For someone who’s now more than ten years dead, Suharto still feels very much like the maximum leader of Indonesia’s wildly unequal political economy; the New Order is now far from new, but its power is everywhere still all too plain. The dictator, his family and followers, and the killers were never held accountable for their actions—and indeed assiduously sought, in the vein of right-authoritarian leaders everywhere, to depict themselves as the true victims of implacably hostile historical and cultural enemies. As a result, today’s Indonesia is still propping up a broad-ranging culture of impunity designed to benefit the country’s ruling elite.

Since Suharto vacated the scene in the 1990s, the country has received high marks for a successful transition to democracy, but on what terms and with what consequences? Democracy—understood in the broader, material sense as a set of meaningful protections of core civil rights such as the ability to earn and secure a sustainable wage across your adult working life—is largely a dead letter for most Indonesian workers. That’s no doubt why so many workers, abused and aggrieved by the capital flight of major garment brands like Jack Wolfskin and Uniqlo, typically fell silent or expressed a world-weary brand of fatalism any time I suggested that they might seek remedies through the Indonesian political system. They know that, despite certain nominal improvements to the electoral process, Indonesia’s politics remain an ominously well-armed plaything of factory owners and other moneyed interests.

As was the case during the Suharto dictatorship, there’s a rigid collaboration between politicians and Indonesian oligarchs. Business executives give money to politicians who win office by distributing money and goods to voters. When they win office, they steal state money to replace the capital they were provisionally given to fund their elections and pass laws that benefit their financial patrons. It’s an arrangement that’s bound to sound familiar to anyone following American politics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision striking down all functional limits on campaign finance in American elections.

Meanwhile, many members of Indonesia’s political, economic, and religious elite have direct ties to the massacres. Among countless examples, the country’s previous president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is a retired army officer who took part in the massacres.

The current president, Widodo, is running for reelection in April and may well lose to Prabowo Subianto, a former general who is a notorious alleged killer and human rights abuser. The son of a carpenter, Widodo is the first Indonesian president who doesn’t hail from the elite and is a force for some incremental and moderate reforms to the country’s corrupt political system and rapacious wage-theft–enabling economic order. At the same time, however, he’s been severely hemmed in by the military and some Islamic groups, even though at the outset of his term he took clear precautions against that outcome by selecting a conservative vice president and naming many military officers to key posts in his administration.

Nonetheless, the old oligarchy has launched an absurd but viciously effective smear campaign against him that accuses him of secretly being a Communist and an atheist. “The fear of being labeled a Communist is as strong now as it was at the height of the New Order,” Winters said. “This accusation is coming from conservative Islamic clerics and powerful elements of the military, the same people who were allied to carry out the 1965 massacres. These two actors disagree about some issues, and sometimes quite strongly, but they are united around the whisper campaign accusing Widodo of being a Communist.”

Indeed, the massacres of 1965 are rarely discussed in Indonesia, because nearly 54 years after the fact, there’s really no safe place to reckon with their legacy, beyond the farcical Jakarta memorial to the putative victims of the failed Communist coup. Various people I talked to said this key part of Indonesian history is not even taught in Indonesian schools.

The filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, who directed the stunning 2012 film The Act of Killing about 1965 and its consequences, told me he can’t safely travel to Indonesia anymore because he received too many death threats after his movie was released. The head of armed forces publicly warned people not to watch his 2014 follow-up documentary, The Look of Silence.

I asked Oppenheimer why the Indonesian slaughter had been all but airbrushed out of officially sanctioned history in Indonesia and in the United States alike. “Once Suharto achieved victory, the U.S. government went silent, especially given the scope of the killings, and the media presented it as a victory,” he said. “It’s hard to believe mass killings were put in a positive light. But it happened.”

“Once Suharto achieved victory, the U.S. government went silent, especially given the scope of the killings, and the media presented it as a victory. It’s hard to believe mass killings were put in a positive light. But it happened.”

This all leads directly back to another legacy of 1965—namely the fear that keeps workers from organizing to defend their rights and allows factory owners, apparel brands, and venal oligarchs like Schwarzman to beggar the poor and get away with wage theft. The national trauma that dates to 1965 is unresolved and deep seated. The police and military no longer really need to mete out violent discipline or threats of detention and arrest to workers contemplating rebellion on the factory floor. (Though it remains the case that factory owners continue to rely on state violence to intimidate workers throughout Indonesia, as the experience of Nurhayat in the Liebra struggle made all too clear.) The half-suppressed memory of the 1965 trauma usually supplies ample motivation for people to stay on line with punishing production quotas—and to drift into Indonesia’s vast postindustrial army of casualized service workers and scroungers once their factories lay them off and impound their severance and back pay to subsidize Stephen Schwarzman’s Neronic birthday revels.

In his remarkable book, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66, Geoffrey Robinson cites a wide range of countries, including Argentina, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chile, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, and South Africa, that had to confront and reckon with their own horrifying pasts of strongman impunity, untrammeled political violence, and exploitation at the hands of a globalized moneyed oligarchy. “While their records are certainly far from perfect,” he wrote, “all these countries have at least made some halting effort to come to grips with their violent pasts, to seek a shared understanding of that history through the formation of truth commissions, to bring at least some of the perpetrators to justice, to recognize and memorialize past crimes, and to provide some kind of reparations (or at least apology) to the victims of those crimes.”

But as Robinson notes, Indonesia ranks very badly in this regard, and is “in the company of a handful of states notorious for their evasion of meaningful human rights action.” Here he cited China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, “in connection with its genocide against indigenous peoples as well as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Nevertheless, even if Indonesian officialdom refuses to confront the massacres committed by Suharto—and even if the country’s elites may push the ghastly former general Subianto into office in the April election—at the grassroots level, people know what happened and who the perpetrators were. “People lost their loved ones, and they cope in different ways,” Hari Nugroho, a lecturer and researcher at University of Indonesia, told me in Jakarta. “They joined a religion or they kept silent.” And they took great pains to shield successor generations from any exposure to the massacres and their toxic political legacy. “That’s why a lot of young people don’t even know that the massacres happened.”