Suharto

Tommy the Hamburger is here again, and this is Historical Depravity, where we dig up the polished bones of history, crack them open, and show you the rot they tried to dress up as greatness. They called these people kings, visionaries, captains of industry, patriots, reformers, whatever flattering bullshit helped the blood dry faster. I'm here to show you what they actually were. Suharto gets remembered through one of the dirtiest formulas in modern political memory: the development dictator. In the polished version he is the stern modernizer who rescued Indonesia from instability, defeated communist chaos, opened the economy, brought order, and governed with the hard realism required in a dangerous Cold War region. In the softer academic version, he becomes an authoritarian modernizer whose brutalities must be weighed against growth, state consolidation, and the comparative disorder of the alternatives. Both versions are rotten. The actual record shows a ruler who consolidated power through mass killing, built a long dictatorship on fear and corruption, and then wrapped the whole thing in the language of national recovery while Western governments and corporations congratulated themselves for dealing with a "stable" partner. Fuck me sideways, that is the development dictator scam at full volume. That is the myth versus reality split. The myth says Suharto stabilized Indonesia. The reality says he stabilized a field of corpses, prisons, disappearances, censorship, patronage, and militarized intimidation. The myth says he saved the country from communism. The reality says the anti communist frame became a license for one of the worst mass political slaughters of the twentieth century, followed by decades of state violence and theft. The myth says his economic record proves pragmatic success. The reality says his so called order was inseparable from kleptocracy, crony distribution, regional repression, and a political structure where people learned survival through silence. Start with the 1965 66 killings, because any attempt to talk about Suharto without centering that bloodbath is already moral evasion. After the upheaval around the September 30th Movement, the Indonesian military and allied forces launched a campaign against the PKI, alleged sympathizers, trade unionists, leftists, ethnic Chinese, and a broad range of people who could be swept into the category of enemy. The numbers remain contested in exact form and obscene in every version: hundreds of thousands killed, perhaps more. The dispute over the final number does not soften the crime. It just tells you the scale of the graveyard. What matters historically is that these were not merely spontaneous local riots or isolated revenge killings in a confused national emergency. The military played a central role in enabling, directing, legitimizing, and amplifying the violence. The anti communist campaign became the founding terror of Suharto's order. If you understand that, the later development story looks very different. You are no longer looking at a regime that unfortunately committed abuses on the way to modernization. You are looking at a regime born in mass murder and then normalized by geopolitics, business interest, and the public fatigue that always follows very large crimes when the killers manage to stay in office. That is one of the key mechanisms in this file: founding violence converted into legitimacy. Once the PKI and associated victims had been physically and politically smashed, Suharto could present himself as the man who restored order from catastrophe. But the catastrophe had been used, enlarged, and politically harvested to create his authority in the first place. He did not merely emerge after chaos. He ascended through a campaign that turned extermination into state re foundation. That stain never leaves the regime, no matter how many technocrats or investors later call the place stable. And the stability itself was deeply choreographed. Suharto's New Order did not simply govern. It managed memory. It censored, intimidated, surveilled, and taught generations a state approved story in which the anti communist massacres became justified salvation rather than atrocity. That control over narrative matters because authoritarianism survives not only through force but through enforced common sense. If children grow up hearing one version, if schools repeat it, if media cannot challenge it, if survivors are shamed into silence, then the regime gets to build legitimacy on top of unburied fear. The dead remain politically useful long after they are gone. Then there is the economic myth, the one that still seduces analysts who want to talk about growth as if GDP can bleach a killing field. Yes, the Suharto era produced development indicators that some observers found impressive. Yes, foreign capital flowed. Yes, the regime courted technocrats and international institutions. But development under a dictatorship is not morally neutral accounting. The question is always: development for whom, under what conditions, with what coercion behind it, and with how much theft braided into the system? In Suharto's case, the answers are filthy. The regime became synonymous with corruption, patronage, monopolies, military business entanglement, and the enrichment of family and cronies on a gigantic scale. That means economic growth cannot be discussed honestly as a rebuttal to the violence. It was part of the regime's self justification and part of its extraction model. This was not simply a harsh ruler reluctantly getting his hands dirty so the country could industrialize. This was a political order where the ruler's family and connected elites built fortunes while regions at the margins absorbed repression and dissent got criminalized. If you treat the shopping malls, highways, and macroeconomic tables as evidence that the killings must somehow belong to a separate moral ledger, you are already doing propaganda work for the dictatorship. Corruption is not a side scandal in the Suharto file. It is central. The New Order became one of those systems where public office, military power, licensing, and commercial opportunity fused into a hierarchy of extraction. Family members, cronies, and loyal networks benefited enormously. Business access flowed through proximity to power. Institutions that should have constrained theft got bent into the same clientelist logic. And because the regime could still point to order and growth, a lot of international actors looked away. That is the usual bargain. If the trains run well enough, foreign investors get deals, and communists are dead, then many governments and corporations suddenly discover a high tolerance for corruption and repression. That kleptocratic structure matters because it shows the regime was not merely violent in order to secure development. It was violent in order to secure a political economy of theft. Licenses, monopolies, concessions, and state favor did not just stabilize Indonesia. They fed the ruling circle. The New Order kept telling the country it was sacrificing freedom for prosperity, but large sections of the prosperity were being privately harvested by people clustered around power. That is the old authoritarian fraud in its cleanest form: make the public pay the moral price for discipline while the rulers collect the financial upside. That international context is part of the crime and not merely the scenery around it. Western governments, especially the United States and its allies, treated Suharto's anti communism as a strategic asset. Cold War logic did enormous moral laundering here. If the regime sat on the right side of the ideological divide, the mass killing could be minimized, reframed, or quietly welcomed as unfortunate necessity. The same powers that loved to sermonize about freedom were quite capable of admiring a strongman who murdered leftists and opened markets. That is why Suharto's story is not only Indonesian. It is global. It shows how great power strategy and corporate appetite help turn atrocity into "stability." East Timor then blows apart any remaining fairy tale that the violence belonged only to the founding years. In 1975 Indonesia invaded, and the occupation that followed brought massive death through direct violence, displacement, hunger, and repression. The numbers again are contested in precise shape and morally damning in every serious account. Tens of thousands, perhaps far more, died under conditions created by invasion and occupation. That matters because it shows continuity. The regime that had come into being through anti communist mass killing was fully capable of exporting militarized domination to a smaller neighboring territory while still enjoying diplomatic cover from states too invested in their regional ally to care honestly about Timorese bodies. This is where the "strong but necessary" defense fully collapses. A government may claim emergency at home, but once it starts occupying weaker populations and normalizing military violence across borders, the pattern becomes obvious. Suharto's state was not reluctantly disciplined. It was structurally predatory. It used armed force as an ordinary political instrument, first to seize the national story, then to maintain the domestic order, and then to crush peripheral or inconvenient populations. That is not realism. That is empire in bureaucratic uniform. The victims in this file are not only the dead of 1965 66 and East Timor, though the dead are enough to damn the whole regime permanently. They include the imprisoned, the surveilled, the tortured, the censored, the disappeared, the politically silenced, the families forced to live under inherited stigma because a relative had been labeled communist, and the generations taught to keep their heads down because the state had once shown what it could do to categories of people it marked for elimination. That long fear is part of the harm. A dictatorship that successfully terrorizes memory steals more than lives. It steals the ability of survivors to speak openly about what was done to them. It also steals the public language available to later generations. When a regime polices memory long enough, even the grandchildren inherit damaged vocabulary. They learn to describe massacre as unrest, kleptocracy as growth, occupation as integration, and obedience as maturity. That is why historical correction matters so much in the Suharto file. The regime was not only killing people and stealing wealth. It was training the country to narrate those acts in safer words. Once that training sticks, the afterlife of the dictatorship extends well beyond the dictator's formal exit. And then there is the false legacy, which is still very much alive. Development authoritarian nostalgia is one of the most poisonous habits in modern political thought because it asks people to imagine that brutality can be redeemed by competent management. Suharto's defenders, softeners, or cautious weighers often want to say some version of this: yes, terrible things happened, but the economy grew, the state functioned, the country was more orderly, the alternatives were dangerous. That formula is a graveyard bargain. It treats human beings as acceptable input costs for macroeconomic tidiness. It lets the planner's eye replace the victim's eye. It says the roads and charts matter more than the rivers of blood that helped clear the political space for them. If you want the mechanism in one blunt sentence, here it is: Suharto turned anti communist slaughter into a founding asset and then sold the resulting dictatorship as disciplined development. That is why he belongs here. Not because he was the only Cold War butcher in a uniform, and not because every atrocity under his system can be collapsed into one line item, but because he stands as one of the clearest receipts for how mass murder, foreign approval, and economic mythmaking can fuse into a long authoritarian afterlife. The myth says Suharto was the hard modernizer Indonesia needed. The truth says he ruled through terror, censorship, corruption, and an origin story soaked in mass killing, then let the language of stability do the moral laundering. Strip away the investor praise, the Cold War excuses, the development tables, and the technocratic perfume, and what remains is a dictator whose order rested on the dead. That is the depravity on record. The myth is smaller now, the stink is stronger, and the body count is still the body count. See you in the next grave I have to dig up.