The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 Hardcover - 2018

From the rear cover

"Of the world's mass killings since 1945, the genocide in Indonesia stands out as remaining unfamiliar to many, and still presenting unsolved questions while possessing high death tolls. This book is essential for understanding the Indonesian tragedy and why humans sometimes do terrible things on a vast scale."--Jared Diamond, University of California, Los Angeles

"The Killing Season left me heartbroken. I've spent fifteen years exposing the consequences of impunity for Indonesia's genocide, and it was a painful catharsis to read this, the first morally honest, timelessly brilliant history of the killings as a whole. Geoffrey Robinson's tone is a mixture of gentleness, empathy, and quiet anger--as though he knows Indonesia's terrible silence can only be broken with grace. But this book also breaks an American silence, for Robinson reveals that the massacres would never have happened without U.S. support: this genocide is an American crime too. The Killing Season is a breathtaking, essential book."--Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

"Finally, a full accounting of one of the most brutal events in twentieth-century history. Geoffrey Robinson's The Killing Season documents, in chilling detail, the mass murder of half a million Indonesians between 1965 and 1966. Based on fine-grained research, Robinson's book is a model of analytical and moral clarity, shining a damning light on U.S. complicity in the atrocity. This is a tour de force."--Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia

"This elegantly written and carefully crafted book provides the single most sustained and systematic evaluation of the competing and contradictory theories concerning the coup which helped to precipitate the mass killings of late 1965 and early 1966 in Indonesia. Robinson's arguments are clear, coherent, and compelling, and the evidence presented is impressively well-documented. This is the definitive account of a highly important aspect of Indonesian history."--John T. Sidel, London School of Economics and Political Science

"This masterful and engrossing book illuminates the mass violence and incarceration that took place during the transition to the three-decade Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. Displaying a superb command of Indonesian history and sources, The Killing Season is an important corrective to conventional wisdom about a little-known genocidal campaign that destroyed an estimated 500,000 victims."--Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science

Media reviews

Citations

• Kirkus Reviews, 12/15/2017, Page 0
• Publishers Weekly, 02/26/2018, Page 0