PEER HOLM JORGENSEN
Author and publisher Peer Holm Jorgensen was born in Aars, Denmark, and grew up in Copenhagen and Vendsyssel.
At age 16 he left school and travelled the world on merchant vessels, acquiring a rare perspective on the vast varieties of politics, societies and human nature across the globe, in a time of international turmoil and conflicts.
Since then, he worked his way up in the corporate system of a giant international shipping company, left it to engage in moviemaking, joined and took over a computer company before selling it, joined and took over a consultancy company before selling it, worked as an independent consultant specialized in crises management in France, UK, Germany and Spain, as a CEO in Madrid and Hamburg, and as a President of a French company.
Leaving the management business, he returned to Denmark and founded the publishing house Isotia, in order to publish books connecting the past and the future of mankind.
BOOKS
“Back-Log” – Aschehoug, Copenhagen, 2000
A dramatized edition of Peers experiences when cutting a French industrial
company into half size by doing a “Plan Social” under the very special French
labor regulations in a small town depending on the company.
“Må Gud bevare America” - Isotia, 2006
The title “May God save America” isn’t a hope or a question to be answered. Peer
leaves it to the reader to decide.
The novel is based on historical facts, present events, Peers own experiences
with USA during 45 years and with Americans in the States and around the world.
The story takes off a year before a presidential election and takes us through
the candidates’ campaigns, caucuses, and primaries until Election Day with all
what it takes.
The main character is a female, Ester Carpenter, 42, with a white father, who
was killed in Vietnam and a black mother, who died from being wounded in the
Selma-to-Montgomery march on Bloody Sunday.
DEN GLEMTE MASSAKRE
(THE FORGOTTEN MASSACRE)
(Isotia, Denmark, 2007)
“… maybe. Maybe we
did it, I have forgotten …”
- William Colby, director of CIA Southeast-Asia Division 1962-67 in 1990.
The novel is based on the authors personal
experiences in Indonesia during the last four month of 1965 at the time when the
Sukarno regime was overthrown by the generals under command of the later
president Suharto supported by the CIA.
It is a novel introducing a reality most people would hope does not exist.
The novel relays two parallel tracks:
In one of them we follow the CIA’s involvement and the background of the
organization.
In the other we follow the main character, Kasper, Danish seaman, age 19, and
his friends at the same age, through the disaster.
THE CIA
Through the CIA track in novel we are introduced to the organizations background
and role in the massacre.
The novel also presents the social culture in Indonesia, a nation that, even
being raped for hundreds of years by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British,
still believed so much in the West that they after World War Two, wrote in parts
of the US’s declaration of independence into their own constitution, especially
the part of human rights, and made big posters with quotations from the
Gettysburg speech prepared to welcome the Americans as a new allied.
But the Americans never arrived. Not even after Sukarno called Washington. They
did not even reply.
At least not until 1958 where Sukarno had turned his back to the West and had
nearly fallen in love with Mao, at that time doing his experiment with almost
half of mankind.
It led CIA to attempt establishing paramilitary groups on Sumatra, at the same
time as their fourth secret army attacked east Indonesia from CIA bombers
stationed on Clark at the Philippines. The attempt failed when a contract pilot,
Pope, was shot down by an Indonesian navy ship and identified as an American.
The secret armies were one of CIA’s instruments to get its own politics carried
through independent of political and public opinions.
After taking over the Office of Strategic Services, created in 1942, who’s
personnel was convinced that they were called to manipulate mankind in the
interest of mankind, CIA designed the Mighty Wurlitzer.
A Wurlitzer is a machine used at theatres to make different sounds like
raindrops falling on a roof, a cars engine driving by etc. It became the term
for the CIA news department making news to be used to get things running their
way everywhere. And it worked. The news was published through well respected
news agencies all over the world. The biggest task those days was to get
thousands of Americans to travel thousand of miles to fight a war in Vietnam,
which wasn’t about defending the homeland.
However in the early sixties a number of
American politicians were promoting that the US should be softer on the
communist issue. According to them it would pay off.
This made the CIA call on the British Foreign Office and their division of
development, who in two weeks sat up an office in Singapore to produce fake news
about Indonesia.
The interests of the British were to fulfill an agreement from 1963 between
Kennedy and McMillian to get rid of Sukarno at a convenient time.
In Indonesia a CIA agent at the American
embassy had worked out lists of 5000 names of the most important communists to
be killed.
CIA supplied a tape to President Sukarno, in which the generals discuss their
plan of overthrowing the President in early October, as he in their opinion had
become too happy to work with the Communist Party.
The content of this tape led to the coup d’état by colonel Untung, head of the
palace guard, in order to be ahead of the generals and to protect Sukarno.
As planned by the CIA, the Communists, who was not involved at all, were accused
of killing six generals and the army got their reason to start the bloodshed
CIA handed over the lists of the 5000 persons they would like to be killed and
used the lists later to check the outcome.
In the shadows of the American War in Vietnam
the CIA without engaging a single man on the battlefield in Indonesia had won
their victory to get American businesses back to the brightest shining jewel in
Asia by the killings of a million people in four months without anybody in the
West lifting an eyebrow.
Media clip about the massacre:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4gZZXK2CiM
KASPER
Kasper grows up in Denmark in the shadows of the Cold War learning the lesson
that the Americans are the good guys and the Communists the bad ones. When 16 of
age he joins the merchant navy to see the world. Three years later, after a
couple of voyages around the world, he has lost his heart to Indonesia and its
people.
In September 1965 he is by chance in Djakarta, when a coup d’état takes place
killing six generals. Without being involved the Communist Party is accused to
be the coup plotters.
Headed by the later president Suharto, the army launch a merciless huntdown of
members of the Communist Party.
Soon everything turns into chaos. During four months Indonesia becomes the scene
of one of the most brutal mass murder in the 20th century, but the outside world
hear almost nothing about it.
Nobody knows that the cards has been dealt by the CIA, who ever since has done
their best to let the truth of one million killed Indonesians disappear.
The story presents what individuals are able to do to each other, without
wanting to do it, when a superpower plays Russian roulette with a foreign nation
and its people.
In 1965 the world is full of opportunities
for five young people going from teenagers to grown ups. They are the Dane
Kasper, Dutch-Indonesian Nadia, East German Thomas, Indonesian Jimmy and his
sister Sophia.
In the story we get deep into the life of the five, their backgrounds and we
follow the five exchanging their dreams, hopes and plans for the future,
developing friendships and their fall into love, while the voice of the massacre
signs in the background, in a world where the only reason to be a member of the
Communists Youth is to go to their Saturday evening dances. But this shows to be
not only their own death penalty, but also their families’.
Soon the five depend on each other trying to survive.
The question is whether they, across their
different ethnic backgrounds, culture, political observations, moral, Christian
and Islamic religion, and the lack of same can trust each other?
As a reviewer displayed
“… a shocking human document about organized inhumanity, but at the same time
sensitive and touching as a novel telling of the development of a young man …”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE TWO FIRST CHAPTERS
REVIEWS: (Danish)
http://politiken.dk/boger/article454559.ece
http://www.nordjyske.dk/Nyheder/kultur.aspx?ctrl=10&data=6%2C2623835%2C5%2C4