The Jakarta Method

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jakarta Method, published in 2020, takes its title from a term that became a codeword for mass murder. Vincent Bevins is an American journalist who speaks both Indonesian and Portuguese. He built this book from interviews with survivors across Southeast Asia and Latin America. An estimated one million people were killed in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966, in a campaign backed by the United States government. Those killings targeted the political left and movements pushing for government reform. The strategy was so effective that later authoritarian regimes, also with U.S. assistance, would invoke the term "Jakarta" when planning their own campaigns. How did a single country's catastrophe become a global template? And why did this history largely disappear from American public memory? Towards the end of the book, Bevins asked one Indonesian survivor how the West had won the Cold War. The survivor's answer: "You killed us." Those aggregate consequences, Bevins argues, stretch from the Cold War into the present era.

  519112

• 2. A Global Template

  ›

  Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept wrote that CIA-sponsored killings in Indonesia became a direct model for later interference campaigns. Those campaigns spread to "myriad other countries throughout Asia and Latin America," as Greenwald described it. The explicit target, Bevins argues, was the Non-Aligned Movement, the coalition of nations that refused alignment with either Washington or Moscow. Government reform and economic reform movements in countries across Asia and Latin America became targets of the same strategy. Leo Schwartz, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, called The Jakarta Method a "devastating critique of US hypocrisy during the Cold War." Schwartz described it as a "mournful hypothetical of what the world might have looked like if Third World movements had succeeded." Daniel Larison, writing for The American Conservative, observed that these historical events "continue to affect the social and political landscape today."

  1315105

• 3. The Forgotten Record

  ›

  Thomas Kingston, in the LSE Review of Books, noted that Bevins pieces together events "relatively unknown outside of academic or activist circles." Kingston himself had not considered "their echoes and influence around the world" before reading the book. Greenwald argued the silence was not accidental. The "chilling success of that morally grotesque campaign," he wrote, "led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse." Stuart Schrader, an assistant research professor in sociology at Johns Hopkins University, reviewed the book for the Boston Review. Schrader pointed out that the Cold War, "contrary to its name, entailed hot, violent conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America." Bevins translates the findings of complex scholarly accounts into what Schrader called "smooth and readable, if often heartbreaking, prose." Tenny Kristiana of Waseda University argued that Bevins writes against "a history written by the victors." Kristiana says the book seeks to correct "a long-standing imbalance in historiography on the Cold War." Kingston noted the book cannot be dismissed by possible critics as simply "an anti-American diatribe."

  9131416

• 4. The Book Lands

  ›

  Grace Blakeley of the socialist magazine Jacobin praised the book as explaining U.S. involvement with the genocide "better than almost any other document." Jacob Sugarman, also in Jacobin, said the book "truly takes flight as a work of narrative journalism." Sugarman called it "conscientious and persuasive" as a polemic. Daniel Larison in The American Conservative praised its "dispassionate, matter-of-fact" reading of history. He said it reveals aspects of U.S. Cold War history "lost in its current memory." Thomas Kingston called it "an excellent book, well researched and tightly written." Kirkus Reviews described it as "a well-delineated excavation of yet another dark corner of American history." Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times included The Jakarta Method in his list of the best politics books of 2020. Greenwald described the book as providing "one of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet" of the CIA. He wrote that it reveals "the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world."

  111210917