In 1965 Indonesia had the largest communist movement in the world outside of the Soviet Union and the People s Republic of China. Indonesian President Sukarno supported the movement and was edging Indonesia towards socialism, when a mutiny coordinated by D. N. Aidit, chairperson of the Indonesian Communist Party, was launched on the last day of September 1965, and the backlash destroyed the movement. As Max Lane describes in "Catastrophe in Indonesia," though this attempt to replace the anti-communist army leadership was organized without the knowledge of the communist party, the army...