The Jakarta Method

I think the last time I was so shocked about untaught history was reading King Leopold's Ghost.

This is an exhaustively researched look at American foreign policy in the Third World post WWII into and through the Cold War. As evinced by the title, Indonesia and the horrific coup eliminating Sukarno are the focus. The methods by which the CIA influenced this coup and used it as a model for orchestrating dozens of other coups across SE Asia, Central, and South America round out the second half. This book is hugely enhanced by all the first hand testimony Bevins collected.

Highly, depressingly recommended.

A modern classic, and should be mandatory reading. Despite covering historical material, author Bevins' background as a journalist serves the subject matter well. In the spirit of what investigative journalism should be, Bevins performed extensive interviews with the (surviving) people effected by mid-20th Century anticommunism in Indonesia, Brazil, and Chile. Despite being an American, Bevins outlines the history of the early CIA's covert operations and counterintelligence scheming with the dispassionate perspective of an outsider, an angle that is all too rare in such works. The sheer ruthlessness and brutality of the events of the anti-communist killings are haunting and stomach-turning, but the urgency of understanding the logic and circumstances that can allow individuals and interest groups to perpetrate such violence cannot be overstated. With this book, Bevins performed the important work of demonstrating the way that global anti-communists collaborated and shaped their own plans based on the experiences of others, and it would serve any politically motivated person well to read The Jakarta Method and know what you may one day be up against.