Jess Melvin’s new book, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide, has been rightly hailed as a breakthrough. Uncovering the actors behind the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists (as well as the country’s Chinese racial minority), Melvin punctures a hole in the prevailing story about the 1965–66 genocide.

The Indonesian state has always claimed that any killing of communists or leftists was both limited and the result of spontaneous anticommunist anger among ordinary people. It was not, officials have insisted, systematic or carried out by the Army.

Most existing academic scholarship, although more varied and nuanced than the official state version, has lent credence to that account. In this telling, President Sukarno, an autocratic left reformer, was attempting to balance the massive Communist Party of Indonesia (which he was partial toward) and the army (which was hostile to the Communist Party). Then things became unbalanced, and spiraled out of control. The mass killings might have been regrettable, but they were the result of Sukarno’s inability to walk this perilous tightrope.