Vincent Bevins

Wow. This is one of the most important books I’ve read. I knew about the military coups in Chile and Argentina, but not in as much detail. Now I know the bigger story. The book focuses mainly on Indonesia where the larger story begins before branching to other countries in Asia and Latin America.

Overview: In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians, anyone who was or was suspected to be a communist, a socialist, a sympathizer, show more or even a moderate, and many of their family members – anyone who wasn’t an anticommunist. They were “disappeared,” imprisoned, tortured and executed.

Page 148: December 16, 1965. U.S. officials were … very alarmed that the military government-in-waiting had not yet reversed Sukarno’s [the democratically elected president’s] plans to take over US oil companies, by far their most important economic concern at the time. … if nationalization went forward, … their grip on power was at stake.

Page 150: …at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed – that is, eighty thousand people…

Page 224: …the CIA … told his anticommunist comrade that Washington could assist him in forming “shock troops” to put the plan into action in Argentina. “We won’t need to kill a million like in Indonesia, [a meeting attendee] said, “because we can get it done with ten thousand.” He guessed low. Anticommunists killed far more than that in Argentina.

Page 227: On March 23, 1982, General Efrain Rios Montt took power in Guatemala in a military coup. He was an Evangelical Christian – which made him a special favorite of Ronald Reagon – and continued the genocide… [His] religious zeal gave the anticommunist violence a theological justification. “They are communists and therefore atheists and therefore demons and therefore you can kill them,” as one civil war victim … summarized the logic. The vast majority of the murdered were practitioners of traditional Mayan religions.

My comment #1: This gives me chills. His “theological justification” propels me back to politics in the U.S. now, in 2024.

My comment #2: Damn. In spring of 1982, at the time of this coup, I was traveling in Central America – not in Guatemala, like in 1972 with the Amigos group, but this time in Belize and Honduras with another traveler, a man I’d met in Belize. I was so adventurous when I was young, or is the word reckless? At least I wasn’t traveling alone by then. The war wasn’t targeting tourists, but still…! Too close for comfort.

Page 245: (Paraphrased) There’s a beach in Bali where the military brought people to kill them at night – a beach where bones and skulls are sometimes still found. It’s now packed with luxury resorts where foreigners can sip cocktails all day and take a dip in the pool. At one of the more upscale beach clubs, tourism usually revolves around wellness, and spa treatment, or “mindfulness,” and meditation or massages or, of course, sun and surfing. If space aliens landed on Bali, they would conclude that our planet has a racial hierarchy. The white people who come here for vacation are orders of magnitude wealthier than the locals, who serve them.

Page 246: (Paraphrased) Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here. 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.

Page 246: … there’s a reason none of the tourists know about the violence… The government has buried that history deep … The tourism boom that started in the late 1960s required that. They needed to kill the communists so that foreign investors could bring their capital here. “Now all visitors see is our famous smile,” a local said. “They have no idea the darkness and fire that lurks underneath.”

My comment #3: I don’t blame the tourists for not knowing. At the end of my three-month tour of Asia, I almost made it to Indonesia, my last planned stop, but completed the trip in Singapore instead. Once in Jakarta, I could easily have traveled through Java, which itself is full of graves, and on to Bali. Till this book, I had no idea.

Highly disturbing and highly recommended! show less

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 show more 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. show less

I finally locked in and finished this book that I had started ages ago, probably last summer or easter?

Was this book shocking? Yes, and this is even after knowing a bit about the individual events. Bevins says these extermination campaigns were not centrally coordinated but inspired by the US and the various US anticommunist regimes it propped up. Personally, I am having difficulty believing this, and in the end we will certainly never know for certain as I doubt the full truth is even show more contained in the US archives. Either way, it seems difficult to me that the crimes of the United States and of the regimes it propped/s up, were they more widely known, would be forgiven by the average decent person who subscribes to humanist values.

But for someone aware of how the US empire operates the most horrific thing beyond the crimes of extermination, wanton rape and torture, and the wholesale slaughter of peoples and their cultural identities in the name of 'anti-communism', is the future that they robbed us of; this is why the ending of chapter 11 and chapter 12 were amongst the most impactful for me. Currently, our world is on a ledge:

With the environment on a tipping point and with the planet itself ready to kill every human indiscriminately regardless of who is to 'blame'. The brunt of this destruction will necessarily fall on the third and former second world who do not have the resources to built the infrastructural resilience to limit the destruction.

'Growth' and standards of living have sharply fallen since the Great Financial Crisis (or even the 80s), agitated by neoliberal austerity fueling (a) the previously dormant fanatical anticommunism against the rising power of China and setting the stage for a new cold war; and (b) fascist (or at least very right wing), anti-migrant, pro war and anti-human movements domestically be that MAGA, ReformUK, AfD etc.

We have seen a retreat of the liberal niceties, the humanist veneer previously used to masquerade imperialism, anti-communism and colonial extraction in favour of a 'might is right' attitude reminiscent of the older colonial relations. This means little for the third world who has continuously faced the death and destruction sowed by the first, whatever the PR used, but imo it does signal an escalation in the frequency and intensity of violence that is to come.

As we see in the book itself, the third world has never caught up to the first, with its citizens still living in appalling conditions compared to the first and with the international division of labour and imperial extraction meaning that, despite doing all the backbreaking labour of resource extraction and manufacturing, their wages, work, their very lives are worth less than that of -compared to the past poorer but still- insanely rich and spoiled first worlders, and this gap will never close.

Facing the world that the US and its allies, winners of the cold war, have created I find it supremely cruel that Bevins asked his interviewees if that is the world they imagined in their youth. He recognizes this himself. What would the world have been without Washington's anticommunist crusade Bevins muses, had the 20th century had a different outcome. I cannot answer this question, and it seems in hindsight difficult to imagine a different course of events. I know one thing however, and that is who is to blame for destroying even the most unlikely of alternative outcomes.

P.S. this could have been 5 stars, but at some points I found that Bevins' writing got a little stale for me (and probably contributes to why it took me so long to finish this book). At the same time, I recognise that this is a personal issue, maybe exacerbated by my familiarity of particularly the Chillian events, and thus this is in no way an insult to this book with its excellent sourcing and the many interviews the author conducted. If I was writing the book, which I could in no way do as I am very untalented writer, the only change I would make was add more of the victims stories and perspectives as I think this is where this book excels. Then again, I am a piggy reading this from the comfort in my own home, not traveling to Indonesia, Brasil, Chile or any other country where these events took place to interview the victims, so what do I know xD show less

I've been meaning to get to grips with this book pretty much since it came out, as while I'd argue that the events of 1965 in Indonesia are not as forgotten as Bevin believes, it's also true that they can stand to be better remembered.

Having said that, and granting Bevins credit for all the good intentions in the world, I have to admit that I found this book rather shallow. At a certain point this enterprise morphed from Bevins wanting to bear witness to some truly nasty events, to being a show more critique of American imperialism, how Washington waged its proxy war against Soviet Russia, and he just didn't do a deep enough dive into what is admittedly a complicated topic. Bevins sort of admits this in his notes. So, if you've read this work, and were impressed, do yourself a favor and read the works of Odd Arne Westad, and keep branching out from there.

Still, I do need to give a tip of the hat to Bevins, as he did get me thinking about the resurgence of fascism in our times, and how easily that once the Neo-conservative ideology espoused by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ran its course, the conservative parties of the West seemed to find in fascism a refuge for its real concerns; the preservation of undeserved privilege. What I wonder about is whether what one has here is blow back from how the "West" waged the Cold War. I sense another reading program coming on. show less