Vincent Bevins

The hidden story of the wanton slaughter in Indonesia - and Latin America, and around the world - that was a fundamental part of the Cold War "victory" we all now live with. In the 20th century, the U.S. government's effort to contain communism resulted in several disastrous conflicts: Vietnam, Cuba, Korea. Violence in Indonesia, and then interconnected slaughters across Latin America, arguably had a bigger hand in shaping today's world, but have been widely overlooked for one important reason: the secret CIA interventions were successful. In 1965, nearly one million unarmed civilians were killed in Indonesia with active U.S. assistance. This was the end of a decade-long attempt to stop the rise of the largest communist party outside the USSR and China. The resulting dictatorship buried the truth until this day, but the massacre shook the world. Left-wing movements radicalized, afraid of suffering the same fate as the unarmed Indonesians, and the world's committed anticommunists - especially in Brazil and Chile - learned from the mass murder, creating terror campaigns named after the Indonesian capital. In this bold and comprehensive new history, building on his reporting for the Washington Post in Southeast Asia, Vincent Bevins uses recently declassified documents, archival research, and countless of hours of interviews to reconstruct this chapter in world history and reveal a hidden legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been portrayed that much of the developing world passed naturally, and peacefully, into the US-led capitalist world system. But those who suffered through this process have long known differently.

Washington's Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

The Jakarta Method

soochie

“They say that time feels Iike it slows down in revolutionary or historic moments. And we know that in moments of trauma or violence, time can nearly come to a stop. When eyewitnesses and victims talk about the six months sfter September 30, 1965, they speak differently. Elderly men and women who talk about other parts of their lives in terms of years, or decades, begin to talk about weeks, specific dates, hours, and minutes.”

communism offered the people of the Third World "some-thing to die for."

“And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.”

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here, says Ngurah Termana, the nephew of Agung Alit, the man who spent a darkly absurd afternoon sifting through skulls in search of his father’s body. In contrast to Cambodia, where Western backpackers faithfully (or morbidly) visit the Killing Fields Museum outside Phnom Penh, few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.

Within the current structure, the only real examples of large Third World countries becoming as rich as those in the First World since 1945 are South Korea and Taiwan, and it’s very clear that these nations were given special exemptions from the rules of the world order because of their strategic importance in the Cold War. 

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. 

Perhaps Castro had committed the unforgivable sin of very publicly surviving repeated coup and assassination attempts in a way that embarrassed Washington. 

The United States left South Vietnam. In the Western world, this meant that Saigon “fell.” From the perspective of Hanoi, the Vietnamese had only achieved what they should have gotten, through the referendum that Washington had helped cancel, back in 1956. Three million had died, the entire nation was militarized, and huge swathes of the country’s lush jungles were rendered poisonous for generations because of US chemical warfare. After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam.

Why did Cold War Washington let Western Europe “get away” with all this light socialism when similar policy orientations led to violent intervention in the Third World? Was it only that, as Francisca said, Americans simply trusted their European cousins—who were white, and therefore responsible—to handle the task of managing democracy?

In the Gulf of Tonkin, a US destroyer called Maddox was in Vietnamese waters, violating the international twelve-mile limit, attempting to intercept North Vietnamese communications. On August 2, three Vietnamese patrol boats approached the Maddox, and the US opened fire, killing four sailors. The Vietnamese shot back, and then fled. On August 3, Johnson said that patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin would continue, warning against “further unprovoked military action.” On August 4, nothing happened. But US vessels thought something was happening, and they began “firing at their own shadows.” 25 This second, nonexistent confrontation was used as pretext for the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” which gave Johnson the authority to start a full war in Vietnam.

In Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961), anyone who was paying attention knew that Washington had been behind the regime change operations. These very obvious signs of US intervention had not only tainted Washington’s image worldwide—they had undermined the efficacy of the states they installed when they were victorious. 

Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB), reportedly used classic extortion tactics on small businesses, but with an anticommunist twist. In the dark of night, party members would cover the walls of shops and homes with seemingly communist graffiti. Then they’d show up a few days later, asking the owners to make donations to the AIB, to prove to the concerned citizens in the neighborhood that they weren’t actually communists.

The Miami CIA station became the largest in the world, and offered cash bounties for dead communists. Edward Lansdale, the same man who had created vampire victims in the Philippines, discussed spraying civilian sugar workers in Cuba with biological warfare agents, as well as faking the Second Coming of Christ. 

The South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem also tried and failed to organize a coup in Cambodia, with US approval. After that failed, Sihanouk received a gift box. Maybe it was an attempt to patch things up. Instead, it exploded when his staff opened it, killing two men. 32 The parcel bomb, the third attempt to destroy Sihanouk, was traced to a US base in Saigon, but may have been sent without US knowledge. However—and this crucial dynamic repeats itself throughout the Cold War—the incident would not have happened if the South Vietnamese thought Washington would disapprove. 

Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. […]  The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.

On the left, the Soviet Union was launching something upward: Sputnik, the first satellite ever sent into orbit by humankind, which had been a fabulous propaganda tool for global communism all year. On the right, the United States was dropping something from the sky: bombs, onto Indonesia. 

In his studies, Sakono also developed a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and ideology. “You see, the Communist Party in the United States never grew because it didn’t have the right roots,” he concluded. “But in Indonesia we have so much injustice and exploitation. There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”

But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote. 7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.

In Guatemala, the North Americans did their best to create a pretext for intervention. The CIA planted boxes of rifles marked with communist hammers and sickles so they could be “discovered” as proof of Soviet infiltration. 

During the resulting three-year stalemate, the US dropped more than six hundred thousand tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, and poured thirty thousand tons of napalm over the landscape. More than 80 percent of North Korea’s buildings were destroyed, and the bombing campaign killed an estimated one million civilians.

In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist. 

a harrowing read but engaging enough for anyone. brief overviews of CIA involvement in various countries besides an in-depth look at Indonesia make this a great foray into history

yasi

I consider myself to be pretty educated and thought I knew how bad the US govt was/is because I knew about some Latin American events that I suspected would be mentioned in this book.... tip of the iceberg. I was nauseous the whole time. The messaging was made even more poignant because Bevins used specific survivors' stories as a lens to recount these events from the ground. A vast and important (but still accessible!) book that I would recommend to anyone.

reread after watching i’m still here and realized i didn’t pay much attention to the brazil parts when i first read this. truly a harrowing read and i did take away a lot i didn’t catch in my first read, particularly on international common grounds, the exile diaspora, and bevins addressing his own positionality as a white american in the last few chapters. might write further about this on the substack…

Patricia K

reread after watching i’m still here and realized i didn’t pay much attention to the brazil parts when i first read this. truly a harrowing read and i did take away a lot i didn’t catch in my first read, particularly on international common grounds, the exile diaspora, and bevins addressing his own positionality as a white american in the last few chapters. might write further about this on the substack…

personal copy

I started reading it last year but had to drop it eventually due to thesis and work. I finally had the chance to get back to it this year after months of not reading any book and I thank all the gods in the universe for making me read one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. I have been doing research on communism and SEA politics as a political science student (graduate) and have been writing essays on the emergence of this ideology in the region. However, I haven't actually tried studying the consequences of anticommunism in this region—one thing that made me regret the most right now as I am no longer a student. The book narrated the stories of the victims and exposed how the US played a crucial role in delivering mass murder across the globe. But what made me love this masterpiece is its attempt to humanize the stories of the "losers" and let their voices be the vehicle to expose the truth that has been deliberately erased by the state governments and later forgotten in the history of many countries. 

josh

Jakarta Method is written in the form of a story, but follows real actors (both organizational and individual) in the story of American imperialism. Using the Washington-backed onslaught in Jakarta, Indonesia as the beginning, Bevins goes on to highlight how the US refined the method to their madness (the madness being establishing a global economic and political hegemony). Starting in Indonesia, but following massacres all over Southeast Asia, Middle East, and South & Central America.

Same with Micheal Parenti's "Against Empire", this will crush any sense of nationalism you have if you are from anywhere in the imperial core. Truly America is the most terrorist state to ever exist. 

Adam Arif-Pardy

Jakarta Method is written in the form of a story, but follows real actors (both organizational and individual) in the story of American imperialism. Using the Washington-backed onslaught in Jakarta, Indonesia as the beginning, Bevins goes on to highlight how the US refined the method to their madness (the madness being establishing a global economic and political hegemony). Starting in Indonesia, but following massacres all over Southeast Asia, Middle East, and South & Central America.

Same with Micheal Parenti's "Against Empire", this will crush any sense of nationalism you have if you are from anywhere in the imperial core. Truly America is the most terrorist state to ever exist. 

Rosa

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.

Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

i'll write a poem about this (tearing up counter: 2, sobbing: 1)

madina

how can the world’s third most populous country be scrubbed from the people’s imagination? how has it been reduced to tourist destination where bloodshed occurred? this is the truth of my hometown, home country. required reading in understanding how the third world was systematically diminished to preserve the continuance of the western / first world’s colonial ambitions. 

selamat hari peringatan konferensi asia-afrika. there’s a better world here still.

aisha

how can the world’s third most populous country be scrubbed from the people’s imagination? how has it been reduced to tourist destination where bloodshed occurred? this is the truth of my hometown, home country. required reading in understanding how the third world was systematically diminished to preserve the continuance of the western / first world’s colonial ambitions. 

selamat hari peringatan konferensi asia-afrika. there’s a better world here still.

18/4/23

alina s

Yonas

Bevins does an excellent job in the beginning of the book explaining the context of the Cold War to frame the tragedy and massacres that occurred in Indonesia. His explanation of the post World War II environment, the rise of anti-communism and American efforts to shape regimes in Europe and elsewhere set the scene perfectly to explain what happened in Indonesia. 

Specific examples of regime change efforts against Guatemala and Iran are outlined and then Bevins explained how the CIA changed strategy and employed subtler methods to get what they wanted such as supporting right-wing elements in the military to build "a state within a state".

The tragic stories of what happened in Indonesia are also told through first hand accounts of people who were there at the time and some of these personal stories (that of Ing and Benny especially) perfectly link with the larger theme of the book of how "The Jakarta Method" was seen as a model for anti-communist right wing military despots around the world.

I did find some issues with how Bevins explained the result of these efforts in the Third World though. He was right that these terror campaigns of disappearances and murder worked to maintain the global extractive relationship the north has with the south. He does mention the inequality between those two worlds but wrongly says that the US client states that were able to be set up by these mass murder programs were "crony capitalist." The reasons why the capitalism in the global south that was imposed was so corrupt and so authoritarian is not because it was a different system but the role those countries played in the larger world system. The "crony capitalism" meme absolves capitalism as a whole when the two are not distinct - the imposition of such violence in Indonesia and Brazil among others was necessary to maintain the softer capitalist structures in the West, as the cheap resources from the global south could solve "social problems" at home as Rhodes outlined when he was advocating imperialism as a strategy in Britain (see Lenin Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism for this). In a way those more brutal regimes were a way of exporting the violence necessary to maintain capitalism - they are part of one system not two. These brutal regimes were also were vital in the victory of the capitalist system as it ensured a flow of cheap resources and provided cheap labour upon which to build neoliberalism to renew the capitalist project in the midst of crisis in the 70s and enshrine world hegemony.

Bevins makes a good effort to point out Modernization Theory and how it was concocted by the US elite to counter Marxism and provide a "suitable" path for development for the third world. It would have been even more incisive had he outlined alternatives to the explanations provided by Modernization Theory such as Dependency Theory/World System Theory. The threads of such an analysis were there but a more thorough critique of Modernization Theory using works by Amin, Rodney, Arrighi etc. would have been excellent. Considering he hinted at providing a similar explanation as those theorists I just mentioned I was disappointed he was not more explicit. Diving deeper in this manner would have resolved the "crony capitalism" distinction I outlined above.

There were also attempts to appease the liberal reader by also admitting that that socialist regimes also committed crimes in a way that I think was unnecessary (and at one point was not a correct equivalency to what was going on in Latin America when pointing out Soviet repression, but that is just my read of history) but probably mandatory to get published by a Western publisher these days.

Regardless of these critiques this book deserves 5 stars, it flows very well and is not difficult to read at all and above all is extremely well structured. The way the different parts flow into each other shape the narrative and make the history easy to digest as factual information and statistics are melded perfectly with personal stories and recollections.

Read this book if you are interested in geo-politics and 20th century history - many do not know the things Bevins outlines in this book and they should because as he posits, these events have had a strong determining effect on the world in which we find ourselves today.

Lily

It seems gauche to rate this book, this well-researched, well-written, concise and harrowing account of how United States global hegemony became the only reality most of us have ever known. More specifically, Bevins uncovers the political history leading up to the brutal massacre of nearly one million left-leaning and communist Indonesians between 1965-1966, fully and methodically backed by United States government and its experimentation with such "liberation" methods all around the world. While the actions of US government in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam (and the backing of the apartheid state of Israel) are tangible and fresh in the contemporary reader's mind, what Bevins recounts with staggering precision points to a largely hidden but unbelievably atrocious era of Indonesia's history, a country that hosted the biggest non-ruling communist party in the world at 1965. Bevins also moves seamlessly to the simultaneous events in Iran, Brazil, Guatemala and Chile, all countries which had their own taste of "The Method", leaving millions of lives destroyed in its wake. It is the value of these lives that is centered in this book, with Bevins almost mirroring Joshua Oppenheimer’s sublime documentary on the mass murders of 1965-66,The Act of Killing; while Oppenheimer shone a blinding spotlight on the murderers, Bevins focuses on the lives and humanity of the victims. The books is lovingly dotted with the personal stories and journeys of bright and brave survivors of the horrific years of torture brought upon anyone with even slightly left-leaning ideology. 
While this certainly is not an easy read, and there were many instances where I felt physically ill and truly sick at heart with every single line, it is a crucial book for anyone living in a world that is profoundly and eternally shaped by the atrocities it details.

priya

Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism.

The British did not want to create a country that was majority Chinese, since too much of Malaya’s population, especially in Singapore, sympathized with communism for their liking. As a solution to this "problem," London added its possessions on the top half of the huge island of Borneo into what would become Malaysia, and excluded the island of Singapore. This move would combine the entirely distinct peoples of Sarawak, Borneo, and Sabah into the new Malaysia, which would dilute the proportion of ethnic Chinese to levels the British considered acceptable. The southern half of Borneo was part of Indonesia—so Indonesians would share a long border with British colonial territories shoehorned into Malaysia just to dilute the power of leftists.

It’s believed the events of 1965–66 in Indonesia were the first time Asia suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.20 In 1965, two men with direct knowledge of US activities in Indonesia arrived in Guatemala City. Historians who study violence in Latin America believe that 1966 in Guatemala was the first time the region suffered from disappearances as a tactic of state terror.

Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement either, or even that Allende would harm US business interests. What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.

Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here, says Ngurah Termana, the nephew of Agung Alit, the man who spent a darkly absurd afternoon sifting through skulls in search of his father’s body. In contrast to Cambodia, where Western backpackers faithfully (or morbidly) visit the Killing Fields Museum outside Phnom Penh, few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.

The Jakarta Method Washington's Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

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