Cold war scripts: Comparing remembrance of the malayan emergency and the 1965 violence in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper contributes to a growing field of literature on Cold War culture by comparing struggles over memory in Indonesia and Malaysia of anti-communist repressions. It demonstrates the enduring legacies of the Cold War in these neighbouring countries where the war overlapped directly with experiences of colonization and decolonization. I show how and why anticommunism in both countries became a core foundation of both Malaysian and Indonesian nationalism and related religious identification and how this largely explains successive governments’ attempts to memorialize and defend these repressions. I argue that recent attempts by both survivors of the repression and younger Indonesians and ..