Grace Leksana
This chapter describes how anti-communist persecution in Indonesia has persisted from the violent events in 1965-1968 to the present. One reason for the long-term persistence of anti-communist sentiments has been the construction of anti-communist memory. Through a micro-case study of a village in East Java, this chapter examines the dynamics of anti-communist memory which reflects some of the complexities of social structure and local agency. Its main argument is that although the state constructed and sustains Indonesia's national anti-communist memory, local communities do not always internalize that construction. The ways that they remember the anti-communist violence in 1965-68 have been determined by how it was entangled, at the time and afterwards, with local dynamics, such as patronage relations and the post-violence rural transformation. © The Author(s) 2020.
Malang State University, Malang, Indonesia
