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A review by mburnamfink
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
5.0
There were two Cold Wars. The first was an apocalyptic technowar, eyeball-to-eyeball-to-thermonuclear-mushroom-cloud; a war of research and development which thankfully never went hot. And then there was the war that was actually fought, the competition for the loyalties of the Third World, the arc of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where billions of people lived. In this second Cold War, the United States had a secret weapon, one which it deployed repeatedly with great success. No, not rock and roll, Coca-Cola, the transistor radio and color TV. It was mass murder carried out by local anti-Communist death squads with covert support from the CIA, Army Special Forces, and multinational corporations based in the US.
Bevins aims to recover this largely forgotten history, focusing primarily on the 1965 Indonesian genocide as experienced by its survivors, recounted between the broader sweeps. The immediate period post-WW2 was one of immense optimism in the decolonized Third World. These countries were young and poor, but they knew that the future was their's to take. And often, Socialist and Communist parties played a major role in these countries new politics. Communists were the only ones taking colonial subjects seriously in the 1920s and 1930s. Socialism provided a plan to build a prosperous egalitarian society without the racial hierarchies and extractive violence that characterized colonialism. And finally, the USSR was one of the superpowers, and these countries were too poor to turn down Moscow's aid. But tolerating Communist organizers and having diplomatic links with Moscow were seen as dangerous steps away from capitalism, steps which America would not permit Third World nations to make.
In 1960, Indonesia was the 6th most populous country in the world, with the third largest Communist party after the USSR and China. It was ruled by Sukarno, a charismatic leader who blended political philosophies in a syncretic fashion, and who mediated between the state-within-a-state of the armed forces on the Right, and the Communist party of the Left. A leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, Sukarno had slowly become estranged from Washington, which cultivated relationships with senior generals. In the early hours of October 1, a group of soldiers calling themselves the 30th of September Movement assassinated six senior generals, and then were brutally eliminated themselves. The armed forces used this as a pretext to seize power, installing Suharto as the new dictator. They they proceeded to liquidate the Left, killing approximately one million Indonesians and imprisoning a million more in concentration camps for years. After the bloodshed, Indonesia was opened for business, with US firms taking prime contracts in fishing, rubber, and other extractive industries.
Indonesia was the bloodiest of these actions, but the pattern was repeated in 24 other countries across the Third World. Black propaganda was used to build up a Communist threat (it is unclear the 30 September movement wanted, or even who they were), Left wing democracies were subjected to economic sabotage, and then when the time was ripe, the military took power and started killing. "Jakarta" was used by the bloody hands responsible for disappearances and mass killing in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to explain their actions and plans. The killing continued until the Cold War ended, with only a brief slackening under Carter.
The basic facts of history are not in doubt: the right wing coups, the American training of those responsible, the approving diplomatic cables for each incident, and finally the dead and vanished. The pattern that Bevins lays these facts is also potent. Those responsible knew each other and traded lessons learns across brutal counter-insurgency. The violence fit American foreign policy goals and Manichaean anti-Communist outlook. It was a racist campaign that excluded white Europeans, where Communist parties sat in parliaments and whole nations enacted social democratic policy. What Bevins doesn't have are the receipts, the red string connecting a specific decision by an American President to a killing field in Bali. Those receipts, if they exist, are still locked in a CIA archive. But conversely, Hitler never gave an explicit order to exterminate the Jews of Europe; all the Nazis just understood the task to be done. Bevins closes by asking "was it worth it?", and in many cases, the answer is a resounding no. While absolute wealth has risen, global inequality has barely budged since the 1960s. Most of the Third World is still locked in impoverished crony capitalism, ruled by flawed democracies. The exceptions are China, Taiwan, and South Korea.
This is a hard book. The mix of personal reporting and history doesn't always work, though it is a brave attempt to give an empathic anchor to what is so often an abstract atrocity. Bevins is a journalist, not an academic, and I'm sure that an actual political scientist or historian will take asides at his theoretical framework and method. But I've read several books like this, and The Jakarta Method is the best. Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War is a great book, but focused on the perpetrators rather than their victims. Chamberlain's The Cold War's Killing Fields is systematic but dry, avoids Latin America and Africa, and forces a conclusion that is not warranted by the evidence. Blumenthals' The Management of Savagery is more contemporary, but also conspiratorial in approach.
The Jakarta Method is an important book, a sober reminder of grim truth that Americans would like to forget. We are an empire, and our prosperity is built on bones.
Bevins aims to recover this largely forgotten history, focusing primarily on the 1965 Indonesian genocide as experienced by its survivors, recounted between the broader sweeps. The immediate period post-WW2 was one of immense optimism in the decolonized Third World. These countries were young and poor, but they knew that the future was their's to take. And often, Socialist and Communist parties played a major role in these countries new politics. Communists were the only ones taking colonial subjects seriously in the 1920s and 1930s. Socialism provided a plan to build a prosperous egalitarian society without the racial hierarchies and extractive violence that characterized colonialism. And finally, the USSR was one of the superpowers, and these countries were too poor to turn down Moscow's aid. But tolerating Communist organizers and having diplomatic links with Moscow were seen as dangerous steps away from capitalism, steps which America would not permit Third World nations to make.
In 1960, Indonesia was the 6th most populous country in the world, with the third largest Communist party after the USSR and China. It was ruled by Sukarno, a charismatic leader who blended political philosophies in a syncretic fashion, and who mediated between the state-within-a-state of the armed forces on the Right, and the Communist party of the Left. A leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, Sukarno had slowly become estranged from Washington, which cultivated relationships with senior generals. In the early hours of October 1, a group of soldiers calling themselves the 30th of September Movement assassinated six senior generals, and then were brutally eliminated themselves. The armed forces used this as a pretext to seize power, installing Suharto as the new dictator. They they proceeded to liquidate the Left, killing approximately one million Indonesians and imprisoning a million more in concentration camps for years. After the bloodshed, Indonesia was opened for business, with US firms taking prime contracts in fishing, rubber, and other extractive industries.
Indonesia was the bloodiest of these actions, but the pattern was repeated in 24 other countries across the Third World. Black propaganda was used to build up a Communist threat (it is unclear the 30 September movement wanted, or even who they were), Left wing democracies were subjected to economic sabotage, and then when the time was ripe, the military took power and started killing. "Jakarta" was used by the bloody hands responsible for disappearances and mass killing in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to explain their actions and plans. The killing continued until the Cold War ended, with only a brief slackening under Carter.
The basic facts of history are not in doubt: the right wing coups, the American training of those responsible, the approving diplomatic cables for each incident, and finally the dead and vanished. The pattern that Bevins lays these facts is also potent. Those responsible knew each other and traded lessons learns across brutal counter-insurgency. The violence fit American foreign policy goals and Manichaean anti-Communist outlook. It was a racist campaign that excluded white Europeans, where Communist parties sat in parliaments and whole nations enacted social democratic policy. What Bevins doesn't have are the receipts, the red string connecting a specific decision by an American President to a killing field in Bali. Those receipts, if they exist, are still locked in a CIA archive. But conversely, Hitler never gave an explicit order to exterminate the Jews of Europe; all the Nazis just understood the task to be done. Bevins closes by asking "was it worth it?", and in many cases, the answer is a resounding no. While absolute wealth has risen, global inequality has barely budged since the 1960s. Most of the Third World is still locked in impoverished crony capitalism, ruled by flawed democracies. The exceptions are China, Taiwan, and South Korea.
This is a hard book. The mix of personal reporting and history doesn't always work, though it is a brave attempt to give an empathic anchor to what is so often an abstract atrocity. Bevins is a journalist, not an academic, and I'm sure that an actual political scientist or historian will take asides at his theoretical framework and method. But I've read several books like this, and The Jakarta Method is the best. Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War is a great book, but focused on the perpetrators rather than their victims. Chamberlain's The Cold War's Killing Fields is systematic but dry, avoids Latin America and Africa, and forces a conclusion that is not warranted by the evidence. Blumenthals' The Management of Savagery is more contemporary, but also conspiratorial in approach.
The Jakarta Method is an important book, a sober reminder of grim truth that Americans would like to forget. We are an empire, and our prosperity is built on bones.