By Mik Frances
Initially, PS’s screening of Josh Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING (2012) piqued my interest primarily because of intersections in the film’s setting– Indonesia– and PS’s project English For Working Voices. The project consists of free ESL classes taught in a Freirean style (as is all poli-ed at PS) about immigration, work, and labor organizing. In its initial semesters we partnered with an Indonesian church right in my backyard of South Philly/West Passyunk (not to be semantically gentrified as Newbold), wherein reside a large swath of Philadelphia’s Indonesian population. Not only are a large portion of our students Indonesian immigrants but, specifically, many of them are ethnically Chinese, Christian Indonesians. Moments in the film render their stories of persecution and emigration into technicolor by highlighting personalized accounts of political violence in relief of the power structures that dictate that violence. Moreover, the film situates Indonesia amongst the violent histories that constructed American hegemony and patterns of immigration we see today.
The film begins with a clear statement of context. Shots of shantytowns living alongside neon advertisements in globalized, central Medan backdrop text describing a seminal event in 20th century Indonesian history. In 1965, the US and other western powers backed Indonesian army generals Suharto’s military coup and subsequent consolidation of power in the sprawling Southeast Asian country. The foundation of this consolidation was largely the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, in which state-sanctioned paramilitary groups and gangsters genocided millions of alleged communists.
The film follows personal accounts of the killings, told from the killers themselves. Oppenheimer’s masterpiece employs a thin facade of a “movie about making a movie” to interrogate the past life of Anwar Congo, a convivial, grey-haired grandfather and retired member of the Pemuda Pancasila. The Pancasila are an Indonesian far-right paramilitary group, who double as henchmen of the Suharto regime as well as low level gangsters, or preman. We learn that Congo and his friends largely come from a peasant class, and that the regime offers them purpose, opportunity, and power, by converting from out-of-work ticket scalpers to full-time Pancasila men. We see the resulting bravado in his tales of the lawless good old days. Specifically, Congo freely admits to taking thousands of lives during these killings, crediting manufactured amnesia from “good music… dancing… feeling happy… a little alcohol… a little marijuana…”
Interspersed with emboldened, braggart accounts of these violent acts are Congo’s repeated mentions of the souls of his victims, nightmares he suffers, and ruminations about governmental apologies to the victim’s families. We see this dissonance slowly but deliberately shattered within our protagonist: Congo, who is initially as eager to share the stories of his escapades with the camera as he is with his young grandchildren, by the end is forced to reckon with the suffering he has caused. What enacts this realization? The staged re-enactment of the interrogations of “suspected communists”, exposés of violent Hollowood-inspired torturing methods, and even the recreation of a massacre of an entire village. While acting in the role of a victim of torture and strangulation, he visibly breaks down, requesting to end filming temporarily. The movie climaxes with Congo retching uncontrollably at the site of the majority of his killings.
Congo’s apparent misgivings contrast sharply to the comparatively muted responses of his fellow conspirators. While the souls of his victims haunt Congo, others find themselves hiding behind a range of psychological shields such as delusional self-distancing, levels of indirection from the personally culpable executors, and even zero-sum “winners and losers” justification. We see a newspaper man, claiming responsibility for propagandized accounts of the violence. We hear guilty bureaucratic agents deny knowledge of universally known genocide. We even reckon with the justifications of Congo’s partner-in-crime, Adi Zulkadry, who claims that he is simply on the winning side of history—much as the American colonial project has violently triumphed over Indigenous Americans: “Americans killed the Indians. Has anybody been punished for that? Punish them!”
The film invites us to pathologize these murderers by documenting their varying levels of cognitive dissonance. However, on another level, direct and indirect American influence on these horrifying outcomes echo throughout the film. Aside from Oppenheimer introducing the coup and genocide as US-backed, he highlights the influence of violent American films on Congo and his friends, who repeatedly cite inspiration from mafia and cowboy-style executions they find there. We see a younger Pancasila man, Koto, haphazardly attempting to run for political office by practicing impressions of Barrack Obama’s 2008 campaign victory speech (“To those who would tear this world down: We will defeat you!”). Most strikingly, Zulkardy’s point about the hypocrisy of Western accusations of war crimes in Indonesia in spite of similar crimes against indigenous Americans and Iraqis– in fact– holds water. While the film in no way absolves the men of their horrors, in these moments we recognize that their actions align with a greater power.
Washington backed the Suharto coup and genocide in Indonesia in order to undermine a a growing leftward, internationalist sentiment of Indonesia’s then president Sukarno. While that fact may be surprising based on the propagandized version of history we’re taught in American schools, this is in fact a key tool in the toolbag the US/the West has employed (to terrifying success) across the globe from Indonesia to Guatemala to Iran: to break anti-imperial solidarity, to stomp out any forms of (even vaguely) left-leaning sovereignty, and to orient the imperialist-backed puppet regime towards the hegemonic world capitalist system.
How does this relate back to our classes? Tracing these US imperialist and capitalist projects can help explain the immigration patterns we see in Philadelphia. While this US military support and clandestine action in the 1960s (as well as the subsequent firesale of the region’s assets to foreign capital) formed the base for the Indonesian sociopolitical climate of the last 80 years, it was far from the end of western exploitation. With major dissent effectively removed from the political sphere, the New Order regime under Suharto then embarked on a 30 year consolidation of power, consisting of militarization, anti-democratization, and an oligarchic domination of a few major conglomerates (most of which owned by an ethnically-Chinese capitalist class). When the 1998 Asian financial crisis brought about the catastrophic devaluation of the rupiah and massive unemployment, the imperialist hand came knocking once again. The IMF stepped in with loan conditions requiring austerity measures, including the removal of critical subsidies for basic necessities such as food and kerosene1. And while foreign capital bought up more discounted assets, much of the aforementioned capitalist class largely relocated to Singapore, leaving the working people of Indonesia with a 50% poverty rate, a 70% hike in kerosene prices, and major food shortages.
The pressure that these conditions created had to release somewhere. Massive riots and violence ensued, primarily aimed at the ethnically Chinese minority population (the majority of whom were not the ownership class). It must be said that this group simultaneously suffer ethnic scapegoating while enjoying the relative economic mobility necessary to immigrate to the West. This brings us to the point that our students from Indonesia come to the US. Our students describe a spectrum of small business ownership and/or professionalized positions in Indonesia (lawyers, accountants, musicians, chefs, etc.) and, after passing through a series of filters including language barriers, contingent citizenship, undervalued or wholly unrecognized certifications/experience, racialized labor, and predatory employer behavior — they end up taking taking gig, warehouse, fast food, and similar work in the US.
It’s worth noting that this is not a simple story of victims and assailants, of good guys and bad guys. Capitalism (and its highest stage) repeatedly creates these crises worldwide. If you were to apply the same framework to the other countries from which our students emigrate (Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, etc.), you’d find varying histories of the same imperialist violence forming distinct, but recognizable conditions. This is to say, combinations of weapons including overt and clandestine military action, hand-picked governments, exploitative resource extraction, and forced neoliberal restructuring work to foment massive wealth inequality, authoritarian governments, gutted social safety nets, ethnic/religious tensions, and large swaths of unemployment, invariably forcing emigration en masse to the west.
As educators at the meeting point out these imperial outcomes abroad and labor exploitation at home, it behooves us to understand these systems more critically. Imperialism abroad and the creation of exploited underclasses of immigrant laborers at home are two sides of the same coin. We need to think past immigration narratives of “political unrest” or “economic instability” towards an understanding of the global capitalist system operating as intended. We need to be able to understand the mechanisms by which immigrant labor is exploited and pitted against the rest of the working class right here in Philly. And then we need to build that understanding into what we teach, the contradictions we highlight, and the type of solidarity we aim to create.
1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 96.
The Philadelphia Partisan 