The recently published book The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World is published in 2024. It is written by Nathan J. Robinson, mainly based on what Noam Chomsky has written and spoken about in the past.

The book clearly shows how the unfathomable devastation that is created by the U. S. government and its overarching military body is explained away as 'needed' or even as part of a larger, has-to-happen strategy, but it's all for the sake of warlords and private company profit.

These two parts are details from the contents about what the U. S. military did to Indonesia and Laos. The very last paragraph of this post shocked me to tears, although, frankly, so could most of the others.

The rest of this post are quotes from the book.

Indonesia

In 1965–66, the Indonesian Communist Party was liquidated in what a CIA analysis called “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” Estimates of the death toll are imprecise, because the killers subsequently ruled the country for decades and no real investigation was ever conducted. Five hundred thousand is considered a consensus estimate, though it could be as high as a million. The communists in Indonesia had been one of the most successful leftist parties in the world, and were the only mass-based political party in the country. In a short time, they were entirely wiped out, the independent nationalist Sukarno was forced from power, replaced by the murderous dictator Suharto.

In The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Geoffrey Robinson gives more detail about the massacres. The victims were “overwhelmingly poor or lower-middle-class people—farmers, plantation laborers, factory workers, schoolteachers, students, artists, dancers, and civil servants—living in rural villages and plantations, or in ramshackle kampungs on the outskirts of provincial cities and towns.” They were murdered in “killing fields…dotted across the archipelago,” “felled with knives, sickles, machetes, swords, ice picks, bamboo spears, iron rods, and other everyday implements.” The savagery was extreme. Vincent Bevins says eyewitnesses described “the most shocking scenes imaginable, an explosion of violence so terrifying that even discussing what happened would make people break down, questioning their own sanity.”

In the United States, even as the atrocities were reported, the Indonesian government was celebrated. This Rwanda-style slaughter was reported as a triumph for the Free World, because by eliminating the independent left opposition, the killers had ensured Indonesia’s government would be pro-Western. Time magazine called the decimation of the Indonesian communists “the West’s best news for years in Asia,” and The Atlantic told readers that “in attacking the communists,” the “incorruptible” Suharto “was doing simply what he believed to be best for Indonesia.” The New York Times was downright euphoric, portraying the event as part of a new “Gleam of Light in Asia.” The Times said that despite our “political troubles in Vietnam,” there were “more hopeful political developments elsewhere in Asia.” While forthrightly calling it a “massacre,” the Times said that “control of this large and strategic archipelago is no longer in the hands of men fiercely hostile to the United States.”

But the United States didn’t just welcome this holocaust. It actively helped the killers carry it out. This was known even at the time—the Times report says that while “Washington is being careful not to claim any credit…it is doubtful if the coup would ever have been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Subsequent evidence confirmed the depth of U.S. involvement. Telegrams from the U.S. Embassy requested clandestine aid to “strengthen the hands of those we want to see win in the current mortal struggle for political power,” and noted “small arms and equipment may be needed to deal with the PKI [the Communist Party of Indonesia].” The U.S. even provided the Indonesian army with lists of thousands of communists, with the full knowledge that they would be assassinated.

In fact, since the 1940s, the United States had, according to Robinson, “worked assiduously to undermine the PKI, and weaken or remove President Sukarno,” and had long been encouraging the military to seize power. Bevins summarizes the record: “U.S. strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.” The massacres were the payoff of a long effort to destroy the left and put Indonesia under military control. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta reported in 1958 that it was increasingly probable that “Communists could not be beaten by ordinary democratic means in elections,” thus a “program of gradual elimination of Communists by police and military to be followed by outlawing of Communist Party [is] not unlikely in [the] comparatively near future.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the same day, urged that “action must be taken, including overt measures as required, to insure either the success of the dissidents or the suppression of the pro-Communist elements of the Sukarno government.”

Robert Martens, who worked as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, admitted unapologetically to providing the lists of communists that helped facilitate their liquidation: It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.

Howard Federspiel, then an Indonesia expert at the State Department, commented in 1990: “No one cared, so long as they were communists, that they were being butchered…. No one was getting very worked up about it.” Bradley Simpson, director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, concludes from the evidence that “the U.S. and its allies viewed the wholesale annihilation of the PKI and its civilian backers as an indispensable prerequisite to Indonesia’s reintegration into the regional political economy,” and thus “Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the Army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party’s unarmed supporters might not go far enough.” Geoffrey Robinson concludes that Western states were “not innocent bystanders,” but rather launched a “coordinated campaign to assist in the political and physical destruction of the PKI and its affiliates” and the imposition of Suharto. Claims that the violence “was the product of domestic political forces over which outside powers had little, if any, influence” are “untrue,” because “Western powers encouraged the army to move forcefully against the Left, facilitated widespread violence including mass killings, and helped to consolidate the political power of the army.”

Thus the United States government was directly responsible for instigating and supporting what the CIA itself called one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. The event is never discussed. Bevins suggests the reason. The truth that the U.S. “engineer[ed] the conditions for a violent clash” and then “assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving U.S. geopolitical goals” is so ugly that it is impossible to acknowledge, at least for any American who wishes to continue thinking of the United States as playing a benign or positive role in the world. Bevins reflects that “what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore.

In other words, the story is so revealing that it cannot be known. And so it isn’t. The events are consigned to Orwell’s memory hole, forgotten in the same way as the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century, the genocidal destruction of Native Americans, and other matters not suitable to be enshrined in official history.

Laos

The “Vietnam War” is a misleading name for a war that inflicted massive violence on neighboring countries as well. In Laos, the United States attacked both Laotian communist and North Vietnamese forces, flying 580,000 bombing runs between 1964 and 1973, which works out to “one planeload every eight minutes for nearly a decade.” A ton of ordnance was dropped for every person in Laos, and in total the war killed one out of ten people in the country. By the end, “U.S. aircraft had dumped 2,093,100 tons of ordnance on the landlocked country, which is about twice the size of Pennsylvania, with a population then under 3 million.” Laos became the most bombed country in the history of the world, exceeding the World War II bombings of Japan and Germany combined.

Laos is still one of the most war-contaminated places on Earth. For over fifty years, the bombs have continued to kill people, with more than twenty thousand Laotians dying (and many more being maimed) after the bombing stopped. Nearly half the victims are children. In 2021, there were over sixty explosions. The killing and maiming, of course, are only part of the damage; there is also the trauma and fear that come from living in a landscape littered with hidden bombs. Elementary school children are taught to identify the difference between types of bombs so that they don’t pick them up.

In 2013, The New York Times ran a story entitled “One Woman’s Mission to Free Laos from Millions of Unexploded Bombs.” It reports on the “single-minded effort” of a Lao-American woman, Channapha Khamvongsa, “to rid her native land of millions of bombs still buried there.” The story notes that as a result of Ms. Khamvongsa’s lobbying, the United States increased its annual spending on the removal of unexploded bombs by an inadequate $12 million. The Times tells us that Ms. Khamvongsa “was spurred into action when she came across a collection of drawings of the bombings made by refugees and collected by Fred Branfman.” That book displays the torment of the victims, poor peasants in a remote area that had virtually nothing to do with the Vietnam War. But the Times did not report on a crucial revelation made by Branfman. The article retells the standard explanation for the attack on Laos: It tells us that “the targets were North Vietnamese troops—especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos—as well as North Vietnam’s Laotian Communist allies.” In fact, Branfman writes that “one of the most shattering revelations” was that “there was no military reason” for Lyndon Johnson’s diverting planes into Laos. U.S. deputy chief of mission Monteagle Stearns testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in October 1969 that “we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.”