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Sebastian Ritscher
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THE JAKARTA METHOD

Vincent Bevins

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

During the Cold War, the U.S. effort to contain communism resulted in several disgraceful and disastrous conflicts: Vietnam, Cuba, Korea. But other conflicts in Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, and other Latin American countries have arguably had a bigger hand in shaping today's world, yet the very nature of U.S. participation in them has been shrouded for decades. Until now.
In 1965, nearly one million civilians were killed in Indonesia with U.S. assistance. The strategy went as follows: act early, play up the threat of a communist revolution, find the natural anti-communist elements in society, fund them, overthrow the sitting government, give the full backing of Washington to the new authoritarian state, and finally, turn a blind eye to the body count that mounts in its wake. It was a brutally efficient playbook that the CIA then emulated in Latin America in the decade that followed.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Washington Post reporter Vincent Bevins uses newly unveiled CIA documents and countless hours of interviews to reconstruct this chillingly overlooked chapter in U.S. history and reveal a hidden legacy that spans the globe. For decades, these conflicts have been minimized as a non-violent, "cold" war and 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.

Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist currently working as Southeast Asia Correspondent for the Washington Post. He has reported from all across the region, while paying special attention to the 1965 massacre and contemporary Indonesian politics. He previously served as the Brazil Correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that worked for both the Financial Times and the Guardian, in London. Among the publications he has written for are the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist, the Guardian, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Folha de S.Paulo, the New Republic, Los Angeles Times, the New Inquiry, the Awl, the Baffler, and Paper Magazine. Bevins has appeared often as a guest expert on a wide range of media outlets, including NPR, the BBC, NBC, MSNBC, ABC News, HuffPost Live, Brazil's GloboNews and TV Brasil. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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Published 2020-05-19 by Public Affairs

Comments

It sounds like a grim read, and it is, but it's also a gripping one, interweaving recently declassified documents and interviews with people around the globe. Read more...

The Jakarta Method dismantles and re-positions the American mythos, similar to two recent Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project and Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth... The Jakarta Method is a devastating critique of US hypocrisy during the Cold War, and a mournful hypothetical of what the world might have looked like if Third World movements had succeeded. Read more...

Through this transnational perspective, Bevins finds connections between unexpected locations... [He] takes a broader approach, situating the violence within the global context of the Cold War, but the story he tells is still grounded in deep on-the-ground investigation and extraordinary personal narratives. Read more...

Trenchant... Powerful... [Bevins] translates the findings of complex scholarly accounts into smooth and readable, if often heartbreaking, prose.

Excellent... anchors itself in a history most Americans never learned or would rather forget.

A gripping account of Indonesia's post-independence politics.

Vincent Bevins's piece related to THE JAKARTA METHOD will run in the New York Times Sunday paper. It's up online now. Read more...

One of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of [the CIA] and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world.

The Jakarta Method is a gripping, thoroughly original exploration into the global covert Cold War, the passions it provoked, and the corpses it left in its wake. ... Bevins' excellent book offers a different kind of reckoning, of moral costs and ongoing political consequences.

This, for my money, may be the must-read book about the Cold War. There have been quite a few, but this one is current, it's sweeping, and it's an absolute must-read, if you're only going to read one book to think about what that - maybe the most eventful period in human history - was all about... You cannot dismiss this book.

Bevins has deftly chronicled the genocide of Indonesian communists in 1965.. a brilliant history of the Cold War told through global anti-communist violence. Read more...

This is an indispensable book for all those interested in the Third World during the era of the Cold War, and in the links between various operations of 'the Anti-Communist International', a subject whose importance will I think only increase. It might in effect emerge that the decisive global changes were not the ones that we currently see as such (the fall of the Berlin Wall), but rather what happened in countries like China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil.

Bevins' The Jakarta Method is a must-read to better understand how the U.S. intelligence apparatus became what it is today, and how it's ravaged so many other countries along the way. Read more...

Author's piece on anti-communism paranoia in Brazil. Read more...

Through this transnational perspective, Bevins finds connections between unexpected locations... [He] takes a broader approach, situating the violence within the global context of the Cold War, but the story he tells is still grounded in deep on-the-ground investigation and extraordinary personal narratives.

...Listen to the full conversation between Bevins and Scheer as the two discuss how modern day politics are playing out before the backdrop of the Cold War, and what that says about the narratives Americans consume and cling to regarding their country's role in recent history. Read more...

Tragically, that which everyone believed we had left in the past has returned to spread throughout Latin America once more. The Jakarta Method allows us to understand the moment that Brazil is now living through, and its connection to a much larger, global scheme.

The Jewish Currents interviewed Vincent Bevins about THE JAKARTA METHOD (9781541742406; 5/19/20). In the Q&A, they call the book "A guidebook to the dark heart of American empire. In exploring Third Worldist political movements and their swift repression at the hands of Washington, Bevins examines the roots of the global resurgence of far-right politics." Read more...

Bevins is not the first to note that the Cold War frequently burned hot in the Third World, but he excels at showing the human costs of that epic ideological struggle.

Vincent Bevins spoke about THE JAKARTA METHOD with Failed State podcast. Read more...

Essential and devastating.

In this conversation we discuss many of the major themes an details of The Jakarta Method as well as talking about Vincent's time in Brazil where he witnessed the rise of the controversial Jair Bolsonaro... Read more...

CBS Inside Edition Digital interviewed Vincent Bevins about THE JAKARTA METHOD. It has already been viewed 80,000+ times on YouTube! Read more...

...crisply written... Using a mix of documentary sources and interviews with participants across multiple continents, Bevins shows how U.S.-backed violence shaped the world we live in today. Read more...

A fascinating and disturbing account of what the author calls the 'mass murder programme that shaped the world'. Read more...

Q&A: Vincent Bevins on How Indonesia's Anti-Communist Campaign Shaped the Modern World Read more...

Vincent Bevins is quoted in this piece in The Nation on Brazilian politics during the pandemic with THE JAKARTA METHOD mentioned. Read more...

Bevins gives a concise account of how US-supported carnage in Indonesia inspired other countries to unleash their own murderous suppression of left-wing movements. By focusing on Indonesia and nations not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union, he goes beyond the typical Cold War history of arms races and intrigue... As Bevins effectively describes, we are still living in the world created by these anti-communist purges... [His] account raises necessary questions. Did the anti-communist mania of the 20th century make the world any safer? And if so, for whom? Read more...

...I've highlighted Bevin's new book because it appears at a serendipitous moment. In the rush of current events we don't always pause to connect some important dots, in this case the indivisible string of dots between American domestic and foreign policy. That is, the same class warfare practiced by highly class-conscious U.S. elites and their junior partners in Indonesia in 1965 is now playing out in response to Racism 2020 and COVID-19, albeit with different methods.... Read more...

Well-researched, packed with information, and very well-written.

[The Jakarta Method] sheds a welcome light on the crimes that took place in Indonesia, a history largely forgotten in the West, but it also asks the fundamental question of why America aided such atrocities. Read more...

Bevins's book is a reckoning with the massacre of Indonesia's communists - specifically, with U.S. complicity in the crimes. He is less interested in long descriptions of torture and death and more in understanding the geopolitics that lie behind them. The great originality and insight of the book is its emphasis on the international scale of 1965... [His] verdict on American involvement is damning... But more than anyone else, Bevins shows that what linked communists across borders was not so much a belief in international revolution but their shared experience of murder and defeat. Read more...

An exceptionally well-written narrative... In a fascinating and disturbing journey around the world, Bevins documents the effects of Washington's virulent anticommunist crusade across several continents.

A shocking portrait that few readers will forget... [Bevins's] research is solid and his conclusions convincing. A well-delineated excavation of yet another dark corner of American history.

Bevins wrote The Jakarta Method to show how this recent but largely ignored part of our history very much informs the way we live today. He concludes with current information about his sources, some still fighting to simply have the truth of what happened in their countries acknowledged, others expatriated to places that will never completely feel like home. It can be inspiring to hear from people willing to excavate mass graves and bury victims with dignity, but to this day that truth is struggling to be heard.

This fascinating book is a meticulous and shocking analysis of a little-known and horrifically bloody battle of the Cold War, but it is also something more. It places the Indonesia massacre of 1965 in its global context, showing how the United States both supported it and used it as a model for repression in other countries.

Truly captivating.... Bevins is a brilliant and compassionate writer, and The Jakarta Method is eye-opening. I really hope the world pays attention to this book.

Earlier this week Vincent did interviews with Glenn Greenwald's YouTube show for The Intercept: The CIA's Murderous Practices, Disinformation Campaigns, and Interference in Other Countries Still Shape the World Order and U.S. Politics... Read more...

Riveting... As a polemic, The Jakarta Method is never anything less than conscientious and persuasive, but Bevins's book truly takes flight as a work of narrative journalism, tracing the history of America's violent meddling in Southeast Asia and Latin America through the stories of those it brutalized.

In this episode, we are joined by journalist and author Vincent Bevins (@Vinncent) to discuss his new book, The Jakarta Method Read more...

... exceptional... Bevins recounts this history in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact way, and he carefully weaves together the stories of the individual survivors whom he has found over the course of his investigation. He takes us to the sites of killing fields in Bali where tourist hotels now stand. He introduces us to the Indonesians who lost family and friends in the massacres, and he shows how the survivors are still ostracized and viewed with suspicion all these decades later. ... He also traces the use of the tactics employed against innocent Indonesians to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere in Latin America, and reminds us that people in these countries are still living in the shadow of the U.S.-backed dictatorships that were in power there in the 1970s and 1980s.... Read more...

Vincent Bevins discussed THE JAKARTA METHOD on WORT's A Public Affair (Madison, WI) yesterday afternoon. (Nov. 17, 2020) Read more...