Josh Oppenheimer's Film The Act Of Killing

How is it possible that either close to five hundred thousand to one million people in Indonesia that were murdered between the year 1965-1966 might be a forgotten history? The Indonesian mass killings took place at a time when Southeast Asia, still emerging from colonialisms, was energized by social ideology. At the time, the United States was already on ground in Vietnam. In Indonesia, it was led by President Sukarno and a home to one of the world’s largest Communist parties and was seen by Washington as the next domino that could fall. The United States saw communism as a threat. ‘The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each …show more content…
Almost immediately after, Suharto regime sought to hide the history of what happened. The killers were never brought to justice nor given reason to believe that they had done anything wrong. A filmmaker named Josh Oppenheimer released a documentary called The Act of Killing (2012) which the filmmaker was able to convince these killers to reenact the murders to reconnect the history that almost vanished. In the documentary, it was mentioned that anyone who opposed the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist. By those they mean, the union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese. Human rights groups are petitioning calling out the United States government to release records of their involvement of the mass killings. The United States provided support to the Indonesian army financially, military and intelligence support during the mass killings. “You can see that the United States made it very clear that, as a condition for future aid, the Indonesian army must go after the whole Communist Party. And they had guys in the State Department compiling death lists for the army—communist leader, union leaders, intellectuals who were left-leaning”