1d. Commies Make the Grass Grow

Genocide apologia is very cool

Apr 25, 2024

We saw Donald Howard claim in Exhibit 6 that "Biblical character" is expressed as "throwing out the communists." We learned that "throwing out the communists" was double speak for the murder, torture, rape, detention, and exiling of ~40,000 to 80,000 people. Undefined "anarchists forfeit their rights."

Before we go into his hatred for “homosexuals” in the next series, this point needs to be crystal clear. Namely that in Donald’s “Christian America” the LGBT+ community, racial minorities, intellectuals, atheists, uncorruptible journalists, and undefined Lefties would be rounded up and systemically purged from society. Nothing less than genocide would satisfy Donald’s god. And this time, 80,000 victims will look like child’s play. Back dropped by the fact that the education he authored is still indoctrinating children worldwide on Christian Nationalism, this is disturbing.

To set the tone for this installment, this is how you save a nation:

*just to belabor the point, I am not altering the emphasis in these Exhibits

Exhibit 27

What it will take TO SAVE A NATION is an open confrontation between Biblical theism and secular humanism, a confrontation in a private prayer closet which will move out into the streets in public.
To Save a Nation, page 180

Keep that in the back of your mind.

A confrontation “which will move out into the streets in public.”

For Exhibit 28, Donald Howard and I are swapping roles. This time, I'm going to give a brief history leading up to the events that Donald will report about in this Exhibit. I'm going to do so in the way Donald could and should have, were he an actual man of God relaying a true story in good-faith. When we finish my write-up, we'll read Donald's version of events. As always, his projection of reality does more to betray his bullshit than it serves to educate his audience.

I went a little over board with this post, given how little Donald wrote - the more I learned about the real story, the more fascinated I became. I’m still fairly brief about it, but I cover all the bases.

There is a Bibliography posted below if you want to learn more.

Quick rundown of Indonesia’s history up to 1965:

In 1511, colonial influences in the form of Spanish, Dutch, English, and German trade arrived in modern day Indonesia. By the early 1800s, the Dutch had cornered the region’s trade routes and markets, and began to establish political, colonial control of the region. In the early 1900s, Dutch royalty thought it best to begin providing the native people with a meager education to boost functionality in the region, but the plan backfired. As always, once you educate a person, they learn how to articulate ideas and they begin to think, “Gee, why are we exporting the products of our labor to a far-away oppressor for pennies on the dollar?” This new interest in political expression lead to the formation of Indonesia’s first political party in 1908. Around this time the people who called this region home began to find identity with the label “Indonesian.”

In 1920, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was formed.

President Sukarno was Indonesia’s first president. He was born in 1901, into this new era of ideas and political expression. Sukarno was blessed with educational opportunities and exposure to both Eastern and Western religions. He was influenced by teachers that adored him. He even learned 10 languages, to include Arabic, Japanese, English, German, and French. Involved in politics from an early age, he rebelled against Dutch colonial rule. For his independence agitation he spent two years in jail, and from 1933-1942 he lived in exile.

World War 2 was going on at the time, and the Japanese invaded the country in 1942. Sukarno welcomed them as “liberators,” and worked with the Japanese until the end of the war. He was tasked with bringing the Japanese army Indonesian prostitutes and other forms of free labor (slaves). He was a real piece of shit. Three years later, in the power vacuum that followed Japan’s surrender, Sukarno declared Indonesian independence. Though, it took some coercion by the Communist youth. In 1949, after two failed attempts by the Dutch to re-seize control, the Dutch finally acknowledged Indonesian independence. After decades of efforts, largely headed up by Sukarno, the nation was free from Imperialist control.

Except that it wasn’t.

South East Asia was a hotbed for violence and strife. Both world powers had an interest in ‘winning’ Indonesia. The Cold War was in full swing in the 1960s. Next door, the United States was committing war crimes in Vietnam, while the Soviets and Chinese were fanning the flames on the other end. Meanwhile, the British and Australians were using Malaysia in a proxy war against Sukarno’s regime. During all of this, young Indonesia was experiencing extreme drought, leading to famine conditions and starvation on a national scale.

None of that is an excuse for President Sukarno. He drug the country into ruin through gross negligence, egregious mismanagement, and corruption. He placed unqualified friends and family in positions of power. He further consolidated power by disbanding parliament, creating his doomed Guided-democracy. All the while living like a king while the citizenry starved.

All these trends and forces combined to make 1965-Indonesia a powder keg, placed inside a furnace.

That explosion took place on September 30th, 1965. On that day, the 30 September Movement assassinated six out of the eight army Generals. General Suharto, the senior surviving General, swiftly dispatched the perpetrators of the coup, and reclaimed Jakarta.

General Suharto claimed the coup was the work of Communists. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) claimed it was purely an army matter. While everyone has a different story, I am actually inclined to believe the Fascists that the original coup attempt was committed by a Communist faction within the army.

One, this guided democracy flew in the face of communist ideology, which was a huge piece of Sukarno’s political platform. For two, President Sukarno was failing to fend off imperialist influence in the region, disappointing anti-imperialist agitators. Many members of the Communist party had parents and siblings that grew up under the Japanese enslavement that Sukarno helped facilitate, so it didn’t take much to turn that portion of the population. Finally, President Sukarno was the living embodiment of everything Communist doctrine is opposed to - he lived a lavish lifestyle while his people died from hunger in the streets.

In response to this Communist coup, General Suharto performed a counter-coup. The General edged the President out of power. Sukarno’s authority as President became merely symbolic. Under General Suharto, paramilitary gangs like the Pancasila Youth committed war crimes on their neighbors at will. Think Hitler Youth, but under the direct command of Josef Mengele. They raped, burned alive, carved up, and plundered their fellow citizens, just because they were “godless Communists.” They targeted intellectuals, journalists, atheists, suspected communists and their sympathizers, and ethnic Chinese.

Politicide and genocide have a little meet-cute any time a Fascist is in charge. Consider Hitler branding the Jews as Socialists.

Somewhere between 400,000 and 2 million people were subjected to the absolute depravity that comes from the mental illness named Nationalism. Because the army used extrajudicial gangs to carry out this liquidation, few official government records shed any sort of light on the death toll. You could murder your neighbor and claim later he was a Communist and you’d get a pat on the back. No questions asked. Murder was especially useful in making sure that you weren’t suspected as a Communist - the more lavish the brutality, the better.

Family and friends would just disappear, leaving the rest to assume the worst, which was unimaginable. I watched “The Act of Killing” in preparation for this. I do not recommend subjecting yourself to that film, despite it being a stellar feat of journalism by Joshua Oppenheimer. To summarize what you will see if you choose to watch it, I’m going to quote Anwar Congo. He claimed to have personally murdered and tortured over 1000 people:

“We can make somethings even more sadistic than what you see in movies about the Nazis.”

I feel like quoting him further would just be gratuitous. Misery porn.

The Pancasila Youth, to this day, have a weird fascination with being shittier humans than Nazis.

Running parallel to Indonesia’s social and geopolitical timeline in the 1960s was a controversial Presbyterian revival. Controversial in the sense that, the revival was based, almost entirely, on reports of incredible miracles coming out of the region. People claimed to have walked on water, exercised the demons, cured illness and cancer, and some even received visitations from Jesus himself.

Claims of the “conversion of witchdoctors who saw power encounters when the teams’ prayers banished demons, rendering the witchdoctors powerless.”[1]

Yeesh.

First off, I’m immediately suspicious of people that have to sell their Christian testimony for profit. Donald’s primary source was Mel Tari. He made millions of dollars peddling these fantasies in the form of book sales, televangelism tours, speaking events, and donations. In 1983 he began a long con on a personal friend of his, stealing $475,000. He was convicted in 1994, having to repay the 475k plus another $250,000 in damages.

Super Christ-like.

Further, the eye-witness testimony of Kurt E. Koch should immediately raise eye-brows. Not just for the previously mentioned need for greed, but because he was the most biased source there’s ever been. Early on in the revival, American newspapers and churches relied heavily on the testimony of Dr Koch. Here are some qualifications for this fella:

He had a doctorate in theology from University of Tübingen, specializing in mental health
His pals considered him an occultist expert…

That’s it.

For no reason at all, here a few of the books he wrote:

Demonology: Past and Present: Identifying and Overcoming Demonic Strongholds
The Lure of the Occult: 193 Case studies of Occult Enslavement and Deliverance
Occult Bondage and Deliverance: Counseling the Occultly Oppressed

This paper on jstor.org explains how Dr Koch was a central figure in popularizing the Satanic Panic. He spread disinformation, positing that the Devil was behind all mental illness, to include Communist sympathies.

There is substantial evidence that convincing people (especially children) of their demonic possession can lead to mental illness. While I have no proof directly linking Dr. Koch with any particular person’s mental illness, his tactics were unethical at best. One such tactic to break demonic possession in children was to convince them that their parents were the source of their possession, separating families. Separating children from their parents is cult leader 101 stuff. He even went so far as to claim that anyone who was resistant to conversion was possessed by the devil. Very dangerous stuff, especially from someone speaking with the authority of a mental health specialist.

If you’ve never read The Crucible by Arthur Miller, it’s one of my favorite books. It’s a dramatized story of the Salem Witch Trials from the perspective of the victims and it’s horrifying.

Anyway.

Beyond Dr Koch, the totality of those claiming to have seen these demonic possessions and exorcisms already had strong religious beliefs in the physical manifestations of spiritual beings. Given his manipulative tactics and the lack of documentation corroborating Koch’s account - I’m not buying it.

To be clear, I’m not cherry picking two random assholes here. Mel Tari was Donald’s primary source, and Dr. Koch was his secondary, indirect source.

Now, before we check in on Donald’s version of events, let’s recall how you save a nation:

Exhibit 27

What it will take TO SAVE A NATION is an open confrontation between Biblical theism and secular humanism, a confrontation in a private prayer closet which will move out into the streets in public.
To Save a Nation, page 180

Exhibit 28

*Donald dates the following story as the 16th of September. It was the 26th. The one time he tried to write something true, and he waffled it with a typo. God really does have a sense of humor

“Get back to the simplicity of the Word of God.”
World Awakening, page 100, 101

Right off the rip he claimed that the Muslims, not Christians, averted the coup.

One sentence later, the tune starts to change. You see, every argument Donald ever made banked entirely on “illustrated principles” (his version of parables, remember his Christ-complex from post 1b), or loosely correlated timelines without evidence of causation. Donald would have you believe that, in a country of ~90,000,000 (in 1965), people were spared a Communist coup because 1000 people converted to Christ, four days prior to said coup. No further evidence of causation was provided. Just a loosely connected timeline and a conclusion.

Again, all after giving credit (so to speak) to the Muslims.

Wildly enough, there was a causal relationship between Christian conversions and the following coups. Only, it was the Fascist coup that played the leading role in this relationship, imposing it’s will on the Communist coup and the Christian revival. The Christian revival was fueled by brutality of the Fascists.

Here are four reasons that Christianity surged in the country, following the attempted Communist coup, and the successful Fascist coup:

Starting in 1965, all Indonesian citizens had to declare a religion on their identity cards. So, suddenly, millions of people who weren’t religious at all had to choose between Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. Most of this demographic chose Christianity as a silent protest against the Muslim controlled government who was making them choose. Neither Indonesia, nor Donald count Catholics as Christians, but he does so here to make his 23 million stat work. This stat is further deceptive because between 1965 and 1988, when Donald is reporting this 23 million number, the population of Indonesia nearly doubled. The Christians and the Muslims have maintained their respective population shares since 1950, suggesting that the Christian population growth is due to natural population exchange, rather than a “mighty wind.” It just makes his little brag about embarrassing the Muslims super cringe.
A secondary reason for this growth in the Christian population was the famine. Once General Suharto took over, he allowed western Christian missionaries to bring in foreign aid in the form of food, medicine, and education. This naturally swayed some of the population towards Christian sympathies. This influx of foreign Christians who made Indonesia their permanent home also boosted the Christian population.
Third, Communists declared for Christianity to potentially gain optical safety. Christianity was seen as a western religion. The idea being that maybe western newspapers would have some sympathy for fellow Christians, even if they were accused of Communism. If the Fascists murdered too many Christians, they ran the risk of losing Western support and missionary aid. Further, Christians were actually known for being nice to Communists at the time, and opposed to the genocide. Shocking, I know. Christians in Indonesia at the time were essentially hiding Jews and Gypsies in their attics. The fact that this wasn’t Donald’s focus screams to me that he was intentionally running cover for yet another Fascist purge of “Lefties.”
This one is the most damning to Donald’s claim about Muslim converting to Christianity. The barbarity of this “intervention of God” that “prevented the Communist coup” cannot be overstated. Many practicing Muslims converted to Christianity out of pure revulsion for this genocide being committed, often in the name of Islam. Plain and simple. It’s not unlike Christians leaving the church in America today, because, honey, that shit looks absolutely nothing like the Jesus we were told about.

To be clear, I am not claiming that Muslims are inherently violent, or trying to spread xenophobic fears. The population of Indonesia was 88.7% Muslim, and Christians were hardly in places of political or military power. It’s as accurate of a generalization as you can make, in this case.

What I am claiming is that the Christian revival in Indonesia and the simultaneous purge of Lefties had a very strong causal relationship. The purge was the primary factor in this relationship, imposing it’s will on the revival. The terror of the genocide and the laws enacted at this time affected the revival, and there is zero evidence that this relationship worked in the other direction.

Donald wrote his report about the 30 September Movement and its fallout in 1988 - 23 years after the event. The information was there. Other than the US involvement in the genocide, and maybe the proxy war in Malaysia, he had all of this knowledge when he wrote his version of events. Possibly more so since he had access to Mel Tari.

If I could summarize Donald with any Exhibit, it would be 28. He set the scene in 2 sentences, told an anecdotal story, and then concluded that God hates Communism. All to whitewash a genocide.

There is but one reason to make a gang rape about a Christian revival. One reason to make dictators like Pinochet out to be the victim. And when the person doing these things is a Christian Nationalist, that one reason goes without saying.

I have one more Exhibit for you:

Exhibit 29

In chapter 17 of II Chronicles, it says, “. . . he (Jehoshaphat) walked in the first ways of his father David, and sought not unto Ba-al-im.” In verse 4, “But sought to the Lord . . . and walked in his commandments.” Verse 6, “And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the Lord: . . . he took away the high places and groves out of Judah,” that is, all the false religion. He took out all the false cults. He ran off all the liberals off and really cleaned up the nation.
To Save a Nation, page 163

We get it, you want liberals murdered.

"Everything that I did, all that I carried out, all the problems I had, I dedicate to God, all this I dedicate to Chile because this permitted that the country was not communist and arose as it is today." — Augusto Pinochet

The Act of Killing by documentary film-maker Werner Herzog and Joshua Oppenheimer

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2014/joshua-oppenheimer

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/asia/indonesia-cables-communist-massacres.html

“The U.S. was following what was happening very closely, and if it weren’t for its support, you could argue that the army would never have felt the confidence to take power.”

“P.K.I. members are classified as lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing a chicken.” [always with the atheism; Godless Commies]

“The extrajudicial killings spread beyond suspected Communists to target ethnic Chinese, students, union members and anyone who might have personal feuds with the hit men.”

[Religion]

https://brill.com/view/journals/mist/36/2/article-p191_4.xml

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/28/5-facts-about-muslims-and-christians-in-indonesia/

https://www.indonesia-investments.com/culture/religion/islam/item248

https://www.indonesia-investments.com/culture/religion/christianity/item249

https://www.ijesd.org/papers/28-D437.pdf

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/01/22/step-freedom-religion-and-belief-indonesia

{Mel Tari}

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-30-me-10331-story.html

LA Times: “In another book, “The Kingdom,” Tari later wrote that he had been reluctant to evangelize in Tonga because, “I knew that going into those countries would never produce a single penny.””

https://revival-library.org/histories/1965-soe-timor-mel-tari/

https://romans1015.com/1965-timor-revival/