Former Indonesian dictator Suharto dies

[Starbucks Anarchist]

Source: Yahoo

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Former dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed Indonesia's communist movement and pushed aside the country's founding father to usher in 32 years of tough rule that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86.

"He has died," Dr. Christian Johannes told The Associated Press, adding that he died at 1:10 p.m.

Finally toppled by mass street protests in 1998, the U.S. Cold War ally's departure opened the way for democracy in this predominantly Muslim nation of 235 million people and he withdrew from public life, rarely venturing from his comfortable villa on a leafy lane in the capital.

Suharto had ruled with a totalitarian dominance that saw soldiers stationed in every village, instilling a deep fear of authority across this Southeast Asian nation of some 6,000 inhabited islands that stretch across more than 3,000 miles.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080127/ap_on_re_as/indonesia_suharto

[Kutjara]

1. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Rot in hell, Suharto.

[kurth]

2. Burn in hell, asshole

"Up to a million political opponents killed"

[bluestateguy]

3. Good! Wonderful news!

:bounce:

[Ken Burch]

4. Suharto will also be remembered as the Butcher of East Timor

With the gracious assistance of Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Suharto helped at least 100,000(and possibly up to 200,000) Timorese into early graves.

He was the prototypical "strongman", put in power by the Cold War and left to slaughter people with no protest from the leaders of the outside world, because, after all, those people were just Asians and most of them were Muslims(other than the Timorese who were Catholics, but still they weren't WHITE Catholics, so...)

The man should not be consigned to hell, but, instead, his soul should be forced to spend the rest of eternity down the most pungent privy in all the slums of Jakarta. With Billy Kwan from THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY periodically looking down at him and screaming "What Is To Be Done"?

[Djinn]

14. bit selective in the blame game

who was President in 1965-66?

[davekriss]

17. Just goes to show you...

...we have been a One Party state since WWII, at least in terms of foreign policy, acting to secure and enhance the ability of powerful corporations to access and exploit foreign markets, expropriate natural resources, and otherwise follow a neo-imperial agenda. Same as it ever was... I don't expect Clinton or Obama to change anything in this sphere.

[Warren Stupidity]

22. Indeed, and estimates of that Bad Year are 800,000 or more killed.

Hey Hey LBJ!

[New Dawn]

5. Too bad he was not executed for his crimes

At least he is dead though.

[arcos]

6. Good riddance!

One less asshole in the world today.

[David__77]

7. One of the greatest criminals of the 20th century.

I only regret that he was not tried and executed for his crimes.

[Tom Joad]

10. i only regret that his enablers still are fugitives from the law. Hear that kissinger??

[Djinn]

12. Over his many kleptomanic mass mudering years

he also had a number of Democratic enablers.

The enablers of the murders of more than 1 million people during his coup was LBJ's administration who provided lists of "Communists" to kill first.

We shouldn't insult the memories of Suharto's many victims by abdicating some of responsibility based on party lines.

Democrats have every bit as much Indonesian (and Timorese & West Papuan) blood on their hands as Republican hawks do.

[Hissyspit]

8. Only the good die young.

[Tom Joad]

9. what can i say?

[stimbox]

11. Another murderous right wing u.s. puppet dictator bites the dust.

:applause:

[Djinn]

13. not right wing

Suharto was a authoritarian kleptocrat. Not a right winger, he wasn't left either but right wing is not synonymous with mass murdering dictator.

Calling him a right wing puppet also obscures the fact that his most brutal period was his coup - in which the DEMOCRAT admin in the US supported and provided a 10,000 name death list for. The bloodbath of 65/66 was 100% backed by LBJ and their emissaries cabled in glowing terms of the slaughter.

The destruction of the largest Communist Party in the world was well worth a million deaths in the minds of Democrats and you might not want to examine Clinton's record with Suharto too closely either, at least not without a sickbag.

[Tom Joad]

16. thanks for adding that reminder. The US was a big supporter of Suharto.

[davekriss]

19. He was Right Wing

He gladly implemented the rightwing recommendations of the Berkeley Mafia, which is all about privitization and deregulation aimed at allowing the greatest possible freedom for the the Master to exploit the slave. Irony is, after ruining the economy for their own lower and middle classes (just as we're doing to our own economy today), he became dependent on the largesse of the IMF and World Bank. To obtain the loan guarantees he needed to keep the State limping along, he was forced by the latter to impose even steeper austerity programs (shrink social services even more, further deregulate markets) and the resulting social pain led to the end of his regime.

In any case, good riddance of a violently selfish sociopathic mass-murderer. One less demon walks the earth today.

[Warren Stupidity]

24. Shock Doctrine ought to be required DU reading.

I can't put that book down, but I can hardly stomach reading it.

[davekriss]

26. I haven't read it yet

But by all the kudos it gets here I certainly will (I just finished today Chomsky's Failed States, which I highly recommend -- next up, Shock Doctrine!).

[Djinn]

31. no he wasn't

The economy in Indonesia was one of the most centrally managed in the world. Just because he flogged off much of Indonesia's wealth doesn't make him right wing.

He instituted costly food subsidies and handed monopolies to family members, he was certainly no believer in the primacy of the free market

Javanese men of his vintage could never really be right wing

[davekriss]

20. Republicrats

"The destruction of the largest Communist Party in the world was well worth a million deaths in the minds of Democrats"

Perhaps it was worth it to Democratic Leadership over the years (see my "one party" post above), but most likely not to the vast general public -- if they were informed and not lost behind the illusion of a functioning democracy.

While I have no poll numbers handy, as analogy think of Madelaine Albright's response to Leslie Stahl's question:

"We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it."

Who thinks the price was worth it? What progressive American can line up behind Albright and say, yes, the death of 500,000 children via American actions to contain Saddam Hussein was "worth it"? Not many, my guess. Likewise, to the extent the public was informed, there are likely few rank-and-file Democrats that line up behind the LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton support of Suharto. It's one of many examples of the disconnect between Governance and the Governed, an example of the dysfunction of our current "democracy".

(Another example, despite the popular support for universal healthcare, it doesn't have sufficient "political support". Dysfunctional Democracy at work.)

The illusion of freedom in America will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
-- Frank Zappa, 1977

Don't get me wrong, I will vote straight party line ticket to the day I die (I prefer near-Fascist to overt-Fascist), but in the area of foreign policy it is hard to discern significant difference between the two parties. Yes, yes, Gore would not have invaded Iraq (we're under the thumb of a truly radical, murderous administration right now), but in general the difference is nil.

[stimbox]

21. Democratic and Republican administrations both support murderous right wing dictators.

Neither ever support left wing murderous dictators.

One of those things that makes you go Hmmmmmmm...

[Warren Stupidity]

23. huh?

You even bring up his initial rise to power - based on a typical right wing anti-left authoritarian military coup backed by our government. In what sense was Suharto not 'right wing'?

[Djinn]

32. centrally controlled economy

in fact almost everything in Indo was centrally managed, wasteful agricultural subsidies, subsidies to underperforming businesses and industries, handing out monopolies to his family etc etc etc

Suharto's coup was not anti-left wing - that would only make sense if Sukarno's government was left which it clearly and patently was not. Nationalist does not equate to left wing.

The terms right and left have meanings, just because it seems most don't understand them, doesn't mean they've changed.

[GliderGuider]

15. My mama taught me to only say good about the dead.

He's dead.

Good.

[7 of 11]

18. The people of Indonesia taught us a good lesson

Mass protest can topple a militant tyrant with relatively little loss of life and split blood.
So if we protest Bush by the 10s of millions in every major city of America our tyrant should topple too!



I'm happy for then that this beast is now in hell!!

[Joanne98]

25. May he rot in Hell, along with Ronald Raygun!

[Andrushka]

27. I hope

it was oh-so-very painful, I truly do. I also hope that just before he died the ghosts of the hundreds of thousands his gang murdered came to collect him.

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

28. Clinton administration loved him, too

called him "our kind of guy"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2774957

[citizen snips]

29. its about damn time he kicked the bucket

He was one of Ronald Reagan's dictator pupits.

[stimbox]

30. Excellent analysis of the NYT obit.

Source: PA Editor's blog

"Having written an angry blog piece about General Suharto when he was dying and the U.S. press was reporting the incident and omitting his leadership in the mass murder carried out in 1965 against Indonesian Communists, workers, peasants, and ethnic Chinese people, I thought that I would mention that Suharto is now dead and Marilyn Berger in the New York Times has written a lengthy obituary which dealt significantly with the mass murder of 1965."


"While Berger deserves praise for this article on the whole, one should note that she didn't really deal with the role of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department in aiding and abetting the mass killing of 1965, although she did deal with the billions of dollars of aid that Suharto's regime received subsequently from the U.S. and other capitalist countries. Nor did she deal with the fact that the Communist Party of Indonesia was a mass party with an estimated three million members at the time of Suharto's real coup and establishment of what many analysts outside of U.S. media circles regarded as a fascist regime."

"Suharto's place in history is with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, the Tojo regime, and those whom the publisher of the Nation, Freda Kirchwey called "midget Hitler's" (The Trujillo's, Somozas, and Batista's of Latin America) in response to Franklin Roosevelt's reference to one of them as "a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch." Suharto's crimes place him above the Latin American SO B's of the right and far closer to Hitler and Franco. His death should encourage Americans to understand that substantive change in U.S. foreign policy is much more than ending the Iraq occupation and restoring decent relations with the international community. It is about ending the military and political and economic support for regimes like Suharto's, which have inspired justified anger and resentment among the masses of people throughout the world."

Read more: http://paeditorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/suharto-mass-murderer-and-tryant-is.html