Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Memoryscapes’ Complex Negotiation of the Past and Present: Mnemonic Role Attributions and Ambivalence
- 3 Cambodia: From Demonization to Universal Victimhood
- 4 Rwanda: Ethnic Essentialism and Rwandan Patriotic Front Heroism
- 5 Indonesia: Ambivalent Silence and Communist Threat Constructions
- 6 Mnemonic Role Attributions and Ambivalence in Post-Violence Memoryscapes: Comparative Insights
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
5 - Indonesia: Ambivalent Silence and Communist Threat Constructions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Memoryscapes’ Complex Negotiation of the Past and Present: Mnemonic Role Attributions and Ambivalence
- 3 Cambodia: From Demonization to Universal Victimhood
- 4 Rwanda: Ethnic Essentialism and Rwandan Patriotic Front Heroism
- 5 Indonesia: Ambivalent Silence and Communist Threat Constructions
- 6 Mnemonic Role Attributions and Ambivalence in Post-Violence Memoryscapes: Comparative Insights
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Even though we know how to act like we are silent … we never really were and we aren't now. And so, I think it's like, it's a strategy and it, it, it, it's constantly kind of improvisation on developing and changes depending on the moment or the people or the broader environment. But it's also something that we’ve learned from generations across. … Because at the end of the day, the people who killed our grandfather, who let him die, are people within our family, our neighbours. It's like, how? What does it mean then, to hold someone to account? Um. But. What I’ve seen in the ways that we’ve chosen to remember our grandfather recently have been that … they would participate in killing him again. Now. They believe that he deserved to die. (Interview with a scholar and activist in Bali, August 2022)
This quote is instructive for our understanding of how the violent past is remembered in Indonesia and the role that silences have in defining the roles of perpetrator, victim, and hero. While silence is a trope frequently attributed to the 1965/1966 genocide in Indonesia, it really serves to augment the voice that can speak: the official narrative that attributes communists as threatening and the role of hero to the violent actors that put down the threat. And yet the silence is also not monolithic, as the quote argues and I shall show in this chapter. Not only is there quite some voice that continues the discourse of threat construction by the government and other organizations, but there are also spaces in which survivors can articulate their memories of victimhood and utter condemnation of the military as well as Islamic and nationalist organizations for their violence.
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- Memory Politics after Mass ViolenceAttributing Roles in the Memoryscape, pp. 116 - 147Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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