EXCERPT
Since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, scholarly interest in the studies of political history in the 1950s and 1960s has continued to increase. The era was characterised by intense ideological competition between the nationalists and communists on one end of the spectrum and the Islamists and military influence on the other end. These competitions encircled the unstable political dynamics of Indonesia during the period of the parliamentary liberal democracy after full sovereignty was gained in 1949. Although the political situation of that time has been well recorded in seminal works such as George McTurnan Kahin’s Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (1952) and Herbert Feith’s The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (1962), a major gap remains due to the actions of the New Order regime (1966–1998) in creating a grand narrative of the past as the basis of its anti-communist ideology. The goal of this grand narrative was to forbid, ban, and censor everything related to communism in Indonesia. This creation was an attempt to clean up traces of history and collective memory by rewriting postcolonial history and controlling its teaching in schools. Views other than this official narrative were silenced; the official narrative was not to be debated, doubted, or interpreted. The genocide against the communists between the years of 1965–1969 created a long-lasting fear and trauma that worked effectively in maintaining and preserving the New Order regime. At the same time, the New Order glorified the military’s role in saving the country from the communist threat. In this narrative, the New Order brought stability, development, and prosperity, in contrast to the Old Order which was in chaos and under the influence of communism.
