesia. They also provided death lists, lists of thousands of names that—of fairly prominent public figures, leftists, leaders of unions, intellectuals. So it wasn’t meaningful intelligence, but it was a clear signal: We want these people dead.

AMY GOODMAN: And these are political officers within the U.S. embassy handing over names of people, and they were crossing off the names as they were killed.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. One of them was a guy called Bob Martens, from the—a former State Department official who, when we met him, was living in Bethesda, Maryland. And another was the CIA deputy station chief, Joe Lazarsky, living in suburban Virginia. They were handing out—they were handing over these lists of names. Basically, I remember—actually, Bob Martens was on the record in 1990; he was interviewed by a journalist called Kathy Kadane, and he said, "I may have blood on my hands, but sometimes that’s a good thing."

And, you know, the whole—beyond that list of names, who were people the Indonesian army certainly knew about, the whole message from the United States was: We want you not to just go after a few political leaders who are opposed to the new regime, the leaders of the Communist Party, for example; we want you to go after the entire grassroots base of the Indonesian left. It’s as if one day everybody affiliated with the Democratic Party and everybody registered as a Democrat was hunted down and killed or put in concentration camps. That’s essentially what happened in Indonesia in 1965, with Western support.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about your film. You’re giving the political backdrop. Talk about how you discovered the people in your film. And begin with the name, because that very much tells us the story, The Act of Killing, and its various meanings.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, The Act of Killing is, of course, the title of the film. It has a few—it has several meanings. Of course, it can refer to the commission of the crime of killing or commission of the deed of killing, which, it’s worth pointing out, is fundamentally a human act. We have really no other species, except for a couple of the higher primates, kill each other. Human beings kill each other, and we kill each other en masse and again and again and again through our history. So there’s a sense that the film looks at what does it mean for human beings to kill. What are the consequences of killing? Why do—why do we kill? What are the consequences on our societies for impunity around killing? How do we justify killing through the stories we tell?