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The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.
In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.
In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 19, 2020
About the author
Vincent Bevins
4 books541 followersVincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist. He reported for the Financial Times in London, then served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, before covering Southeast Asia for the Washington Post.
His first book, The Jakarta Method, came out in 2020. Bevins lives in São Paulo.
His first book, The Jakarta Method, came out in 2020. Bevins lives in São Paulo.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,485 reviews
May 28, 2020
I am an Indonesian, was born in the ‘70s. My dad was a 24-year old high-school teacher in 1965 when G30S movement broke our country Indonesia. He later told me that then, he witnessed innocent men with communist affiliation were brought to our village cemetery to be slaughtered.
"Were these men atheists?" the 12-year old me asked. I was told in school that the communists were evil and having no religions.
"No. I knew some of them personally. They prayed at the village temples just like other Balinese men do," replied my dad.
I was oblivious to politics and to me, history classes were just regurgitation of facts and dates that were fed to us by higher ups. I only knew that on 30 September 1965, seven army generals were murdered by the communist party, and later, General Suharto restored order and led the nation through an unprecedented period of economic growth. Every year I was directed to watch the same gory propaganda movie made by his regime. I was even briefly in awe of Suharto's children for being able to manage so many "successful businesses". Only by the time I was in college, it was apparent to me that Suharto was no angel and that he committed a major crime against humanity and enriched his family beyond belief.
I read the book "The Jakarta Method" over a weekend and it blew my mind. Vincent Bevins, the author and also a US journalist nonetheless, went a great length to dig up facts on coup d’états—that were supported by the CIA—in Indonesia, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, and 18 other countries, also the memories of ordinary people whose lives had been disrupted, no, destroyed by the events. Bevins's narrative convincingly describes how the turmoil in Indonesia was not an isolated incident, but the biggest puzzle piece of US anticommunism strategy in the Third World, that is to make sure none of the newly independent countries fall into Soviet's hands. In the First World, the memories of Cold War consisted mainly of the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, and the nuclear threats. These events are often depicted in novels and Hollywood movies. For the residents of the Third World, the terrors from both US-supported and the Soviet/China-supported regimes (they are not innocent, either) are much more concrete.
The most important insight from the book is about the legacy of the events in present day Indonesia. Even though G30S happened 55 years ago and the Cold War ended 30 years ago, I can still see Suharto's New Order era everywhere. The book mentioned about the persistence of the covering up of the atrocities and the continuous blaming on the communist party in the history school books, the censure of any public discussions about communism, as well as labelling many social activists as "communists". Land reform, the main political agenda of the communist party, was never implemented, with most of the land under the control of palm oil tycoons who previously cleared the forests and sold the timbers. West Papua is still the army's playground; their land and resources exploited by foreign corporations and their people terrorized.
I wish this book, together with the movie "Act of Killing" and "Look of Silence", can become part of the history curriculum for Indonesian high school students. I do not think this will happen with the current government, so I will just make sure my own children and everyone that really want to understand about modern Indonesia to read this book.
"Were these men atheists?" the 12-year old me asked. I was told in school that the communists were evil and having no religions.
"No. I knew some of them personally. They prayed at the village temples just like other Balinese men do," replied my dad.
I was oblivious to politics and to me, history classes were just regurgitation of facts and dates that were fed to us by higher ups. I only knew that on 30 September 1965, seven army generals were murdered by the communist party, and later, General Suharto restored order and led the nation through an unprecedented period of economic growth. Every year I was directed to watch the same gory propaganda movie made by his regime. I was even briefly in awe of Suharto's children for being able to manage so many "successful businesses". Only by the time I was in college, it was apparent to me that Suharto was no angel and that he committed a major crime against humanity and enriched his family beyond belief.
I read the book "The Jakarta Method" over a weekend and it blew my mind. Vincent Bevins, the author and also a US journalist nonetheless, went a great length to dig up facts on coup d’états—that were supported by the CIA—in Indonesia, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, and 18 other countries, also the memories of ordinary people whose lives had been disrupted, no, destroyed by the events. Bevins's narrative convincingly describes how the turmoil in Indonesia was not an isolated incident, but the biggest puzzle piece of US anticommunism strategy in the Third World, that is to make sure none of the newly independent countries fall into Soviet's hands. In the First World, the memories of Cold War consisted mainly of the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, and the nuclear threats. These events are often depicted in novels and Hollywood movies. For the residents of the Third World, the terrors from both US-supported and the Soviet/China-supported regimes (they are not innocent, either) are much more concrete.
The most important insight from the book is about the legacy of the events in present day Indonesia. Even though G30S happened 55 years ago and the Cold War ended 30 years ago, I can still see Suharto's New Order era everywhere. The book mentioned about the persistence of the covering up of the atrocities and the continuous blaming on the communist party in the history school books, the censure of any public discussions about communism, as well as labelling many social activists as "communists". Land reform, the main political agenda of the communist party, was never implemented, with most of the land under the control of palm oil tycoons who previously cleared the forests and sold the timbers. West Papua is still the army's playground; their land and resources exploited by foreign corporations and their people terrorized.
I wish this book, together with the movie "Act of Killing" and "Look of Silence", can become part of the history curriculum for Indonesian high school students. I do not think this will happen with the current government, so I will just make sure my own children and everyone that really want to understand about modern Indonesia to read this book.
July 3, 2021
This book is a painful read. But it should be made compulsory all the same. The year before the pandemic I went to Indonesia for the first time, to Bali. We had meant to go to the central coast of New South Wales, but the bush fires that swept Australia at the time made that impossible. On our last night we went to a restaurant that faced the setting sun. I have a photograph on my wall of me and my friend smiling together while a stranger snapped us against the backdrop of the sky ablaze. All very symbolic, with the sun setting on the final day of our week away.
The restaurant is called Ku De Ta. Get it? What I didn’t know at the time was that the beach in front of the restaurant had been one of the Indonesia’s killing fields and our smiling and ordering expensive food and drinks was a bit like dancing on the graves of those who had dreamt of a fairer, more equal Indonesia – people I would rather think of as my brothers and sisters. About 5% of Bali’s population were murdered during the coup. Sometimes, even today, skulls appear out of the sand. As Aristotle liked to say, call no man happy till he dies – I cannot think of another event in my life where so lovely a memory has been spoilt quite so completely. Needless to say, there are no plaques or any other references to the slaughter that occurred there to be seen. If this book hopes to achieve anything at all, it is for the million or so Indonesians who were murdered to be acknowledged and remembered. It hardly seems too much to ask.
What happened in Indonesia was central to the Cold War, certainly not a side-show and ‘local issue’. Those of us in the west who would otherwise just shrug it off or to pretend it was just one of those things that happened, really ought to read this book.
“A million Indonesians did you say? Oh well, did you know Amok is a Malaysian word – that’s obviously what happened, the natives ran amok and killed each other. They aren’t at all like us, of course. What with all of their violent and primitive passions… I blame all that hot sun.”
This book makes it clear that the excursion into inhumanity that was the coup in Indonesia would have been impossible without the active encouragement, planning and support of western governments. From the supplying weapons and military training, our economic punishments unless the military ‘did the right thing’ and ‘finished the job’, even down to our supplying of the names and addresses of members of the Indonesian Communist Party so as to facilitate their slaughter, western powers were up to their eyes in responsibility for this act of mass murder. But, as they say, the winners get to write history – or rather, write out history if it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The Indonesian Communist Party had the largest membership of any Communist party in Asia. But it was not preparing for armed insurrection. Rather it was happy to participate in the parliamentary democracy of the country. The Chinese Communist Party warned their comrades in Indonesia that only bad things would come from this strategy – that the west, and the CIA in particular, would show no mercy to them. But the Indonesian Party ignore this advice. They paid an incredibly heavy price for this level of trust. When the coup began, members of the Indonesian Communist Party sought the protection of the police and the army. That is, they literally ran into the arms of those intending to slaughter them.
Australia actively supported the murder. Shortly after the coup the Australian Prime Minister went to New York and joked at a dinner he was giving a speech at, “with 500,000 to 1,000,000 Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” The Australian Labor Party was also relieved by the events in Indonesia, with the leader of the party mostly credited as being our most progressive Prime Minister ever (and who was, ironically enough, also likely to have been removed with the aid of the CIA) saying Indonesia falling to communism would have proven a tragedy for Australia. Australia’s involvement in this act of mass murder is not discussed at all in this book – it is also a topic that is never referred to here either. Much the same silence on a million deaths as is the case with US involvement too.
What this book makes clear is that what was to happen in Indonesia wasn’t only about Indonesia. Many other nations were exposed to the ‘Jakarta Method’ – that is, to coups organised by the US and western powers that involved the crushing of democratic governments in nations seeking economic and national independence. These governments were invariably replaced by grossly repressive regimes that proved remarkably receptive to the demands of multinational corporations.
These regimes would often refer, completely openly, to the Jakarta Method – that is, the military leadership would boast that they were going to take over the country and murder left-wing and progressives following the play book of the Indonesian military. Latin America is riddled with regimes that have ‘disappeared’ their citizens. That is something else I learnt from this book – the psychological point of disappearing people. You see, as Alan Price sings,
“Hope springs eternal in a young man’s breast, and he dreams of a better life ahead, without that dream you are nothing, nothing, nothing. You’ve got to find out for yourself that dream is dead.”
And the same holds true for families of the disappeared. The military appears in the night. A son or father or sister or mother is dragged out of their bed and the family are told they are to be brought somewhere for questioning. They might have their hands tied behind their backs and then be dropped from a helicopter into the ocean. But the family are never told if they are alive or died. And so the family do not protest, because their loved one might just still be alive. To protest might be the straw that forces the authorities to kill them. So, you remain quiet. It seems clear that this is an active strategy of the CIA, it repeats itself too frequently to be anything other.
The worst of this is how sad it is when leaders seeking their own national liberation try to remind the US of the US’s own history, their own war against the British, of freedom and equality and… but the mistake is to believe that a nation truly believes its own bullshit, or that ‘all men are created equal’ applies to black or brown skinned people.
The author makes it clear that we create the monsters we fight – that is, our actions make it impossible for our enemies to be anything more than our propaganda paints them to be. After what happened in Indonesia, no communist party would be foolish enough to trust in parliamentary democracy as a path to national liberation. That would be insane. They would have to assume the CIA was looking for any excuse to empower reactionary forces to exterminate anyone looking even ‘a little’ too left. And since ‘too left’ was effectively defined as doing anything that sought to counter national humiliation and prostrate subservience, this left a lot of scope for mass murder, oppression and even effective genocide.
That we are never told these stories goes a long way to confirm us as the victors. Our ignorance allows us to drink Mojitos while watching a nearly perfect sunset, over the unmarked and unremarked graves of what had been the one-in-twenty people of the island we are visiting without having their ghosts inconvenience the last night of our holiday.
The restaurant is called Ku De Ta. Get it? What I didn’t know at the time was that the beach in front of the restaurant had been one of the Indonesia’s killing fields and our smiling and ordering expensive food and drinks was a bit like dancing on the graves of those who had dreamt of a fairer, more equal Indonesia – people I would rather think of as my brothers and sisters. About 5% of Bali’s population were murdered during the coup. Sometimes, even today, skulls appear out of the sand. As Aristotle liked to say, call no man happy till he dies – I cannot think of another event in my life where so lovely a memory has been spoilt quite so completely. Needless to say, there are no plaques or any other references to the slaughter that occurred there to be seen. If this book hopes to achieve anything at all, it is for the million or so Indonesians who were murdered to be acknowledged and remembered. It hardly seems too much to ask.
What happened in Indonesia was central to the Cold War, certainly not a side-show and ‘local issue’. Those of us in the west who would otherwise just shrug it off or to pretend it was just one of those things that happened, really ought to read this book.
“A million Indonesians did you say? Oh well, did you know Amok is a Malaysian word – that’s obviously what happened, the natives ran amok and killed each other. They aren’t at all like us, of course. What with all of their violent and primitive passions… I blame all that hot sun.”
This book makes it clear that the excursion into inhumanity that was the coup in Indonesia would have been impossible without the active encouragement, planning and support of western governments. From the supplying weapons and military training, our economic punishments unless the military ‘did the right thing’ and ‘finished the job’, even down to our supplying of the names and addresses of members of the Indonesian Communist Party so as to facilitate their slaughter, western powers were up to their eyes in responsibility for this act of mass murder. But, as they say, the winners get to write history – or rather, write out history if it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The Indonesian Communist Party had the largest membership of any Communist party in Asia. But it was not preparing for armed insurrection. Rather it was happy to participate in the parliamentary democracy of the country. The Chinese Communist Party warned their comrades in Indonesia that only bad things would come from this strategy – that the west, and the CIA in particular, would show no mercy to them. But the Indonesian Party ignore this advice. They paid an incredibly heavy price for this level of trust. When the coup began, members of the Indonesian Communist Party sought the protection of the police and the army. That is, they literally ran into the arms of those intending to slaughter them.
Australia actively supported the murder. Shortly after the coup the Australian Prime Minister went to New York and joked at a dinner he was giving a speech at, “with 500,000 to 1,000,000 Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” The Australian Labor Party was also relieved by the events in Indonesia, with the leader of the party mostly credited as being our most progressive Prime Minister ever (and who was, ironically enough, also likely to have been removed with the aid of the CIA) saying Indonesia falling to communism would have proven a tragedy for Australia. Australia’s involvement in this act of mass murder is not discussed at all in this book – it is also a topic that is never referred to here either. Much the same silence on a million deaths as is the case with US involvement too.
What this book makes clear is that what was to happen in Indonesia wasn’t only about Indonesia. Many other nations were exposed to the ‘Jakarta Method’ – that is, to coups organised by the US and western powers that involved the crushing of democratic governments in nations seeking economic and national independence. These governments were invariably replaced by grossly repressive regimes that proved remarkably receptive to the demands of multinational corporations.
These regimes would often refer, completely openly, to the Jakarta Method – that is, the military leadership would boast that they were going to take over the country and murder left-wing and progressives following the play book of the Indonesian military. Latin America is riddled with regimes that have ‘disappeared’ their citizens. That is something else I learnt from this book – the psychological point of disappearing people. You see, as Alan Price sings,
“Hope springs eternal in a young man’s breast, and he dreams of a better life ahead, without that dream you are nothing, nothing, nothing. You’ve got to find out for yourself that dream is dead.”
And the same holds true for families of the disappeared. The military appears in the night. A son or father or sister or mother is dragged out of their bed and the family are told they are to be brought somewhere for questioning. They might have their hands tied behind their backs and then be dropped from a helicopter into the ocean. But the family are never told if they are alive or died. And so the family do not protest, because their loved one might just still be alive. To protest might be the straw that forces the authorities to kill them. So, you remain quiet. It seems clear that this is an active strategy of the CIA, it repeats itself too frequently to be anything other.
The worst of this is how sad it is when leaders seeking their own national liberation try to remind the US of the US’s own history, their own war against the British, of freedom and equality and… but the mistake is to believe that a nation truly believes its own bullshit, or that ‘all men are created equal’ applies to black or brown skinned people.
The author makes it clear that we create the monsters we fight – that is, our actions make it impossible for our enemies to be anything more than our propaganda paints them to be. After what happened in Indonesia, no communist party would be foolish enough to trust in parliamentary democracy as a path to national liberation. That would be insane. They would have to assume the CIA was looking for any excuse to empower reactionary forces to exterminate anyone looking even ‘a little’ too left. And since ‘too left’ was effectively defined as doing anything that sought to counter national humiliation and prostrate subservience, this left a lot of scope for mass murder, oppression and even effective genocide.
That we are never told these stories goes a long way to confirm us as the victors. Our ignorance allows us to drink Mojitos while watching a nearly perfect sunset, over the unmarked and unremarked graves of what had been the one-in-twenty people of the island we are visiting without having their ghosts inconvenience the last night of our holiday.
January 15, 2022
This book took me a while to finish reading because I just kept putting it down. I think as an American it's hard to read this and come to terms with a lot of the harm we've perpetuated through out a lot of the world. I do not quite know what to say because I feel like anytime I write a review about a book on politics or history people get quite defensive. I wish there was a way for us to be able to critique our historical behavior and the ways we've failed to live up to the ideals we espouse without it becoming about whether or not we hate this country. I don't hate this country, I live here and I want to feel good about it but I can't do that fully when it feels like we don't even try to be better about how we treat the people living her and abroad. It's really tiring honestly when all I want is for us to all be able to live safely and have autonomy to be full actualized people. I truly understand why most people just refrain from involving themselves in politics, and in that sense I guess the repression worked out in its goal of demoralizing people.
March 16, 2021
I wouldn't guess that there are a lot of people under the age of let's say 40 who are reading Henry Kissinger right now, or who are interested in his thoughts on Kant's Categorical Imperative. I happen to know one of them however, a friend from college whom I consider to be admirably non-ideological, at least to the extent that any of us can be, and at least to the extent that he will read anything that piques his interest without worrying about whether it's considered morally, socially or politically acceptable...which is as it should be. I'm furthermore of the mind that any one of us should be able to, without fear of censure, watch a Polanski film, listen to a Burzum album, or...as I conceded to my friend with considerably greater distaste, sure, even read Henry Kissinger. By all means read evil people, I advised my friend. Try to understand their worldview, how they think. Just make sure that you're reading the evil person with some context.
I suggested to him that The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins might provide just that context, and I hope he gets around to reading it. Even if Kissinger doesn't turn up until page 188, the consequences of the worldview he shared with millions of Americans during the Cold War- the mental habit of halving the world between darkness and light- are rendered here in genuinely devastating clarity. In any case, I told another friend that I was reading this book, and he inadvertently provided me with as good a rhetorical question as any to start my review off with: can we name one good thing the CIA has ever done?
True, I think most of us already knew or at least suspected that the world would be a much better place if the CIA were disbanded tomorrow. But Bevins's book offers far more than that- in my case, anyway, it challenged my entire framework for understanding the Cold War, namely the framework in which the United States won, and the Soviet Union lost. Conveniently, as long as one maintains this mental framework, it's difficult to be too distressed by the Cold War's outcome.
But one sense in which the book challenged me is by arguing very persuasively that anticommunism was an ideology just as pernicious and homicidal as the worst iterations of communism. In a broader sense, before reading this book, I might have said something like, "well yes, we're far from blameless- look at Vietnam, Cambodia, Brazil, Chile- but whatever criticisms can be leveled against the United States, the Soviets were even worse- just read The Gulag Archipelago, after all- and if one of these two world powers had to prevail, we should all be thankful that it was the United States." Bevins doesn't argue with this proposition so much as shift the emphasis of the Cold War away from the US/Soviet dichotomy towards countries like Indonesia and Chile, which most Americans seldom read or think about these days. Bevins has some ideas about why that might be.
As he reminds us, communism throughout the Third World was often secondary to nationalism, but a nationalism with very different connotations than in let's say Nazi Germany. Nationalism for Ho Chi Minh, for example, simply meant anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism: driving the French (and then the Americans) out of Vietnam. As I recall from Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, it was only after Ho realized that the principles of self-determination that Woodrow Wilson spoke of so eloquently in the wake of WWI "applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe...not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa", that he really gravitated towards the works of Lenin. And as far as respecting democracy goes, I don't think that anyone seriously argues that, if Vietnam had been allowed to have free and fair elections in the mid-50s, following the departure of the French, Ho wouldn't have become president in a landslide.
The case seems even clearer to me in Jakarta, where Sukarno, the Indonesian president up until the military coup of '65, managed a delicate balancing act between the military and the PKI, at the time the world's largest unarmed Communist Party. Sukarno himself was not a communist. For many American administrations beginning with Eisenhower's, however, communism seems to have been a word applied to any country in the non-white world displaying insufficient fealty to the United States, demonstrated for example by said country refusing to turn itself into a free-for-all for US corporations. As far as I can tell, this was the Indonesian government's crime- trying to chart a neutral path between Washington and Moscow, to alienate neither, while simultaneously trying to unite the Third World in an economic, social and political alternative to the models offered by the two hegemonic powers.
A couple of things that I did not know and that I think it's very important to remember are that a) about 1/4 of Indonesians were in one way or another affiliated with the Communist Party, and b) that the tremendously electorally successful Party had been operating legally and democratically. But in six months spanning late '65 to the middle of '66, following the US-assisted coup, somewhere between 500,000 and a million communists and alleged communists were murdered or disappeared, the first time in Southeast Asia that disappearances had been used as a method of terror and repression (this method would reappear, with the help of the CIA, in Central and South America). To quote Bevins:
We find a similar story in many other places- Guatemala, Iraq, Brazil- but the other country that Bevins focuses on the most here is Chile, which was very instructive for me personally because I had never learned that much about Allende. I'd always found what I knew of the coup in Chile to be appalling, but in the back of my mind I had perhaps allowed myself to think that Allende was some sort of hardliner. Well no, the coup was even more appalling than I'd realized. First of all, it's important to remember that Allende won power in Chile democratically (despite the fact that the CIA, rather undemocratically you'd have to say, spent untold amounts of money on propaganda to oppose his election, just as they spent "a million dollars" one year in the late 50s "to influence parliamentary elections in Indonesia"- these activities might be worth considering whenever we see intelligence goons like John Brennan on MSNBC, hyperventilating about Russian interference in the last US election), and he was no sane person's idea of a dictator. His priorities seem to have been land reform, resolving financial inequality, raising the minimum wage, healthcare- he sounds like Bernie Sanders- as well as nationalizing the Chilean oil industry, which was perhaps a fatal mistake. Nixon is quoted as saying that the real danger of someone like Allende was that he might succeed, and provide an example to the rest of the continent. Castro apparently even gave Allende some friendly advice to the effect of (paraphrasing here) "look man, the gringos aren't going to let you survive unless you get tough and establish some sort of military rule." But Allende refused- he believed in democracy, and apparently believed that his relatively mild brand of socialism would be tolerated by the Nixon administration.
As we know, it wasn't. Nixon and Kissinger turned the economic screws, destabilizing the country. The CIA trained rightwing Chilean military officers in kidnapping, murder, and how to attach electrodes to the testicles of Marx-reading students; and assassinated military leaders faithful to democracy and the elected government. Throughout '73, left-leaning Chileans received postcards from the rightwing Patria Y Libertad that read "Jakarta is coming", in other words we're going to kill you all. Truman's Jakarta Axiom- that the United States could accept countries like Indonesia choosing their own path as long as they didn't align with the Soviets- had become the Jakarta Method, a euphemism for mass murder. Like leftists in Indonesia, and in many other Third World countries, Chile's leftists were murdered because they had the temerity to want better lives, a better country. Tens of thousands were disappeared or killed; Chile's resources were opened to US exploitation; Operation Condor conducted terror campaigns across the continent and throughout the world; Chile fell squarely into "our" camp as opposed to the Soviets'; and Kissinger is still around at 97 years old, no doubt continuing to believe that he is a great statesman, just as his good friend Hillary Clinton tells him.
Few if any US administrations come off well here, or as able to resist enabling the band of ideologues in the CIA, although Kennedy (John that is, and Bobby- interestingly- after John's death) seems to have been at least somewhat dubious about black ops. But when he got into office in early '61, it's not as if things had been standing still- the CIA was ready to roll with this Bay of Pigs thing, and the last thing any American president wanted at that time was to be perceived as being soft on communism. I can just imagine Kennedy waving his finger at them in the Oval Office: "well okay, but I just hope you guys know what you're do-ing..." I'm on record as believing that Oswald shot at Kennedy from the window of the book depository, but that doesn't mean I put it past members of the Agency to have pushed Oswald in the "right" direction. Bevins makes the persuasive case that anticommunism was a religion just as much as communism was, and if a leader lacked the zeal for the crusade...
...But Kennedy's death is frankly trivia compared to what we read in this book. Our teachers were for the most part fools- which is not surprising, most kids understand that intuitively- but what does sometimes surprise me is how many passive and unconscious assumptions about the world I still discover in myself only once I realize they're not true, until I realize that Robert Stone, through the dialogue of a Latin American character in his novel A Flag for Sunrise, put it perfectly: "One day if you keep up this way your enemies will put your entire fatuous country to sleep and there won't be many tears, believe me."
The United States won the Cold War, that much seems indisputable. But why was it really fought, who lost (aside from the Soviets), and what kind of world do we live in now as a consequence? Bevins gives us a lot to think about on these fronts, but a few passages linger in my mind:
(a) In Indonesia, Bevins wanders around a megamall playing American pop music; visits a beach in Bali where people were taken by the military to be massacred in '65, and where American tourists are now served by locals- we of the first world are still wealthy and they of the third world are still poor- and walks through something called the Jakarta Museum of Communist Betrayal. At the exit, he watches kids pose for photos under a sign that reads, "Thank you for observing our dioramas about the savagery carried out by the Indonesian Communist Party. Don't let anything like this ever happen again."
(b) [Bevins thinks] "...that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War."
(c) "'A lot of us have gone to the United States', said Antonio Caba Caba as he was showing me around Ilom [in Guatemala]. We walked by the plaza where he watched almost every man he knew get murdered for being some kind of a suspected communist. He said, 'I guess it's funny- well, maybe 'funny' isn't the word- but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States...but we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.'"
(d) "Perhaps the real threat that Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973...Immediately after the end of the Cold War...the idea was that, with Soviet Communism gone, Washington would cut back on military spending and violent foreign engagements. The exact opposite happened. There was a small decrease in spending in the 90s, and then the Pentagon budget exploded again after the turn of the century. Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.
The past two decades have led...historians to take a wider view of US behavior. Before and after the Cold War, the United States was always an expansionist and aggressive power. 'In a historical sense- and especially as seen from the South- the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means', writes Odd Arne Westad. 'The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation- in a slightly more extreme form- of US policy during the Cold War.'"
(e) "Most of the people I spoke with [had] believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, [and] had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit's unarmed party [the PKI] didn't survive. Allende's democratic socialism was not allowed...looking at it this way, the real losers of the 20th century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the US said it supported, rather than what it really supported...that group was annihilated."
I suggested to him that The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins might provide just that context, and I hope he gets around to reading it. Even if Kissinger doesn't turn up until page 188, the consequences of the worldview he shared with millions of Americans during the Cold War- the mental habit of halving the world between darkness and light- are rendered here in genuinely devastating clarity. In any case, I told another friend that I was reading this book, and he inadvertently provided me with as good a rhetorical question as any to start my review off with: can we name one good thing the CIA has ever done?
True, I think most of us already knew or at least suspected that the world would be a much better place if the CIA were disbanded tomorrow. But Bevins's book offers far more than that- in my case, anyway, it challenged my entire framework for understanding the Cold War, namely the framework in which the United States won, and the Soviet Union lost. Conveniently, as long as one maintains this mental framework, it's difficult to be too distressed by the Cold War's outcome.
But one sense in which the book challenged me is by arguing very persuasively that anticommunism was an ideology just as pernicious and homicidal as the worst iterations of communism. In a broader sense, before reading this book, I might have said something like, "well yes, we're far from blameless- look at Vietnam, Cambodia, Brazil, Chile- but whatever criticisms can be leveled against the United States, the Soviets were even worse- just read The Gulag Archipelago, after all- and if one of these two world powers had to prevail, we should all be thankful that it was the United States." Bevins doesn't argue with this proposition so much as shift the emphasis of the Cold War away from the US/Soviet dichotomy towards countries like Indonesia and Chile, which most Americans seldom read or think about these days. Bevins has some ideas about why that might be.
As he reminds us, communism throughout the Third World was often secondary to nationalism, but a nationalism with very different connotations than in let's say Nazi Germany. Nationalism for Ho Chi Minh, for example, simply meant anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism: driving the French (and then the Americans) out of Vietnam. As I recall from Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, it was only after Ho realized that the principles of self-determination that Woodrow Wilson spoke of so eloquently in the wake of WWI "applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe...not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa", that he really gravitated towards the works of Lenin. And as far as respecting democracy goes, I don't think that anyone seriously argues that, if Vietnam had been allowed to have free and fair elections in the mid-50s, following the departure of the French, Ho wouldn't have become president in a landslide.
The case seems even clearer to me in Jakarta, where Sukarno, the Indonesian president up until the military coup of '65, managed a delicate balancing act between the military and the PKI, at the time the world's largest unarmed Communist Party. Sukarno himself was not a communist. For many American administrations beginning with Eisenhower's, however, communism seems to have been a word applied to any country in the non-white world displaying insufficient fealty to the United States, demonstrated for example by said country refusing to turn itself into a free-for-all for US corporations. As far as I can tell, this was the Indonesian government's crime- trying to chart a neutral path between Washington and Moscow, to alienate neither, while simultaneously trying to unite the Third World in an economic, social and political alternative to the models offered by the two hegemonic powers.
A couple of things that I did not know and that I think it's very important to remember are that a) about 1/4 of Indonesians were in one way or another affiliated with the Communist Party, and b) that the tremendously electorally successful Party had been operating legally and democratically. But in six months spanning late '65 to the middle of '66, following the US-assisted coup, somewhere between 500,000 and a million communists and alleged communists were murdered or disappeared, the first time in Southeast Asia that disappearances had been used as a method of terror and repression (this method would reappear, with the help of the CIA, in Central and South America). To quote Bevins:
The Cultural Revolution was built around the idea that hidden bourgeois elements could infiltrate and threaten a left-wing movement. The events in Indonesia in 65-66 served as self-evident justification for this narrative. Just weeks previously, the world's largest unarmed communist party had held considerable influence in the huge country across the South China Sea...Mao and Zhou Enlai had encouraged the Indonesian leftists to arm the people [and they hadn't]. Then overnight, hidden right-wing elements emerged to kill them all and turn a left-leaning anti-imperialist nation into an ally of Washington. It would be the perfect propaganda tale to invent, if it were not all true.
We find a similar story in many other places- Guatemala, Iraq, Brazil- but the other country that Bevins focuses on the most here is Chile, which was very instructive for me personally because I had never learned that much about Allende. I'd always found what I knew of the coup in Chile to be appalling, but in the back of my mind I had perhaps allowed myself to think that Allende was some sort of hardliner. Well no, the coup was even more appalling than I'd realized. First of all, it's important to remember that Allende won power in Chile democratically (despite the fact that the CIA, rather undemocratically you'd have to say, spent untold amounts of money on propaganda to oppose his election, just as they spent "a million dollars" one year in the late 50s "to influence parliamentary elections in Indonesia"- these activities might be worth considering whenever we see intelligence goons like John Brennan on MSNBC, hyperventilating about Russian interference in the last US election), and he was no sane person's idea of a dictator. His priorities seem to have been land reform, resolving financial inequality, raising the minimum wage, healthcare- he sounds like Bernie Sanders- as well as nationalizing the Chilean oil industry, which was perhaps a fatal mistake. Nixon is quoted as saying that the real danger of someone like Allende was that he might succeed, and provide an example to the rest of the continent. Castro apparently even gave Allende some friendly advice to the effect of (paraphrasing here) "look man, the gringos aren't going to let you survive unless you get tough and establish some sort of military rule." But Allende refused- he believed in democracy, and apparently believed that his relatively mild brand of socialism would be tolerated by the Nixon administration.
As we know, it wasn't. Nixon and Kissinger turned the economic screws, destabilizing the country. The CIA trained rightwing Chilean military officers in kidnapping, murder, and how to attach electrodes to the testicles of Marx-reading students; and assassinated military leaders faithful to democracy and the elected government. Throughout '73, left-leaning Chileans received postcards from the rightwing Patria Y Libertad that read "Jakarta is coming", in other words we're going to kill you all. Truman's Jakarta Axiom- that the United States could accept countries like Indonesia choosing their own path as long as they didn't align with the Soviets- had become the Jakarta Method, a euphemism for mass murder. Like leftists in Indonesia, and in many other Third World countries, Chile's leftists were murdered because they had the temerity to want better lives, a better country. Tens of thousands were disappeared or killed; Chile's resources were opened to US exploitation; Operation Condor conducted terror campaigns across the continent and throughout the world; Chile fell squarely into "our" camp as opposed to the Soviets'; and Kissinger is still around at 97 years old, no doubt continuing to believe that he is a great statesman, just as his good friend Hillary Clinton tells him.
Few if any US administrations come off well here, or as able to resist enabling the band of ideologues in the CIA, although Kennedy (John that is, and Bobby- interestingly- after John's death) seems to have been at least somewhat dubious about black ops. But when he got into office in early '61, it's not as if things had been standing still- the CIA was ready to roll with this Bay of Pigs thing, and the last thing any American president wanted at that time was to be perceived as being soft on communism. I can just imagine Kennedy waving his finger at them in the Oval Office: "well okay, but I just hope you guys know what you're do-ing..." I'm on record as believing that Oswald shot at Kennedy from the window of the book depository, but that doesn't mean I put it past members of the Agency to have pushed Oswald in the "right" direction. Bevins makes the persuasive case that anticommunism was a religion just as much as communism was, and if a leader lacked the zeal for the crusade...
...But Kennedy's death is frankly trivia compared to what we read in this book. Our teachers were for the most part fools- which is not surprising, most kids understand that intuitively- but what does sometimes surprise me is how many passive and unconscious assumptions about the world I still discover in myself only once I realize they're not true, until I realize that Robert Stone, through the dialogue of a Latin American character in his novel A Flag for Sunrise, put it perfectly: "One day if you keep up this way your enemies will put your entire fatuous country to sleep and there won't be many tears, believe me."
The United States won the Cold War, that much seems indisputable. But why was it really fought, who lost (aside from the Soviets), and what kind of world do we live in now as a consequence? Bevins gives us a lot to think about on these fronts, but a few passages linger in my mind:
(a) In Indonesia, Bevins wanders around a megamall playing American pop music; visits a beach in Bali where people were taken by the military to be massacred in '65, and where American tourists are now served by locals- we of the first world are still wealthy and they of the third world are still poor- and walks through something called the Jakarta Museum of Communist Betrayal. At the exit, he watches kids pose for photos under a sign that reads, "Thank you for observing our dioramas about the savagery carried out by the Indonesian Communist Party. Don't let anything like this ever happen again."
(b) [Bevins thinks] "...that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War."
(c) "'A lot of us have gone to the United States', said Antonio Caba Caba as he was showing me around Ilom [in Guatemala]. We walked by the plaza where he watched almost every man he knew get murdered for being some kind of a suspected communist. He said, 'I guess it's funny- well, maybe 'funny' isn't the word- but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States...but we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.'"
(d) "Perhaps the real threat that Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973...Immediately after the end of the Cold War...the idea was that, with Soviet Communism gone, Washington would cut back on military spending and violent foreign engagements. The exact opposite happened. There was a small decrease in spending in the 90s, and then the Pentagon budget exploded again after the turn of the century. Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.
The past two decades have led...historians to take a wider view of US behavior. Before and after the Cold War, the United States was always an expansionist and aggressive power. 'In a historical sense- and especially as seen from the South- the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means', writes Odd Arne Westad. 'The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation- in a slightly more extreme form- of US policy during the Cold War.'"
(e) "Most of the people I spoke with [had] believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, [and] had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit's unarmed party [the PKI] didn't survive. Allende's democratic socialism was not allowed...looking at it this way, the real losers of the 20th century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the US said it supported, rather than what it really supported...that group was annihilated."
August 5, 2020
Wow this book is just nuts. The American cold war crusade had so many human civilian victims. This book is about how the US ruined Jakarta, Chile, and other countries for decades by ousting their leaders because they smelled like socialists. This also happened in Iran--and All The Shah's Men covered that one pretty well.
December 6, 2023
US anti-communism vs. Global South decolonization:
Preamble:
--My personal readings and my classes finally converged with this book, helping me dive much deeper than just reading it by myself.
--For a Jim Glassman class, I started my project on the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide with the question: how were some 1 million people (who were associated with a mainstream leftist party) murdered, with survivors still silenced and slandered?
…While I’ve prioritized big picture analysis of systems, if there was ever a case study to dive into, it would be this one: perhaps the worst atrocity of unarmed civilians (not even guerilla forces) based on their mainstream political affiliations. How many are familiar with the details?
--How mainstream were the victims?
i) The Indonesian communist party: the largest non-ruling communist party in the world took the unarmed parliamentary democracy route with popular affiliation in women's/farmers/unions/student activism; known (at the time) as the least-corrupt party and respected for its role in decolonization/Indonesian independence.
ii) Nationalist supporters of the wildly-popular first president of Indonesia, Sukarno: although not in the communist party, Sukarno became a target of the West as he shifted towards anti-imperialism.
--I relied on:
i) Topic overview: The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (2018)
ii) Case studies of the massacres: Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia (2020)
iii) Connecting to Geopolitics (esp. anti-communism vs. decolonization): this book (2020)
iv) Debunking the myth of defending against Chinese communist plot: Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War (2019)
…as well as parts from:
v) Case study of the massacre: The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (2018)
vi) Connecting to US: Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (2008)
The Good:
1) Mainstream journalist connects censored global histories:
--Of all the listed books, this one is the only non-academic one. It was also the only one on my must-read prior to my class project; indeed, this book has thousands of ratings/reviews, whereas only one of the other books have cracked a hundred ratings.
--Bevins is a journalist for the big, bad mainstream media. Thankfully, he developed a critical view as his default Western-liberal views eroded from his journalism in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
--From being Los Angeles Times’ foreign correspondent in Brazil to The Washington Post’s foreign correspondent in Indonesia, Bevins was perfectly placed to popularize the connection made by 2 academics:
i) Indonesia 1965-66: first use of mass disappearances (see later) in Southeast Asia (according to John Roosa, author of Buried Histories listed earlier)
ii) Guatemala 1966: first use of mass disappearances in Latin America, with connections to Indonesia via US diplomats/intelligence (according to Greg Grandin, author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War).
2) How to popularize for Western audiences?:
--How can Bevins’ prevent Western readers from naturalizing/abstracting the atrocities into some distant, exotic piece of history disconnected from the West (like The Year of Living Dangerously film starring Mel Gibson)?
--Bevins targets the reader’s world-view:
i) Western default: the Cold War was supposedly the Western First World democracy vs. Soviet Second World communism.
ii) Critical global view (i.e. not omitting the Global South): the Cold War as Global South decolonization (“Third World project”) vs. US imperialism/capitalist globalization (replacing European colonialism with US hegemony, thus preventing alternatives while cloaked as Red Scare anti-“communism”).
--I can attest to the impact of this paradigm shift in world-view, as it helped me connect several contradictions unresolved from my Western schooling/media:
i) The rest of the world is portrayed as poor and violent (I was politicized during the “War on Terror”)
ii) …while the West is portrayed as developed and civilized …yet somehow is home to all the major global banks (dictates the flow of capital/debt) and arms dealers (merchants of death)?
…The missing piece is imperialism, the continuation of colonialization (“neo-colonialism”). Bevins cites the book that got me into the “Third World project” (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), while relying on The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.
--Instead of relying on these academic tomes, I want to recommend a short-cut especially for communicating to those "All-American" audiences: Major General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated US marine who fought for the US in interventions all over the world, only to become an anti-US imperialism activist (War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier):
3) US toolbox of terror:
--US “anti-communism” in practice means preserving hegemony by preventing any sovereign alternative in Global South decolonization.
--Land reform is a foundational step in decolonization, where colonial feudal parasitism is abolished to rebuild food sovereignty and feed industrialization. This is often far from radical collectivization, as capitalist markets are introduced. The US is perfectly aware of how crucial land reform is, supporting it in puppet regimes Japan/South Korea/Taiwan.
--Given the difficulties of outright wars (esp. genocidal wars on Korea and Vietnam, which drained the US gold supply: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance), Bevins overviews the evolution of US intelligence developing a toolbox of terror (Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations).
--Global South liberals who got a tad nationalist and unarmed leftists were eradicated country by country:
i) Countries that managed to resist: anti-communist hysteria produced communist guerillas, a curious feedback loop (ex. Guatemala’s land reforms to build capitalist markets threatened US’s United Fruit company… Guatemala’s democracy fell to US’s coup since it rejected the repeated calls for civilian armed resistance made by... Che Guevara). This feedback loop is similar to the “torture confessions” feedback loop discussed in Buried Histories: torture confessions “work” in that it validates the fantasies of the torturer.
ii) Countries that succumb: anti-communist military dictatorship blanketed much of the Global South. Since even certain “capitalist” market land reforms were prevented, this shows how perverted global capitalism’s imperialism is on the Global South. The hole left by the eradicated moderate-liberal-to-leftist (including the affiliated women's/farmers/unions/student activism) was often filled with reactionary populism.
4) Indonesian anti-communist genocide:
--I’ll review the details of the Indonesian genocide in reviews of the academic books. In summary:
i) Propaganda by the Indonesian army/government/Western enablers: the genocide was a spontaneous public reaction to a failed "communist" coup (G30S) because the public hates communists.
Ii) Actual history: the US and anti-communists in the Indonesian army encouraged a provocation (coup bound to fail; in this case, the coup was mostly internal to the army rather than under the control of the communist party) so the army could blame and wipe out the unarmed mainstream communist party/mass supporters/supporters of the nationalist anti-imperialist Sukarno and install a US-backed military dictatorship.
--On genocidal mass killings, it’s crucial to note:
i) Common propaganda conveniently shifts blame on the public (the mob with pitchforks).
ii) However, the public is untrained for such extensive and sustained one-sided killing; it’s much easier for the victims to escape and resist.
iii) On the other hand, the function of the military is systematic killing. This includes the institutional capacity: an assembly-line of mass detainment (much easier to kill the defenseless) by the truckloads.
…See the comments below for the rest of the review (The Bad/Missing)…
Preamble:
--My personal readings and my classes finally converged with this book, helping me dive much deeper than just reading it by myself.
--For a Jim Glassman class, I started my project on the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide with the question: how were some 1 million people (who were associated with a mainstream leftist party) murdered, with survivors still silenced and slandered?
…While I’ve prioritized big picture analysis of systems, if there was ever a case study to dive into, it would be this one: perhaps the worst atrocity of unarmed civilians (not even guerilla forces) based on their mainstream political affiliations. How many are familiar with the details?
--How mainstream were the victims?
i) The Indonesian communist party: the largest non-ruling communist party in the world took the unarmed parliamentary democracy route with popular affiliation in women's/farmers/unions/student activism; known (at the time) as the least-corrupt party and respected for its role in decolonization/Indonesian independence.
ii) Nationalist supporters of the wildly-popular first president of Indonesia, Sukarno: although not in the communist party, Sukarno became a target of the West as he shifted towards anti-imperialism.
--I relied on:
i) Topic overview: The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (2018)
ii) Case studies of the massacres: Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia (2020)
iii) Connecting to Geopolitics (esp. anti-communism vs. decolonization): this book (2020)
iv) Debunking the myth of defending against Chinese communist plot: Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War (2019)
…as well as parts from:
v) Case study of the massacre: The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (2018)
vi) Connecting to US: Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (2008)
The Good:
1) Mainstream journalist connects censored global histories:
--Of all the listed books, this one is the only non-academic one. It was also the only one on my must-read prior to my class project; indeed, this book has thousands of ratings/reviews, whereas only one of the other books have cracked a hundred ratings.
--Bevins is a journalist for the big, bad mainstream media. Thankfully, he developed a critical view as his default Western-liberal views eroded from his journalism in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
--From being Los Angeles Times’ foreign correspondent in Brazil to The Washington Post’s foreign correspondent in Indonesia, Bevins was perfectly placed to popularize the connection made by 2 academics:
i) Indonesia 1965-66: first use of mass disappearances (see later) in Southeast Asia (according to John Roosa, author of Buried Histories listed earlier)
ii) Guatemala 1966: first use of mass disappearances in Latin America, with connections to Indonesia via US diplomats/intelligence (according to Greg Grandin, author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War).
2) How to popularize for Western audiences?:
--How can Bevins’ prevent Western readers from naturalizing/abstracting the atrocities into some distant, exotic piece of history disconnected from the West (like The Year of Living Dangerously film starring Mel Gibson)?
--Bevins targets the reader’s world-view:
i) Western default: the Cold War was supposedly the Western First World democracy vs. Soviet Second World communism.
ii) Critical global view (i.e. not omitting the Global South): the Cold War as Global South decolonization (“Third World project”) vs. US imperialism/capitalist globalization (replacing European colonialism with US hegemony, thus preventing alternatives while cloaked as Red Scare anti-“communism”).
--I can attest to the impact of this paradigm shift in world-view, as it helped me connect several contradictions unresolved from my Western schooling/media:
i) The rest of the world is portrayed as poor and violent (I was politicized during the “War on Terror”)
ii) …while the West is portrayed as developed and civilized …yet somehow is home to all the major global banks (dictates the flow of capital/debt) and arms dealers (merchants of death)?
…The missing piece is imperialism, the continuation of colonialization (“neo-colonialism”). Bevins cites the book that got me into the “Third World project” (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), while relying on The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.
--Instead of relying on these academic tomes, I want to recommend a short-cut especially for communicating to those "All-American" audiences: Major General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated US marine who fought for the US in interventions all over the world, only to become an anti-US imperialism activist (War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier):
I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force – the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. […] Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. […] I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. […] During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
[-Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November, 1935), p. 8; bold emphasis added]
3) US toolbox of terror:
--US “anti-communism” in practice means preserving hegemony by preventing any sovereign alternative in Global South decolonization.
--Land reform is a foundational step in decolonization, where colonial feudal parasitism is abolished to rebuild food sovereignty and feed industrialization. This is often far from radical collectivization, as capitalist markets are introduced. The US is perfectly aware of how crucial land reform is, supporting it in puppet regimes Japan/South Korea/Taiwan.
--Given the difficulties of outright wars (esp. genocidal wars on Korea and Vietnam, which drained the US gold supply: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance), Bevins overviews the evolution of US intelligence developing a toolbox of terror (Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations).
--Global South liberals who got a tad nationalist and unarmed leftists were eradicated country by country:
i) Countries that managed to resist: anti-communist hysteria produced communist guerillas, a curious feedback loop (ex. Guatemala’s land reforms to build capitalist markets threatened US’s United Fruit company… Guatemala’s democracy fell to US’s coup since it rejected the repeated calls for civilian armed resistance made by... Che Guevara). This feedback loop is similar to the “torture confessions” feedback loop discussed in Buried Histories: torture confessions “work” in that it validates the fantasies of the torturer.
ii) Countries that succumb: anti-communist military dictatorship blanketed much of the Global South. Since even certain “capitalist” market land reforms were prevented, this shows how perverted global capitalism’s imperialism is on the Global South. The hole left by the eradicated moderate-liberal-to-leftist (including the affiliated women's/farmers/unions/student activism) was often filled with reactionary populism.
4) Indonesian anti-communist genocide:
--I’ll review the details of the Indonesian genocide in reviews of the academic books. In summary:
i) Propaganda by the Indonesian army/government/Western enablers: the genocide was a spontaneous public reaction to a failed "communist" coup (G30S) because the public hates communists.
Ii) Actual history: the US and anti-communists in the Indonesian army encouraged a provocation (coup bound to fail; in this case, the coup was mostly internal to the army rather than under the control of the communist party) so the army could blame and wipe out the unarmed mainstream communist party/mass supporters/supporters of the nationalist anti-imperialist Sukarno and install a US-backed military dictatorship.
--On genocidal mass killings, it’s crucial to note:
i) Common propaganda conveniently shifts blame on the public (the mob with pitchforks).
ii) However, the public is untrained for such extensive and sustained one-sided killing; it’s much easier for the victims to escape and resist.
iii) On the other hand, the function of the military is systematic killing. This includes the institutional capacity: an assembly-line of mass detainment (much easier to kill the defenseless) by the truckloads.
…See the comments below for the rest of the review (The Bad/Missing)…
February 22, 2021
show this book to someone the next time you hear them say "but when has socialism ever worked??!??!?!?!"
August 24, 2021
Five stars for the content of this book, without a doubt. Vincent Bevins does a great job of explaining how the United States contributed to the horrific mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia as well as further violence due to anti-communist panic/propaganda in countries such as Brazil, Guatemala, Iraq, and more. It felt saddening and angering to read about how anti-communist sentence has been utilized as a smokescreen to mask U.S. imperialism and how this corruption has impacted so many people globally. I recommend this book for people who want to learn more about the complicity of the U.S. in violence across the world, which we often minimize in our standard education system.
I only give this book three stars because the writing felt like a bit of a drag to get through at times. This feeling may stem from a preference mismatch, as I often prefer fiction about interpersonal relationships or memoir over nonfiction that details a lot of historical facts. I just felt a bit bored – even though the contents of the book are anything but boring – and wanted more centering of the personal narratives. Bevins kind of names his white male privilege in being able to write this book, though could have concisely unpacked this further and named tangible action steps to dismantle the system that granted him this privilege.
I only give this book three stars because the writing felt like a bit of a drag to get through at times. This feeling may stem from a preference mismatch, as I often prefer fiction about interpersonal relationships or memoir over nonfiction that details a lot of historical facts. I just felt a bit bored – even though the contents of the book are anything but boring – and wanted more centering of the personal narratives. Bevins kind of names his white male privilege in being able to write this book, though could have concisely unpacked this further and named tangible action steps to dismantle the system that granted him this privilege.
May 31, 2020
Every person in America should read this book.
November 23, 2021
Anti-communism panic has murdered millions of innocent civilians.
This is a dense, detail-rich, recounting of the long lost history of the horrific military purge that occurred in Indonesia. Sukarno was the first Indonesian president from 1945-67 after freedom from the Dutch control and Japanese occupation. Sukarno gained popular and political support as the communist part of Indonesia (PKI) as he steered the country much more leftward. While backed by the likes of the Soviets and China, his anti-imperialistic policies irritated the state military as well as the Unites States government.
The US started courting the right-wing side of the Indonesian government in the form of arms deals while creating a clear split in the Indonesian government. There was the right-wing military and the left wing PKI. This climate created the events of September 30th, in which alleged Sukarno sympathizers attempted a military coup when trying to assassinate six Indonesian army generals. This failed coup was blamed on the communist PKI giving the impetus for a mass purge of the communist movement from the country by General Suharto. It is estimated that 500,000 to 1 million civilizan were abducted and murdered by the right wing Indonesian faction, all with the backing and consent of the US government. A lot of doubt remains if the PKI were truly even involved in the coup or if it was an orchestration of Suharto and the CIA to justify the communist purge and mass murder. This is an assertion that Bevins makes here.
What began to be known as "The Jakarta Method" was a form of terror that spread throughout much of Central and South America against socialistic/communist movements. The message was clear: the disappearing of mass civilians will happen here as it did in Jakarata. It happened in Chile with the replacement of Allende with Pinochet. It happened in Brazil, Argentina, Gautemala, Iraq and several other countries. The strategy from the US perspective was clear: replace communist people's movements with crony capitalistic dictators. And thus we have the execution of a new form of US imperialism: covert corruption of a people's sovereignty to subvert Soviet global influence. This strategy was hugely successful for US business and cultural influence which remains today. The US paid the price for continued global domination with the blood of millions of innocent people from the 1960s through 1980s.
And who have benefited? Is it the people of these nations? No. They remained impoverished. Is it the American people? Likely yes, but not as much as the main benefactors: corporate wealth and US imperialism. What I've learned most from this book is that massacre is justified by ideology, regardless of espoused beliefs. Men will find any rationale they need to gain power. Be it the demonizing of communists or the dehumanization of races, men will find away to corrupt their way to power. The politics are only tangential.
This is a dense but excellent and illuminating read.
Similar books I recommend:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
How to Hide and Empire
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is a dense, detail-rich, recounting of the long lost history of the horrific military purge that occurred in Indonesia. Sukarno was the first Indonesian president from 1945-67 after freedom from the Dutch control and Japanese occupation. Sukarno gained popular and political support as the communist part of Indonesia (PKI) as he steered the country much more leftward. While backed by the likes of the Soviets and China, his anti-imperialistic policies irritated the state military as well as the Unites States government.
The US started courting the right-wing side of the Indonesian government in the form of arms deals while creating a clear split in the Indonesian government. There was the right-wing military and the left wing PKI. This climate created the events of September 30th, in which alleged Sukarno sympathizers attempted a military coup when trying to assassinate six Indonesian army generals. This failed coup was blamed on the communist PKI giving the impetus for a mass purge of the communist movement from the country by General Suharto. It is estimated that 500,000 to 1 million civilizan were abducted and murdered by the right wing Indonesian faction, all with the backing and consent of the US government. A lot of doubt remains if the PKI were truly even involved in the coup or if it was an orchestration of Suharto and the CIA to justify the communist purge and mass murder. This is an assertion that Bevins makes here.
What began to be known as "The Jakarta Method" was a form of terror that spread throughout much of Central and South America against socialistic/communist movements. The message was clear: the disappearing of mass civilians will happen here as it did in Jakarata. It happened in Chile with the replacement of Allende with Pinochet. It happened in Brazil, Argentina, Gautemala, Iraq and several other countries. The strategy from the US perspective was clear: replace communist people's movements with crony capitalistic dictators. And thus we have the execution of a new form of US imperialism: covert corruption of a people's sovereignty to subvert Soviet global influence. This strategy was hugely successful for US business and cultural influence which remains today. The US paid the price for continued global domination with the blood of millions of innocent people from the 1960s through 1980s.
And who have benefited? Is it the people of these nations? No. They remained impoverished. Is it the American people? Likely yes, but not as much as the main benefactors: corporate wealth and US imperialism. What I've learned most from this book is that massacre is justified by ideology, regardless of espoused beliefs. Men will find any rationale they need to gain power. Be it the demonizing of communists or the dehumanization of races, men will find away to corrupt their way to power. The politics are only tangential.
This is a dense but excellent and illuminating read.
Similar books I recommend:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
How to Hide and Empire
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
October 10, 2022
Reading this book has been a great shock for me. It evoked feelings of anger and disgust within me, which as of yet, not many authors have succeeded in doing.
Having already read a number of books on the horrible atrocities committed by communist regimes in the twentieth century, "The Jakarta Method" provided me with the other side of the coin. The book tells the history of the employment of the ideology of anticommunism by Washington DC and the millions of innocent deaths in the Third World in which it resulted.
Washington's tactics crushed the Third World Movement started by former president Sukarno of Indonesia (in which mostly formerly colonized countries sought a balance in Cold War relations between the USA and USSR), killed countless numbers of moderate left wingers and propped up socipathic dictatorships in countries with democratic traditions.
A truly fascinating read with multiple personal perspectives from around the globe on one of the most dark and forgotten pages of the twentieth century.
Having already read a number of books on the horrible atrocities committed by communist regimes in the twentieth century, "The Jakarta Method" provided me with the other side of the coin. The book tells the history of the employment of the ideology of anticommunism by Washington DC and the millions of innocent deaths in the Third World in which it resulted.
Washington's tactics crushed the Third World Movement started by former president Sukarno of Indonesia (in which mostly formerly colonized countries sought a balance in Cold War relations between the USA and USSR), killed countless numbers of moderate left wingers and propped up socipathic dictatorships in countries with democratic traditions.
A truly fascinating read with multiple personal perspectives from around the globe on one of the most dark and forgotten pages of the twentieth century.
June 1, 2020
(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)
This proved to be as infuriating as it was informative. And I am serious when I say infuriating, for what else could I possibly feel when reading about all of the backing that the US government provided for hard-right regimes that brutalized their own citizens? Or the millions of innocents in Indonesia, Guatemala, and other nations that were terrorized, imprisoned, tortured, and killed not only for involvement in leftist governments or organizations but often mere perceived involvement? Or the historically documented callousness that US government officials displayed for these disrupted and destroyed lives, all due to the absurdly broad and also stupidly black-and-white view of communism that rarely adhered anywhere close to reality?
Now granted, it’s not as if this historical pattern of US Cold War “support” is brand-new to me. However, until coming across The Jakarta Method, I was very much unaware of the terrible extent of American interference in the toppling of leftist regimes around the globe and the scope of the horribly enthusiastic assistance it always readily provided for the brutal repressions and exterminations that followed. Through his thorough research and clearly-constructed narrative, Vincent Bevins has very sucessfully provided a brand new lens for the past that reveals a present-day world that is far more shaped, if not outright scarred, by America’s brutal global anti-communist actions than most realize. I definitely plan on recommending this eye-opening history whenever the opportunity arises.
This proved to be as infuriating as it was informative. And I am serious when I say infuriating, for what else could I possibly feel when reading about all of the backing that the US government provided for hard-right regimes that brutalized their own citizens? Or the millions of innocents in Indonesia, Guatemala, and other nations that were terrorized, imprisoned, tortured, and killed not only for involvement in leftist governments or organizations but often mere perceived involvement? Or the historically documented callousness that US government officials displayed for these disrupted and destroyed lives, all due to the absurdly broad and also stupidly black-and-white view of communism that rarely adhered anywhere close to reality?
Now granted, it’s not as if this historical pattern of US Cold War “support” is brand-new to me. However, until coming across The Jakarta Method, I was very much unaware of the terrible extent of American interference in the toppling of leftist regimes around the globe and the scope of the horribly enthusiastic assistance it always readily provided for the brutal repressions and exterminations that followed. Through his thorough research and clearly-constructed narrative, Vincent Bevins has very sucessfully provided a brand new lens for the past that reveals a present-day world that is far more shaped, if not outright scarred, by America’s brutal global anti-communist actions than most realize. I definitely plan on recommending this eye-opening history whenever the opportunity arises.
December 5, 2020
This is an excellent, and very important book about the often neglected side of the "Cold War". Bevins, through wide reading and research, as well as interviews with survivors, chronicles how Washington's "anticommunist crusade" devastated multiple countries and led to mass extermination campaigns against leftists that claimed the lives of, at the very least, more than 1.7 million people (not even including wars, victims of sanctions, bombing, etc). In many cases, these were members of legal, non-violent political parties, as well as teachers, union members, and journalists.
The interviews Bevins conducted with survivors give the book an important human element- the victims of these policies are not remote, but very much come alive throughout the narrative.
"The Jakarta Method" refers specifically to the mass murder of about 1 million people in Indonesia as anti-colonial leader, and giant of the Third World Movement, President Sukarno lost power in a coup. Bevins goes on to examine the deep impacts this event had on Indonesian politics and the people who managed to survive the purges.
Crucially, he also looks at how the "Jakarta Method" became a playbook for "fanatical anti-communists" around the world: Bevins mentions that what happened Jakarta was openly admired by the military and far-right elements in more than 11 countries.
Throughout these processes, those carrying out the slaughter were aided, abetted, armed, informed, and encouraged by the United States government. While the broad details of US involvement may not be surprising to those familiar with the Cold War, some of the quotes and documents that Bevins cites are still shocking. He also emphasizes the role that propaganda and psychological terror played in these massacres, and the complicity of major Western news outlets in these efforts. A diplomatic cable from Jakarta, while the massacres still raged, informed DC that a reporter admitted "that, although he was reasonably certain British were feeding him false or misleading information, their stories were so spectacular he had no choice to but to file them."
I came away from this book with a deeper understanding of what Bevins repeatedly calls "fanatical anti-communism." The term is apt. Anticommunist figures, from Brazil to the United States, somehow saw moderate nationalist leaders like Lumumba or Arbenz as the second coming of Mao. It is distressing how prevalent this tendency still is: as Bevins notes in the introduction, current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro justified his impeachment vote against Dilma Rouseff as an attempt to save Brazil from "becoming another North Korea." This exchange is incredibly instructive: the ghost of Jakarta is not relegated to the past. It still shapes politics on a global and local scale, as the Third World movement was crushed and crony capitalism became the norm, and fanatical anti-communism continues to be a potent force in countries around the world.
With all the real and structural violence that these processes entailed and perpetuated, and the horrific global inequality that still plagues the world, it is hard to put much stock in the traditional, triumphalist narratives about the Cold War. There has been "peace", in a limited sense, since the Second World War. However, as Che Guevara put it in the midst of many of these killings: "without analyzing the practical results of this peace (poverty, degradation, increasingly larger exploitation of enormous sectors of humanity)...we would do well to inquire if this peace is real."
The interviews Bevins conducted with survivors give the book an important human element- the victims of these policies are not remote, but very much come alive throughout the narrative.
"The Jakarta Method" refers specifically to the mass murder of about 1 million people in Indonesia as anti-colonial leader, and giant of the Third World Movement, President Sukarno lost power in a coup. Bevins goes on to examine the deep impacts this event had on Indonesian politics and the people who managed to survive the purges.
Crucially, he also looks at how the "Jakarta Method" became a playbook for "fanatical anti-communists" around the world: Bevins mentions that what happened Jakarta was openly admired by the military and far-right elements in more than 11 countries.
Throughout these processes, those carrying out the slaughter were aided, abetted, armed, informed, and encouraged by the United States government. While the broad details of US involvement may not be surprising to those familiar with the Cold War, some of the quotes and documents that Bevins cites are still shocking. He also emphasizes the role that propaganda and psychological terror played in these massacres, and the complicity of major Western news outlets in these efforts. A diplomatic cable from Jakarta, while the massacres still raged, informed DC that a reporter admitted "that, although he was reasonably certain British were feeding him false or misleading information, their stories were so spectacular he had no choice to but to file them."
I came away from this book with a deeper understanding of what Bevins repeatedly calls "fanatical anti-communism." The term is apt. Anticommunist figures, from Brazil to the United States, somehow saw moderate nationalist leaders like Lumumba or Arbenz as the second coming of Mao. It is distressing how prevalent this tendency still is: as Bevins notes in the introduction, current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro justified his impeachment vote against Dilma Rouseff as an attempt to save Brazil from "becoming another North Korea." This exchange is incredibly instructive: the ghost of Jakarta is not relegated to the past. It still shapes politics on a global and local scale, as the Third World movement was crushed and crony capitalism became the norm, and fanatical anti-communism continues to be a potent force in countries around the world.
With all the real and structural violence that these processes entailed and perpetuated, and the horrific global inequality that still plagues the world, it is hard to put much stock in the traditional, triumphalist narratives about the Cold War. There has been "peace", in a limited sense, since the Second World War. However, as Che Guevara put it in the midst of many of these killings: "without analyzing the practical results of this peace (poverty, degradation, increasingly larger exploitation of enormous sectors of humanity)...we would do well to inquire if this peace is real."
May 26, 2020
I read this book twice. As soon as I finished it the first time I immediately started rereading it to make notes. While it isn't something I'm expertly familar with and touched on shortly in this book, the assignation of Lumumba, seems to be the biggest blunder of US foreign policy, ever. That event seems to be an event which set off like a wildfire the Jakarta method which Bevins goes into.
Imagine you find yourself a classical liberal, what we'd call libertarian now, leader of the Congo. You request help from the United Nations and the United States, they deny your request. You then reach out to the soviets and it sets into motion CIA attempt to poison you and you eventually being put in front of a firing squad.
I think the strength of Bevins writing here is that he takes events such as what I just described and tries to link the actual motives and aspirations of the "communists" back to the American revolution. He does this multiple times and it's effective.
Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia and key figure in this book, channels Paul Revere in his famous Bandung speech. This was a serious person trying to appeal to the United States. The United States helped orchestrate a coup which lead to the death of 1% of the population of Indonesia, around a million people.
The events in this book really show the wrong path we went down. There was a lot of lost human potential in a needless pursuit to end communism. You can show that without forgiving Mao's great leap forward failure or the sanction "quota based" killings the soviets employed. When you actually read the history, the more democratic and less oppressive the communist regime, the easier it was the orchestrate a coup.
There's competing incentives where by taking down a perceived demon you create a monster in its place. If we could go back to this turning point and go in a less violent direction, I think all of us would be better off. There was a lot of lost human potential in going down the path this book laid out.
Imagine you find yourself a classical liberal, what we'd call libertarian now, leader of the Congo. You request help from the United Nations and the United States, they deny your request. You then reach out to the soviets and it sets into motion CIA attempt to poison you and you eventually being put in front of a firing squad.
I think the strength of Bevins writing here is that he takes events such as what I just described and tries to link the actual motives and aspirations of the "communists" back to the American revolution. He does this multiple times and it's effective.
Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia and key figure in this book, channels Paul Revere in his famous Bandung speech. This was a serious person trying to appeal to the United States. The United States helped orchestrate a coup which lead to the death of 1% of the population of Indonesia, around a million people.
The events in this book really show the wrong path we went down. There was a lot of lost human potential in a needless pursuit to end communism. You can show that without forgiving Mao's great leap forward failure or the sanction "quota based" killings the soviets employed. When you actually read the history, the more democratic and less oppressive the communist regime, the easier it was the orchestrate a coup.
There's competing incentives where by taking down a perceived demon you create a monster in its place. If we could go back to this turning point and go in a less violent direction, I think all of us would be better off. There was a lot of lost human potential in going down the path this book laid out.
June 24, 2020
The events this book describes are shocking, uncomfortable (for white westerners) and need to be heard. It is a very, very important part of our recent history that must be made known and understood. My difficulty with Bevins’ approach is that I don’t think he was able to settle on what type of book he wanted to write or what framework to use. At times it feels like journalistic reportage, at other time it attempts to tell the history through the lived experience of the people who were there, and at other points the tone is political analysis, setting events in the context of the major global struggles of the time. However, this led to some lack of clarity and jarring of the narrative thread.
In the end I felt disappointed as the theme promised so much more; perhaps another 150 pages to include more detail would have helped. There are at least three major books contained in the ideas and history that the Jakarta Method sets out. At times some of the coverage of events, and the personal stories seemed to be truncated, as if the editing had been too heavy handed.
I understand why several readers marked this as 5 star, and I wanted to be more positive but I was left wanting more, feeling that Bevins’ has only just started telling this story.
In the end I felt disappointed as the theme promised so much more; perhaps another 150 pages to include more detail would have helped. There are at least three major books contained in the ideas and history that the Jakarta Method sets out. At times some of the coverage of events, and the personal stories seemed to be truncated, as if the editing had been too heavy handed.
I understand why several readers marked this as 5 star, and I wanted to be more positive but I was left wanting more, feeling that Bevins’ has only just started telling this story.
July 13, 2021
History is Written by the Victors
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, by Vincent Bevins, is a book about massacres committed by governments during the Cold War, and backed by U.S. government officials, especially the CIA. Such massacres globally killed anywhere from one to three million people, with over a million alone killed Indonesia. These figures include only those murdered by hand. Policies that inflicted famine are not considered. This would make it akin to such atrocities as the Rwandan genocide, for example. Much of this history is taboo in the countries of origin, and little discussed in the West. We often hear about the atrocities of the Soviet Union or Communist China, but the many deaths attributed to U.S policies during and after the Cold War remain little discussed, or even seen favourably by many citizens of the West.
Bevins has done an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the detail of these massacres. The author examines the history of Indonesia in close detail, especially of the early Sukarno regime, which was left-aligned, and instrumental in the non-aligned movement during the early stages of the Cold War. Other nations are examined, however. The 1950's coup in Guatemala, and the list of those to be killed, handed to the junta general by a U.S. CIA agent, is noted. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and the subsequent massacre committed by Mobutu are also noted. Similar events took place in Taiwan under the Nationalists, Iran under the Shah, in Iraq, Brazil, and Chile, as well as numerous other nations across the globe. Oftentimes, the governments overthrown were not Communist at all, as Blevin notes. The main "crimes" they committed were akin to trying to create greater wealth equality, passing policies that hurt exploitative U.S. corporations, or hedging their independence as non-aligned countries. Often the aims were anti-colonial, but the U.S. often supported colonial policies from actors such as Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands due to their Cold War political support to the United States.
The history in this book is a tad horrifying, and sadly, may never be properly understood and chronicled. Many actors or their beneficiaries are still in power in the countries these massacres occurred in. The fact that these atrocities and war crimes may not be properly chronicled for a long time due to the United States' continued role as the global hegemon means that many graves will remain hidden, and many facts may be shelved for a long time. Some may sympathize with the Cold War rhetoric that the U.S. has kept on file, or state that one must "play the game", or even compare these atrocities favourably to similar atrocities committed under Stalin, or Mao in Communist nations. I would say that that is some weak rhetoric. A massacre is a massacre, and an atrocity is an atrocity, no matter who it is committed by. Many millions of innocent people died at the hands of repressive US policies during and after the Cold War. They were civilians, workers, parents, and children. Their only crimes were believing in a better world. We are not there yet, and may never be.
A tough book to read for many reasons. This book contains some dark material, and chronicles the death of millions of people, all while examining the policies and actors involved in the massacres, many of whom are still remembered fondly in some respects in the United States and greater Western sphere. The consequences of these atrocities, including the complete geopolitical annihilation of Indonesia, once a leader in global affairs, and the deep distrust that many view the United States with due to their actions over the last few decades, are laid bare. This will be a challenging book to read for many Americans and those in Western countries like Canada, who may dismiss these claims out of hand. I would say it is a deeply important read, and one that will dispel the myth of "good guy and bad guy" in geopolitics, noting that both sides of the Cold War divide engaged in similar atrocities, and both were equally damaging to global well-being. Hopefully a world where this sort of madness will not occur again is in the works, although with the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen ongoing, and the continued sabre rattling, murdered leaders in Haiti, coup attempts in Turkey, and massacres in Egypt and on and on, this history continues to exist, and these atrocities will continue to be committed.
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, by Vincent Bevins, is a book about massacres committed by governments during the Cold War, and backed by U.S. government officials, especially the CIA. Such massacres globally killed anywhere from one to three million people, with over a million alone killed Indonesia. These figures include only those murdered by hand. Policies that inflicted famine are not considered. This would make it akin to such atrocities as the Rwandan genocide, for example. Much of this history is taboo in the countries of origin, and little discussed in the West. We often hear about the atrocities of the Soviet Union or Communist China, but the many deaths attributed to U.S policies during and after the Cold War remain little discussed, or even seen favourably by many citizens of the West.
Bevins has done an absolutely fantastic job of capturing the detail of these massacres. The author examines the history of Indonesia in close detail, especially of the early Sukarno regime, which was left-aligned, and instrumental in the non-aligned movement during the early stages of the Cold War. Other nations are examined, however. The 1950's coup in Guatemala, and the list of those to be killed, handed to the junta general by a U.S. CIA agent, is noted. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and the subsequent massacre committed by Mobutu are also noted. Similar events took place in Taiwan under the Nationalists, Iran under the Shah, in Iraq, Brazil, and Chile, as well as numerous other nations across the globe. Oftentimes, the governments overthrown were not Communist at all, as Blevin notes. The main "crimes" they committed were akin to trying to create greater wealth equality, passing policies that hurt exploitative U.S. corporations, or hedging their independence as non-aligned countries. Often the aims were anti-colonial, but the U.S. often supported colonial policies from actors such as Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands due to their Cold War political support to the United States.
The history in this book is a tad horrifying, and sadly, may never be properly understood and chronicled. Many actors or their beneficiaries are still in power in the countries these massacres occurred in. The fact that these atrocities and war crimes may not be properly chronicled for a long time due to the United States' continued role as the global hegemon means that many graves will remain hidden, and many facts may be shelved for a long time. Some may sympathize with the Cold War rhetoric that the U.S. has kept on file, or state that one must "play the game", or even compare these atrocities favourably to similar atrocities committed under Stalin, or Mao in Communist nations. I would say that that is some weak rhetoric. A massacre is a massacre, and an atrocity is an atrocity, no matter who it is committed by. Many millions of innocent people died at the hands of repressive US policies during and after the Cold War. They were civilians, workers, parents, and children. Their only crimes were believing in a better world. We are not there yet, and may never be.
A tough book to read for many reasons. This book contains some dark material, and chronicles the death of millions of people, all while examining the policies and actors involved in the massacres, many of whom are still remembered fondly in some respects in the United States and greater Western sphere. The consequences of these atrocities, including the complete geopolitical annihilation of Indonesia, once a leader in global affairs, and the deep distrust that many view the United States with due to their actions over the last few decades, are laid bare. This will be a challenging book to read for many Americans and those in Western countries like Canada, who may dismiss these claims out of hand. I would say it is a deeply important read, and one that will dispel the myth of "good guy and bad guy" in geopolitics, noting that both sides of the Cold War divide engaged in similar atrocities, and both were equally damaging to global well-being. Hopefully a world where this sort of madness will not occur again is in the works, although with the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen ongoing, and the continued sabre rattling, murdered leaders in Haiti, coup attempts in Turkey, and massacres in Egypt and on and on, this history continues to exist, and these atrocities will continue to be committed.
January 28, 2021
An exceptional widely praised book that really deserves all the praise it’s receiving. I found it excellent as a history grad student student and even bought a copy for my dad who I’m sure will also be able to enjoy it, a rare achievement
August 2, 2021
I think Bevins laid it out best in how this book might change you/your view of the world. Living in America, the child of immigrants, the Cold War is presented as a US-Russia face-off, with some proxy wars, as a testimony of capitalism-socialism, its impact contained to those who live in either of those two Worlds. When actually, for most of the world, the Third World, the Cold War in its impact was about how the hundreds-years-old power structure of colonialism was going to evolve into something else and what that might be. How, in a decade, the dream was snuffed out. For my personal existence, how it probably influenced my parents' choice to immigrate and my grandparents' way to raise my parents.
The 1955 Bandung Conference was held in West Java, Indonesia, held by Asian and African states that represented over half the world's population, freshly independent, ex-colony countries seeking their own determination and for common solidarity after centuries of European colonialism. Organized by Sukarno, his opening speech beautifully captured what humanity might become:
"Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind. But today we are faced with a situation where the well-being of mankind is not always the primary consideration. Many who are in places of high power think, rather, of controlling the world.
Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously. In your deliberations, Sisters and Brothers, I beg of you, do not be guided by these fears, because fear is an acid which etches man's actions into curious patterns. Be guided by hopes and determination, be guided by ideals, and, yes, be guided by dreams!
We are of many different nations, we are of many different social backgrounds and cultural patterns. Our ways of life are different. Our national characters, or colours or motifs - call it what you will - are different. Our racial stock is different, and even the colour of our skin is different. But what does that matter? Mankind is united or divided by considerations other than these. Conflict comes not from variety of skins, nor from variety of religion, but from variety of desires. All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us.
We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world. Are not these aims mentioned in the letter of invitation to which you responded? I freely confess it - in these aims I am not disinterested or driven by purely impersonal motives. How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa know these things, for we have experienced them.
Indeed, we cannot yet say that all parts of our countries are free already. Some parts still labour under the lash. And some parts of Asia and Africa which are not represented here still suffer from the same condition. Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey's end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.
We are often told "Colonialism is dead". Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree. And, I beg of you do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth."
He even called out the anniversary of Paul Reverse, in a nod to the US and perhaps a call for empathy and understanding for a nation wanting to be free.
Full address here: https://www.cvce.eu/content/publicati...
Yet, in a decade or so, the dream was lost and over time, many states were contorted into crony capitalistic countries, some lost to decades of dictatorial rule. Major events covered in the book include:
Iran '53 (coup v Mosaddegh)
Guatemala '54 (coup v Arbanez)
Brazil '64 (coup v Goulart)
Indonesia '65 (coup v Sukarno)
Chile '73 (coup v Allende)
Later, Operation Condor in Latin America, Operation Lotus in Southeast Asia, and then the Contras in Central America. The US/CIA did not fuck around. Bivens races through Vietnam, Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Uruguay, Congo... to try to mention the compromised fates of black, brown, and yellow people whose lives were irrevocably changed and lost during the Cold War. Their stories and dreams are rarely told in our history books and never in the American mental blockbuster, Your Freedom Is Always Worth It.
As noted by other reviewers, this is a must-read for Americans.
The 1955 Bandung Conference was held in West Java, Indonesia, held by Asian and African states that represented over half the world's population, freshly independent, ex-colony countries seeking their own determination and for common solidarity after centuries of European colonialism. Organized by Sukarno, his opening speech beautifully captured what humanity might become:
"Perhaps now more than at any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind. But today we are faced with a situation where the well-being of mankind is not always the primary consideration. Many who are in places of high power think, rather, of controlling the world.
Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously. In your deliberations, Sisters and Brothers, I beg of you, do not be guided by these fears, because fear is an acid which etches man's actions into curious patterns. Be guided by hopes and determination, be guided by ideals, and, yes, be guided by dreams!
We are of many different nations, we are of many different social backgrounds and cultural patterns. Our ways of life are different. Our national characters, or colours or motifs - call it what you will - are different. Our racial stock is different, and even the colour of our skin is different. But what does that matter? Mankind is united or divided by considerations other than these. Conflict comes not from variety of skins, nor from variety of religion, but from variety of desires. All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us.
We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world. Are not these aims mentioned in the letter of invitation to which you responded? I freely confess it - in these aims I am not disinterested or driven by purely impersonal motives. How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa know these things, for we have experienced them.
Indeed, we cannot yet say that all parts of our countries are free already. Some parts still labour under the lash. And some parts of Asia and Africa which are not represented here still suffer from the same condition. Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey's end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.
We are often told "Colonialism is dead". Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree. And, I beg of you do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth."
He even called out the anniversary of Paul Reverse, in a nod to the US and perhaps a call for empathy and understanding for a nation wanting to be free.
Full address here: https://www.cvce.eu/content/publicati...
Yet, in a decade or so, the dream was lost and over time, many states were contorted into crony capitalistic countries, some lost to decades of dictatorial rule. Major events covered in the book include:
Iran '53 (coup v Mosaddegh)
Guatemala '54 (coup v Arbanez)
Brazil '64 (coup v Goulart)
Indonesia '65 (coup v Sukarno)
Chile '73 (coup v Allende)
Later, Operation Condor in Latin America, Operation Lotus in Southeast Asia, and then the Contras in Central America. The US/CIA did not fuck around. Bivens races through Vietnam, Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Uruguay, Congo... to try to mention the compromised fates of black, brown, and yellow people whose lives were irrevocably changed and lost during the Cold War. Their stories and dreams are rarely told in our history books and never in the American mental blockbuster, Your Freedom Is Always Worth It.
As noted by other reviewers, this is a must-read for Americans.
April 24, 2021
Fascinating and really upsetting. I think he does a great job interpreting academic works into readable text punctuated with personal narratives. Weaves together threads from across the global south to depict the haunting reality of US anti communist involvement in developing countries. We are taught such liiiessss in US history classes. Recommend if you have interest in the Cold War, US intelligence operations, and 20th century leftist movements. Makes really interesting links between the end of the colonial era and anti communism rhetoric as a new form of subjugation. Also I feel like it can never be said enough but fck the UChicago department of economics
November 12, 2020
This book might change the way you see the world. Super important to understand how the US waged an all-out war on anyone who dared to actually fight the structures of neocolonialism and challenge US-dominated capitalism. Probably will make you want to be a communist :)
August 21, 2021
I read in English but this review is in Bahasa Indonesia
"Kenapa sih susah banget membahas ideologi *peep* di sini?"
Narasi terkait bagaimana kosa kata komunis, sosialis, marxis dianggap sebagai sesuatu yg tabu u/ dibicarakan. Nggak bisa sembarangan. Mengadakan pembahasan topik itu pun harus menggunakan konteks tertentu. Tidak jarang diskusi atau pemutaran film yg diadakan di institusi pendidikan seringkali mendapat kecaman. Katanya, berbahaya. Bisa lupa Tuhan.
The Jakarta Method malah membahasnya. Vincent Bevins mencoba menceritakan melalui riset panjangnya bagaimana bisa sesuatu yang berbau sayap kiri dianggap sebagai sesuatu yg terlarang. Bermula dari Perang Dingin, ini bukan sekadar Amerika Serikat vs Uni Soviet. Masing-masing kubu membawa kepentingan: PDKT agar menjadi "teman baik." Begitu katanya.
Tetapi usaha u/ menjadi "teman baik" (jadi ingat Tomodachi-nya 20th Century Boys nggak sih?) itu nggak main-main. Jutaan nyawa "dipaksa" melayang begitu saja. Tanpa ada pengadilan resmi, tanpa ada pemeriksaan sebagaimana mestinya. Apa yang dulu aku pelajari tentang Peristiwa G30S/PKI dijabarkan oleh Bevins sebagai sesuatu yg diorkestrasi u/ mendapatkan Indonesia di bawah kepak sayap the ultra right dictatorship. Kata mereka, "War is Peace." (Peace darimane bund?). Melindungi Tanah Air dari kudeta kelompok itu tapi tahu sendiri... ada Supersemar yg sampai sekarang nggak ketahuan batang hidungnya. Seperti legenda naga ya?
Membaca TJM bukan perkara mudah. Ada banyak kejadian bersejarah penting yg disebutkan Bevins, membuatku yg hanya "Sobat Sospol" agak kesulitan merangkai linimasa dalam kepala. Caranya apalagi kalau bukan dibantu oleh Google? Di sisi lain kuakui, buku ini seru sekali. Apa yg terjadi di Jakarta menjadi sebuah taktik yg kemudian diaplikasikan di beberapa negara Amerika Selatan. Menampilkan efek domino & efek kupu-kupu berskala besar.
Aku rasa, bagi mereka yg skeptis boleh sekali membaca TJM. Melihat kejadian '65 dari sisi lain yg rupanya memantik perubahan besar.
"Kenapa sih susah banget membahas ideologi *peep* di sini?"
Narasi terkait bagaimana kosa kata komunis, sosialis, marxis dianggap sebagai sesuatu yg tabu u/ dibicarakan. Nggak bisa sembarangan. Mengadakan pembahasan topik itu pun harus menggunakan konteks tertentu. Tidak jarang diskusi atau pemutaran film yg diadakan di institusi pendidikan seringkali mendapat kecaman. Katanya, berbahaya. Bisa lupa Tuhan.
The Jakarta Method malah membahasnya. Vincent Bevins mencoba menceritakan melalui riset panjangnya bagaimana bisa sesuatu yang berbau sayap kiri dianggap sebagai sesuatu yg terlarang. Bermula dari Perang Dingin, ini bukan sekadar Amerika Serikat vs Uni Soviet. Masing-masing kubu membawa kepentingan: PDKT agar menjadi "teman baik." Begitu katanya.
Tetapi usaha u/ menjadi "teman baik" (jadi ingat Tomodachi-nya 20th Century Boys nggak sih?) itu nggak main-main. Jutaan nyawa "dipaksa" melayang begitu saja. Tanpa ada pengadilan resmi, tanpa ada pemeriksaan sebagaimana mestinya. Apa yang dulu aku pelajari tentang Peristiwa G30S/PKI dijabarkan oleh Bevins sebagai sesuatu yg diorkestrasi u/ mendapatkan Indonesia di bawah kepak sayap the ultra right dictatorship. Kata mereka, "War is Peace." (Peace darimane bund?). Melindungi Tanah Air dari kudeta kelompok itu tapi tahu sendiri... ada Supersemar yg sampai sekarang nggak ketahuan batang hidungnya. Seperti legenda naga ya?
Membaca TJM bukan perkara mudah. Ada banyak kejadian bersejarah penting yg disebutkan Bevins, membuatku yg hanya "Sobat Sospol" agak kesulitan merangkai linimasa dalam kepala. Caranya apalagi kalau bukan dibantu oleh Google? Di sisi lain kuakui, buku ini seru sekali. Apa yg terjadi di Jakarta menjadi sebuah taktik yg kemudian diaplikasikan di beberapa negara Amerika Selatan. Menampilkan efek domino & efek kupu-kupu berskala besar.
Aku rasa, bagi mereka yg skeptis boleh sekali membaca TJM. Melihat kejadian '65 dari sisi lain yg rupanya memantik perubahan besar.
July 5, 2020
What officials in the embassy and the CIA decided the (Indonesian) Army really did need, however, was information. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
“It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
While reading this I kept thinking about that montage from Bowling for Columbine set to It's a Beautiful World about American atrocities during the Cold War. I think people who have even a basic understanding of 20th century can name quite a few of them, but due to some, uhh, let's say deficiencies in our education system and public discourse, we have trouble making sense of them.
That's the value of Bevins' book, the way he ties these coups and atrocities together. Not as some grand overarching conspiracy but as a shared reactionary ideology that the CIA cultivated among ruling conservative elites and high ranking military members of the Third World.
Did a thread on the book here, but I gave up halfway through. It's a lot to take it and I'm thinking I'll revisit the book in a couple of months or so. Also wrote a slightly longer book review here.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
“It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
While reading this I kept thinking about that montage from Bowling for Columbine set to It's a Beautiful World about American atrocities during the Cold War. I think people who have even a basic understanding of 20th century can name quite a few of them, but due to some, uhh, let's say deficiencies in our education system and public discourse, we have trouble making sense of them.
That's the value of Bevins' book, the way he ties these coups and atrocities together. Not as some grand overarching conspiracy but as a shared reactionary ideology that the CIA cultivated among ruling conservative elites and high ranking military members of the Third World.
Did a thread on the book here, but I gave up halfway through. It's a lot to take it and I'm thinking I'll revisit the book in a couple of months or so. Also wrote a slightly longer book review here.
June 21, 2020
To trot out a cliché: this should be required reading. We're in a time when a lot of people are trying to unlearn high-school history, and the parts of the curricula pertaining to U.S. imperialism ought not be overlooked. Critiques of the police state lead naturally into critiques of empire, no? Thus this book, which completely reworked how I understand the Cold War, the Third World, and the role of the U.S. in both. Its lasting effect is one of horror and profound grief. But I'll also remember the global left of the mid-century as depicted here—serious, hopeful, thrillingly revolutionary. Infuriating to know how they were quashed, yet galvanizing to know that they were there, as the people are today.
October 17, 2021
"Cold War created a world of regimes that see any social reform as a threat." Vincent Bevins in The Jakarta Method
Despite its title, The Jakarta Method is not at all centered on Jakarta and the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia. Rather, readers are presented with a wide lens view on the context within which the 1965 anti-communist purge took place and the wider consequences of the killings to other countries with similar internal ideological struggles.
The author does not offer new information or perspective regarding the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, but he retells the event succinctly -- which is probably enough for readers who have never heard of this before, including many Indonesians who grew up with the official history written by the New Order government.
While the extent of CIA's covert operation in Indonesia remains unknown, the author is brave enough to pin the blame to the United States, stating that "at several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand." In short, the scale and depravity of the 1965 killings would've been very different had the US not been involved, mainly through supplying weaponries to the Indonesian military.
What is more important, perhaps, is the fact that the world was watching what was happening in Indonesia in 1965 and took it as a lesson. "Jakarta" became a shorthand for the anti-communists purge that would also happen in some South American countries. Some communist parties, including Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, strengthened their military capability and went, well, rouge to avoid the extermination that happened in Indonesia.
But perhaps, the true cost that the world had to pay for Cold War ideological struggle is the loss of alternative ways of living or even the opportunity to experiment with other forms of economic order. Even today, when one is asking for the government to provide more public goods and less privatization for social justice, one's argument and request can be easily be dismissed for being a communist.
Bevins sums it up eloquently: "They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different."
Despite its title, The Jakarta Method is not at all centered on Jakarta and the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia. Rather, readers are presented with a wide lens view on the context within which the 1965 anti-communist purge took place and the wider consequences of the killings to other countries with similar internal ideological struggles.
The author does not offer new information or perspective regarding the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, but he retells the event succinctly -- which is probably enough for readers who have never heard of this before, including many Indonesians who grew up with the official history written by the New Order government.
While the extent of CIA's covert operation in Indonesia remains unknown, the author is brave enough to pin the blame to the United States, stating that "at several points that we know of—and perhaps some we don’t—Washington was the prime mover, and provided crucial pressure for the operation to move forward or expand." In short, the scale and depravity of the 1965 killings would've been very different had the US not been involved, mainly through supplying weaponries to the Indonesian military.
What is more important, perhaps, is the fact that the world was watching what was happening in Indonesia in 1965 and took it as a lesson. "Jakarta" became a shorthand for the anti-communists purge that would also happen in some South American countries. Some communist parties, including Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, strengthened their military capability and went, well, rouge to avoid the extermination that happened in Indonesia.
But perhaps, the true cost that the world had to pay for Cold War ideological struggle is the loss of alternative ways of living or even the opportunity to experiment with other forms of economic order. Even today, when one is asking for the government to provide more public goods and less privatization for social justice, one's argument and request can be easily be dismissed for being a communist.
Bevins sums it up eloquently: "They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different."
October 21, 2023
The importance of this book is to understand the human toll of anti-communist purges and that they were more widespread and horrific than most people know. The story of Indonesia's move from communism to the right and a dictatorship is the most interesting of all the stories here.
Note that I call them stories, not because they are untrue. But I want to emphasize that the author is not an historian and the timeframes covered in the book were well before the author was born. I had a tough time relying on all the facts here or that the information was objectively presented. The United States is the boogeyman in most all of the threads here and the source for all the black ops. The U.S. is even to blame for Pol Pot - if you believe the author. There are a few CIA agents that were tracked to many of the countries but not a good job of tying in the decision makers.
This would have been a better book if it focused more exclusively on Indonesia. The level of depth on the other dozen countries was thinly sourced at best. The human stories are the best part of the book. The author's writing is heavy on cliches and does not flow well.
3.5 stars. An important book that sheds light on anti-communist atrocities around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s and the role of the CIA.
Note that I call them stories, not because they are untrue. But I want to emphasize that the author is not an historian and the timeframes covered in the book were well before the author was born. I had a tough time relying on all the facts here or that the information was objectively presented. The United States is the boogeyman in most all of the threads here and the source for all the black ops. The U.S. is even to blame for Pol Pot - if you believe the author. There are a few CIA agents that were tracked to many of the countries but not a good job of tying in the decision makers.
This would have been a better book if it focused more exclusively on Indonesia. The level of depth on the other dozen countries was thinly sourced at best. The human stories are the best part of the book. The author's writing is heavy on cliches and does not flow well.
3.5 stars. An important book that sheds light on anti-communist atrocities around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s and the role of the CIA.
November 15, 2020
Bevins tells the story of Washington's genocidal 'Cold War' killing campaigns, from Indonesia to Chile, Brazil to the Philippines, East Timor to Guatemala. For those that have read William Blum's books, there's perhaps not all that much here in the way of revelations, but the author brings some genuine depth and human interest to his writing. With a book so expansive in its scope, there are always going to be points of disagreement, and I think Bevins' analysis is flawed in places. Nonetheless, a stunning piece of historical research and writing.
February 6, 2022
I have waited for such a book a long time. To tell this story. It's about the 1965 killings in Indonesia, how the US was behind it and how the Cold War was essentially won by the US and cemented the capitalist world system we know today. My family is half Indonesian, thus this is a topic that is very close to my heart and in Indonesia, many people don't want to talk about this and would rather forget about what happened. How can we ever move forward if we never look at our past honestly? The author Vincent Bevins is a journalist, who has worked in Brazil and Indonesia and saw how both countries were heavily shaped by anti-communism during the Cold War and even now. In Indonesia, the US was very active in providing anti-communist teachings through scholarships to Indonesian military students (Fort Leavenworth), attempting a failed coup in 1958 in Ambon (see Allen Pope), forging close ties with the Indonesian military, who are staunchly anti-communist, supporting Suharto's rise to power and providing lists of names of union leaders and other troublesome "communists" for going against US corporations. I remember reading about Obama spending part of his childhood in Indonesia. He moved there when he was six years old, meaning around 1967, just around the time of the killings. His Indonesian stepfather studied geography in Hawaii, where he met Obama's mother and then he returned to Indonesia and did surveying work in West New Guinea for the US company Freeport. West New Guinea/West Papua has the world's largest gold mine. On September 30th, 1965 six Indonesian military generals were killed and it was blamed on the communists. Suharto took over power. It is estimated that a million Indonesian "communists" were killed or simply disappeared. And not long after that Freeport and other US corporations entered Indonesia. The author doesn't just write about Indonesia, but also presents us to what happened in Brazil. The US was less active here because Brazil already had a very conservative elite in power. The author also shows us what happened in Guatemala and Chile. It's a very sad history that spans across nations and generations and is the direct consequence of what we are witnessing today. Sadly, we are not taught about this in school and we don't talk about it in daily life much either. Despite the overemphasis of how US lost the war in Vietnam, the author comes to the conclusion that the US actually already won earlier in Indonesia. The US didn't even have to send in any troops and still managed to effectively influence Indonesian politics for US benefit. Early in the book, the author traces the history of the CIA and how the leftist movement grew out of the anti-colonial movement. The US presents itself as the land of the free that sprang out of colonialism, when in fact it became an informal coloniser too. After the Second World War and the Cold War, two basic structural types of countries emerged: Western advanced capitalist countries and resource-exporting crony capitalist societies shaped by anticommunism. The author went rather light on China, Russia and communism, because he believes that their atrocities have been emphasized so much in history that he wants to present the other side of the coin. But what I really liked about this book is how the author included personal stories of people who directly lived through this tumultuous time. This really brings to life what happened, how hopes and dreams of people were utterly shattered. And how depressing the presence is. The least we can do is to listen to their stories and voices. I didn't know that many of the Indonesian prisoners who were tortured and survived the killings, converted to Christianity. Until today, many of these so-called communists are still ostracised in society, including their children. It is really crazy how far anti-communism went. People who just wanted a more equal world were killed.
[...] the Cold War created a world of regimes that see any social reform as a threat.
Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.
One of the bullet points in the guidelines from US ambassador Howard Green.
E. Spread the story of PKI's guilt, treachery and brutality (this priority effort is perhaps most needed immediate assistance we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely US effort).
But US officials were also very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno's plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. They "bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership" that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson's analysis of the declassified communications. The White House enlisted Australian and Japanese officials in the fight. They won.
On December 16, a telegram from Jakarta to the State Department described the victory. Suharto arrived at a high-level meeting by helicopter, strode into the room, and "made it crystal clear to all assembled that the military would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies." then he walked out.
Over the period of the killings, the economic situation deteriorated, reducing further what remained of Sukarno's power. According to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic good like rice, sugar, and cooking oil. Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.
In his first acts, he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno's cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.
It wasn't only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of "troublesome" communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.
When people find out that some things, important things, have been hidden from them, they start to doubt things they shouldn't, and embark on wild conspiracy theorizing.
[...] the Cold War created a world of regimes that see any social reform as a threat.
Most historians today would quickly recognize that this small Indonesian communist newspaper reported the events more accurately than the New York Times.
One of the bullet points in the guidelines from US ambassador Howard Green.
E. Spread the story of PKI's guilt, treachery and brutality (this priority effort is perhaps most needed immediate assistance we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely US effort).
But US officials were also very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno's plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. They "bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership" that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson's analysis of the declassified communications. The White House enlisted Australian and Japanese officials in the fight. They won.
On December 16, a telegram from Jakarta to the State Department described the victory. Suharto arrived at a high-level meeting by helicopter, strode into the room, and "made it crystal clear to all assembled that the military would not stand for precipitous moves against oil companies." then he walked out.
Over the period of the killings, the economic situation deteriorated, reducing further what remained of Sukarno's power. According to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic good like rice, sugar, and cooking oil. Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.
In his first acts, he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno's cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.
It wasn't only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of "troublesome" communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.
US strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.
When people find out that some things, important things, have been hidden from them, they start to doubt things they shouldn't, and embark on wild conspiracy theorizing.
June 15, 2021
Like most Americans well into my adulthood, in fact well into middle age, I was completely ignorant of what my country was doing abroad. I easily accepted the story of good vs evil that explained the Cold War in a phrase. People who lived under communism were captives and those who lived under capitalism were free. We who were free had a noble obligation to see that communism was contained if not ended so that all people could enjoy the life we lived.
Such a simple outlook never considered that other people in other places might have their own ideas about how to live. The Berlin wall and the tight rein that the USSR kept on the countries of eastern Europe provided a foundation for fear and loathing of communism. But this ignored the fact that communism was not monolithic and conditions varied greatly among countries that called themselves communist. After all, colonialism was thoroughly capitalist and it should not have been surprising that those victimized under it should look for a different way.
There was an effort called the Third World Movement that sought a middle pathway between the communism of the USSR and the capitalism of the United States. This effort was represented by India and Indonesia, in the latter by Sukarno, a gifted speaker who energized the people in countries newly emerged from colonialism.
JFK toured the world while a member of Congress educating himself on the way other countries desired to tread their own paths, but he was exceptional and for almost all others in our government, the United States had a duty to push others our way, regardless of the cost to them and with no middle way tolerated.
The Jakarta Method tells the sad story of how this effort by the U.S. had tragic consequences for many foreign countries and it is personalized by the accounts of individuals who were witnesses and victims of programs influenced if not directed by the CIA in cold calculation that communism should be destroyed wherever found.
The reader interested in a concise country-by-country summary of CIA efforts should read Killing Hope by William Blum. Vincent Bevins concentrates on Indonesia and Brazil.
In Indonesia in the 1950's the U.S. first tried supporting a war by proxy to overthrow Sukarno, but was caught in the act when a CIA agent/bomber pilot with full identification was shot down and held captive. The Indonesian military sided with Sukarno and the effort failed, but with over one hundred million people in this nation of ten thousand islands the U.S. was determined not to lose the most populous country in SE Asia to communism, a county considered far more important than Vietnam on the international chessboard.
Continuing to thread a line, Sukarno deftly kept communists from gaining political control while allowing them participation, but a mysterious movement kidnapped and killed several generals of the Indonesian military. While it is not known if this was engineered by the CIA, the reaction of the military was swift and had full CIA backing. A campaign of mass killing of anyone associated with communism in Indonesia began with lists of names provided by the CIA. The result was hundreds of thousands of deaths and a nation cleansed of communism to the delight of the United States. Thus was born the Jakarta Method: team up with a national military and employ death squads to get the desired result by direct terror.
By the way, if seeing is believing the reader is directed to the movie, The Act of Killing, which interviews those who willingly, even eagerly, executed their fellow citizens in Indonesia.
What worked in Indonesia was an action plan for South America where Brazil and Chile were at risk of not following the U.S. line. The CIA, with a successful 1956 coup in Guatemala under its belt and the added success of Indonesia in 1965 then supported similar action in Brazil and Chile. Posters began appearing "Jakarta is coming" to terrorize the left. Salvadore Allende, a socialist elected democratically in Chile was overthrown, killing himself before capture. It was another success for the United States.
This book is a horror story that has even greater impact for the fact that it took place during the time when America was rocking to Elvis Presley and enjoying the surf music of The Beach Boys. It involved the deaths of many innocent people at the direction of the country proclaiming liberty and justice for all. It is a history that should be known by all Americans, disturbing though it is, and quite distinct in the truth it tells from the mythology presented about the Cold War, not cold by any means for those hundreds of thousands murdered in an effort to extinguish communism.
Such a simple outlook never considered that other people in other places might have their own ideas about how to live. The Berlin wall and the tight rein that the USSR kept on the countries of eastern Europe provided a foundation for fear and loathing of communism. But this ignored the fact that communism was not monolithic and conditions varied greatly among countries that called themselves communist. After all, colonialism was thoroughly capitalist and it should not have been surprising that those victimized under it should look for a different way.
There was an effort called the Third World Movement that sought a middle pathway between the communism of the USSR and the capitalism of the United States. This effort was represented by India and Indonesia, in the latter by Sukarno, a gifted speaker who energized the people in countries newly emerged from colonialism.
JFK toured the world while a member of Congress educating himself on the way other countries desired to tread their own paths, but he was exceptional and for almost all others in our government, the United States had a duty to push others our way, regardless of the cost to them and with no middle way tolerated.
The Jakarta Method tells the sad story of how this effort by the U.S. had tragic consequences for many foreign countries and it is personalized by the accounts of individuals who were witnesses and victims of programs influenced if not directed by the CIA in cold calculation that communism should be destroyed wherever found.
The reader interested in a concise country-by-country summary of CIA efforts should read Killing Hope by William Blum. Vincent Bevins concentrates on Indonesia and Brazil.
In Indonesia in the 1950's the U.S. first tried supporting a war by proxy to overthrow Sukarno, but was caught in the act when a CIA agent/bomber pilot with full identification was shot down and held captive. The Indonesian military sided with Sukarno and the effort failed, but with over one hundred million people in this nation of ten thousand islands the U.S. was determined not to lose the most populous country in SE Asia to communism, a county considered far more important than Vietnam on the international chessboard.
Continuing to thread a line, Sukarno deftly kept communists from gaining political control while allowing them participation, but a mysterious movement kidnapped and killed several generals of the Indonesian military. While it is not known if this was engineered by the CIA, the reaction of the military was swift and had full CIA backing. A campaign of mass killing of anyone associated with communism in Indonesia began with lists of names provided by the CIA. The result was hundreds of thousands of deaths and a nation cleansed of communism to the delight of the United States. Thus was born the Jakarta Method: team up with a national military and employ death squads to get the desired result by direct terror.
By the way, if seeing is believing the reader is directed to the movie, The Act of Killing, which interviews those who willingly, even eagerly, executed their fellow citizens in Indonesia.
What worked in Indonesia was an action plan for South America where Brazil and Chile were at risk of not following the U.S. line. The CIA, with a successful 1956 coup in Guatemala under its belt and the added success of Indonesia in 1965 then supported similar action in Brazil and Chile. Posters began appearing "Jakarta is coming" to terrorize the left. Salvadore Allende, a socialist elected democratically in Chile was overthrown, killing himself before capture. It was another success for the United States.
This book is a horror story that has even greater impact for the fact that it took place during the time when America was rocking to Elvis Presley and enjoying the surf music of The Beach Boys. It involved the deaths of many innocent people at the direction of the country proclaiming liberty and justice for all. It is a history that should be known by all Americans, disturbing though it is, and quite distinct in the truth it tells from the mythology presented about the Cold War, not cold by any means for those hundreds of thousands murdered in an effort to extinguish communism.
December 31, 2021
I was reasonably familiar with most of the events described in this book, having read around the subject a bit (top tips: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World or anything by Vijay Prashad, and The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times or anything by Odd Arne Westad). But nothing prepared me for the visceral narrative clarity, the heart-breaking use of first hand testimony, and the sheer impactfulness of Vincent Bevins' combination of scholarly exactitude and journalistic flair.
The Indonesian genocide, the Brazilian general’s coup, the murder and overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende were intimately linked and decisive events of the Cold War which opened up the United States’ path to victory. They were undertaken using mass murder, torture, and terror on a scale *orders of magnitude* worse than anything perpetrated by the Soviet ‘evil empire’ during the same period. Bevins does a masterful job of showing the structural interconnectedness of these events while humanising them, bringing out the reality of being an individual caught in the crossfire of the Cold War's hottest spots.
Everyone should read this book – liberals so they can understand the true history of the world they conquered, and socialists so they can put to bed forever any stupid doubts about the stakes involved when imperialism confronts progress.
I challenge anyone to read the Jakarta Method and not feel iron take hold in their soul.
The Indonesian genocide, the Brazilian general’s coup, the murder and overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende were intimately linked and decisive events of the Cold War which opened up the United States’ path to victory. They were undertaken using mass murder, torture, and terror on a scale *orders of magnitude* worse than anything perpetrated by the Soviet ‘evil empire’ during the same period. Bevins does a masterful job of showing the structural interconnectedness of these events while humanising them, bringing out the reality of being an individual caught in the crossfire of the Cold War's hottest spots.
Everyone should read this book – liberals so they can understand the true history of the world they conquered, and socialists so they can put to bed forever any stupid doubts about the stakes involved when imperialism confronts progress.
I challenge anyone to read the Jakarta Method and not feel iron take hold in their soul.
July 8, 2020
Fuck.
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