In recent blogs “BRITISH FORCES’ NETWORKS IN IRELAND” and “KING WILLEM REGRETS” I recounted how Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Dublin in 1969 arranged for THE IRISH TIMES to be brought under the control of a secretive, oathbound “TRUST” serving the interests of Her Britannic Majesty’s Governments.
I reported also how King Willem of the Netherlands had recently expressed regret how from 1945 to 1950 the Netherlands had waged a savage war on the people of Indonesia killing about half a million people there.
I reported on how, when Ambassador in Jakarta in 1965, Sir Andrew Gilchrist had arranged manipulation of media beamed at Indonesia, and the coup which murdered approximately one million innocent people.
I have since re-discovered “THE NEW RULERS OF THE WORLD” by the Australian prize-winning author John Pilger, published in 2002 which goes into these matters in more detail, and which has not, so far as I know, been refuted.
I will quote him at length and trust if any reader can discredit him they will do so, quoting reliable sources. I’m neither a historian nor a scholar, but an honest scavenger who collects stories here and there and knits them together into an honest narrative to stimulate the brain cells.
“The American Ambassador in Jakarta (in
1965) was Marshall Green, known in the State Department as ‘the
coupmaster’. He had earlier masterminded the overthrow of Korean leader
Syngman Rhee, who had fallen out with the Americans. When the killings got
under way in Indonesia, manuals on student organising, written in
Korean and English were distributed by the US embassy to the Indonesian
Student Action Command (KAMI) whose leaders were sponsored by the CIA.
On October 5 1965, Green cabled Washington on how the United States could ‘shape the developments to our advantage’. The plan was to blacken the name of the PKI(Communist Party). At the height of the bloodbath, Green assured (the coup leader) General Suharto ‘The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing’ “
“The Americans worked closely with the British, the reputed masters and inventors of the ‘black’ propaganda admired and adapted by Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s. Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the Ambassador in Jakarta, made his position clear in a cable to the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change’. With more than ‘a little shooting’ under way, and with no evidence of the PKI’s guilt, the embassy advised British Intelligence headquarters at Singapore on the line to be taken, with the aim of weakening the aim of the PKI permanently’.
Suitable propaganda might be: PKI brutality in murdering Generals and (Foreign Minister) Nasution’s daughter…..PKI subverting Indonesia as agents of foreign Communists…..But treatment will need to be strictly unattributable, e.g. British participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.’ “
“Within two weeks, an office of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) had opened in Singapore. The IRD was a top secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. It would be salutary for journalists these days to study the critical role western propaganda played then, as it does now, in shaping the news. Reddaway in a letter marked ‘secret and personal’ boasted to Gilchrist how he and his colleagues manipulated the press so expertly that the story he had promoted – that Sukarno’s continued rule would lead to communist takeover -‘went all over the world and back again’. He described how an experienced Fleet Street journalist ‘agreed to give exactly your angle on events in his article ……i.e. that this was a kid glove coup without butchery.’
Roland Challis, the BBC’s South-East Asia
correspondent, was a particular target of Reddaway, who claimed that the
official version of events could be ‘put almost instantly back to Indonesia via
the BBC’. Prevented from entering Indonesia, along with other foreign-born
journalists, Challis was unaware of the slaughter. ‘It was a triumph for Western
propaganda’ he told me. ‘My British sources purported not to know what was
going on, but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being
washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British
warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so
that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later
that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off
as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto
regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring
them back. That was the deal.’ “
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