(Under)reporting Violence in the Cold War: British and Dutch Newspaper Coverage of the Indonesian Coup and Mass Killings of 1965-66.
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2026-01-15
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en
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This thesis investigates the British and Dutch newspaper representation of the 1965–1966 Indonesian crisis, focusing on the abortive coup and the subsequent mass killings of suspected communists. By applying a comparative framework based on Australian and American scholarship, the research analyzes a corpus of approximately 16,000 newspaper articles. The findings demonstrate a systemic marginalization of the massacres, which were frequently overshadowed by the political implications of the coup. Qualitatively, both presses obscured military responsibility by framing the violence as a chaotic cultural phenomenon, relying on tropes like 'amok' or as the work of religious fanatics. Influenced by rigid Cold War alignments, journalists uncritically disseminated army propaganda and dehumanization myths. Ultimately, the study concludes that ideological priorities superseded objective journalism, contributing to the Western "amnesia" and the moral justification of a political genocide.
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