New Books Podcast: Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia (John Roosa)

John Roosa’s Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) is a carefully crafted study that sheds light on the mechanics of mass murder and dispels a number of myths about this dark moment in Indonesian history. Based on decades of interviews and archival research the book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarly work on what some have termed a political genocide and what a 1968 CIA report called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”.

Roosa is an Associate Professor of history at the University of British Columbia. Buried Histories is a sequel to his previous book, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup D'État in Indonesia, the definitive political history of the event that set the Indonesian genocide in motion.

Click here to listen to Roosa in conversation with host Michael G. Vann, Professor of World History at California State University, Sacramento.