Kekerasan Budaya Pasca 1965: Bagaimana Orde Baru Melegitimasi Anti-Komunisme Melalui Sastra dan Film

Although there have been a number of notable studies on the cultural con ict of 1964–1965 in Indonesia between the Left artististic group Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat (Institution of People’s Culture, Lekra), and the liberal Manifes Kebudajaan (Cultural manifesto), which supported the idea of “universal humanism” (see Keith Foulcher, “A Survey of Events Surrounding Manikebu: e Struggle for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in Indonesian Literature,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 125(4, 1969): 429–65; Harry Aveling, “Indonesian Writers and the Left Before 1965,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian A airs 4[1–2, 1970]: 1–7), Herlambang introduces a fresh discussion to the subject along with critical engagement of historical sources. e book explores the role of cultural work produced by anti-Communist artists with the support of Western organizations, which was, unfortunately, used to justify the violence of the anti-Communist purges that followed the failed political coup in 1965.

Herlambang analyzes selected short stories published between 1966 and 1967 in Horison (the cultural magazine of Manifes Kebudajaan), the docudrama Pengkhianatan G.30.S/PKI (Treachery of G.30.S/PKI) directed by Ari n C. Noer in 1984, and a novel with a similar title by Arswendo Atmowiloto. He also examines a collection of documents that describe the communication between the Congress Cultural for Freedom (CCF), a CIA-funded anti-Communist organization, with some of Indonesia’s prominent intellectuals (see also the discussion of the role of the CCF in the magazine Konfrontasi from 1945 to 1960, in Foulcher’s “Bringing the World Back Home: Cultural Traffic in Konfrontasi, 1954–1960,” in Heirs to World Culture: Being Indonesian, 1950–1965, ed. Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H. T. Liem, 31–56 [Leiden: KITLV, 2012]).