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.

This is far and above the most important book I've ever read. Everyone in the USA should know the atrocities their government actively funded and encouraged over the last 75 years around the globe. We have never reconciled with these atrocities, and this failure is partially why our politics is so backward compared to the other wealthy countries.

There's a reason why so many rabid lunatics scream about “socialism” without having any idea what that word means. There's a reason why so many poor countries' citizens migrate to our country. There's a reason why the global south is poor. It's all neatly connected.

The US Government is responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-induced atrocities of the last 75 years in order to prevent the creation of a more equitable, egalitarian world. Now we live in a world with the US being the singular global superpower, draining the wealth of the weaker nations to satiate the unquenchable thirsts of the rich and powerful.

I encourage every single person who is reading this sentence to read this book.

he continued, “the cold war was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won. moreover, we all got the us-centered capitalism that washington wanted to spread. just look around you,” he said, gesturing to his city, and the entire indonesian archipelago around him.how did we win, i asked.winarso stopped fidgeting. “you killed us.”

can't stop crying. could not put this book down. my soul is drained.

Wow. I feel sad and shocked that I have never learned of the majority of events discussed in this book, even as someone who is interested in these topics. It feels bleak, like we will never learn from such horrible, recent history because it is so hidden from our culture and education.

Despite how dark it was, I found I could not put this down once I picked it up. I highly recommend this book to everyone.