The Mysterious Fall of Soeharto: A Genre Analysis of Richard Mann’s Plots and Schemes that Brought Down Soeharto (PSBDS)

Abstract

The real cause of Soeharto’s fall from the Indonesian presidency remains a mystery. Richard Mann (1998) launched three significant rhetorical questions: (a) Was President Soeharto toppled by student demonstrators and people’s power? (b) Was he brought down by the withdrawal of support from the United States? (c) Or, was his sudden fall brought about by all of the two plus large doses of Oriental plotting and scheming? This article attempts to analyze Richard Mann’s PSBDS in terms of its macrostructure in order to find out the real cause of Soeharto’s fall. The analysis is substantiated by different resources as linguistic evidences, to justify the validity of the findings. The study revealed a proposition that critical reading is the key to successful comprehension of a text which may include a crosschecking with other resources, a careful identification of the generic structure of a text, and paying attention to how an author positions his or her readers. The article concludes, that in fact, Soeharto resigned from presidency on his own wisdom in order to avoid more bloodshed in Indonesian dreamland.