Indonesia appears in Noam Chomsky’s analysis as both a site of mass violence and an example of the political alliances he argues are obscured by the language of a civilizational or counterterrorist struggle. He recalls the 1965 military takeover and killings, then places the country within a wider account of Western support for repressive partners, post-September 11 coalition politics, and the risks of domestic conflict spreading across regions.

The 1965 Takeover and Mass Killings

Chomsky describes an army supported by the United States taking control of Indonesia in 1965, followed by the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them landless peasants. He notes that the CIA compared the slaughter with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. In his account, the scale of the violence contrasts sharply with its reception in the West: detailed reporting was accompanied by public and press celebrations rather than sustained condemnation.

He returns to this history when disputing the idea that global politics can be understood as a clash between Islamic and Western civilizations. Indonesia, he observes, is the world’s most populous Islamic state, yet the United States embraced it after Suharto took power in 1965. Chomsky says Suharto remained an American friend even as his rule became associated with killings, torture, and other abuses. The earlier violence, he argues, had become so uncomfortable to recall that it was effectively erased from public memory.

Alliance Politics and Selective Memory

The Indonesian case supports Chomsky’s broader criticism of alliances formed in the name of a supposedly noble purpose. He argues that governments and political movements cannot be judged solely by whether they fall inside or outside an American-led coalition: Indonesia’s history, in his account, illustrates how a partner’s own atrocities may be accommodated when it is politically useful. This makes the label of a counterterrorist coalition, in his view, an unreliable measure of consistent opposition to political violence.

Chomsky also invokes Indonesia while comparing Western reactions to violence abroad with reactions to the 2001 attacks in New York. He recalls that the killings in Indonesia prompted exuberant approval in the West, despite the victims’ having done no harm to the United States. He sets that response beside the dominant press’s approval of the methods used against Nicaragua: economic destruction and a prolonged proxy war were praised as a low-cost means of forcing a government from power, while the devastation left behind was framed as part of a political victory. The comparison does not equate the events; it exposes, for Chomsky, a contrast in whose suffering is publicly mourned and whose is welcomed.

Indonesia in the Post-September 11 Landscape

In discussing the possible effects of the United States’ sudden efforts to build an international coalition after September 11, Chomsky identifies Indonesia as one of several places where internal conflicts could become more consequential. He warns that similar political pressures extend across North Africa and Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, while a rising flow of artillery into the region increases the risk of armed conflict and supplies weapons to terrorist organizations and drug traffickers. He presents this as a regional danger associated with the wider militarization of the response, not as a prediction of a particular Indonesian event.

The country’s earlier history also informs Chomsky’s objection to the idea that the post-September 11 conflict represents a simple opposition between civilizations. Indonesia’s position in that argument is deliberately unsettling: the United States had supported a government formed after mass killings, while later political rhetoric treated the United States as the unquestioned representative of a peaceful democratic camp. The juxtaposition directs attention away from civilizational labels and toward state interests, political alliances, and uneven standards of judgment.

Strategic Reach and the Limits of the Account

Chomsky’s broader geopolitical argument connects military presence to the protection of resources and the ability to intervene. He says that, for the first time, the United States established major military bases in Central Asia, describing them as useful for extending American influence over regional resources and complementing a network oriented toward the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he identifies Diego Garcia as the network’s most secure base. Indonesia is not named as the site of these Central Asian bases; rather, it enters his account as a Southeast Asian setting where the consequences of intensified weapons flows and domestic tensions may matter.

The evidence gives Indonesia two distinct roles in the argument: a remembered setting of mass killings and a present-day part of a region exposed to expanding geopolitical pressure. Chomsky uses the first to challenge Western selective memory and the second to warn that counterterrorist coalition-building can interact with local conflicts in unpredictable ways. The discussion does not document a specific post-September 11 Indonesian outcome, so its conclusion remains a warning about political dynamics and the broader consequences of militarization, rather than a narrative of a particular later event.