The Jakarta method: Washington's anticommunist crusade & the mass murder program that shaped our world, Vincent Bevins (1984- ), 2020, 340 pages, ISBNThe Jakarta method: Washington's anticommunist crusade & the mass murder program that shaped our world, Vincent Bevins (1984- ), 2020, 340 pages, ISBN 9781541742406, Dewey 327.7300904 B468j, Library-of-Congress E744 .B476 2020 Historical Society Library
The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism. American capitalism won by state-organized mass murders of unarmed people suspected of opposing the construction of U.S.-friendly authoritarian regimes. Neocolonialists destroyed the left by mass-murdering suspected leftists, possible leftist sympathizers, whole populations. If you kill enough people, you are bound to kill the people you want. The Jakarta method was reprised throughout Latin America, and in Asia and Africa. American capitalism destroyed the possibility of socialism as a rival model, in Indonesia, Guatemala, Chile, and wherever else it might've sprouted. Crony capitalism and resource extraction rule. pp. 2, 170, 181, 194-195, 199-202, 213-215, 219, 227, 230-231, 233-234, 238-239, 306.
U.S.-backed mass murders of civilians shaped our world: pp. 240-243
Trauma.
Lost opportunities for poor countries to use the country's resources to provide for its people.
Permanent crony-capitalist oligarchies.
Taught opponents of rule-by-wealth that only violence can stop the ruling class from plundering our land, labor, and resources. p. 46
Permanent fanatical anticommunism worldwide: violent, paranoid. Torture and murder create powerful elements within the state whose privileges derive from endless war. pp. 5, 214, 249-251.
Anticommunist exterminations, 1945-2000, pp. 266-267, 305-308:
"Intentional mass murders to eliminate people suspected of being or supporting leftists, excluding regular war, collateral damage, starvation, disease."
In at least 23 countries: p. 238.
Indonesia, 1965-1966: 1,000,000, almost all of them innocent of any crime, p. 156, including 80,000 on Bali, at least 5% of Bali's population. p. 150. pp. 1-6, 67-70, 139-158, 306. Neocolonialism does not give up its loot easily. p. 55. Injustice is fertile soil for the roots of a justice-seeking ideology to grow. 'Cold War' is the name they have given to the process by which America tries to dominate countries like Indonesia. p. 67. U.S. diplomats and CIA agents, and managers of U.S.-owned plantations, gave the Indonesian army lists of thousands of suspected Indonesian leftists and labor-union organizers to kill. pp. 142, 156. U.S. diplomats promised financial aid to the Indonesian army if the army destroyed the Communists. p. 148. The U.S. government destabilized the Indonesian economy. pp. 152, 157. As soon as General Suharto took over, the U.S. poured money, and extractive industries, in. pp. 152-153. The U.S. wanted the Indonesian Communist Party destroyed because it was popular. p. 157. Indonesia became a quiet, compliant partner of the U.S., and vanished from U.S. news. p. 159. Critics rotted in U.S.-supported gulags. p. 185. "Living in Bulgaria under Communism was a hell of a lot better than living in Suharto's Indonesia." --Nury, daughter of Sukarno's ambassador to Cuba, p. 231.
East Timor, 1975-1999: 300,000 p. 213
Guatemala, 1954-1996, most of them 1978-1983: 200,000 pp. 44, 85, 228, 305. The risk was that Árbenz would provide an example that inspired his neighbors to copy him. The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea. pp. 45, 227.
South Korea, 1948-1950: 100,000-200,000. pp. 37-38
El Salvador, 1979-1992: 75,000
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay: Operation Condor, 1970s-1980s: 60,000-80,000, including 30,000 in Argentina.
Vietnam, Operation Phoenix, 1968-1972: 50,000 unarmed North Vietnamese bureaucrats and other civilians targeted for assassination in 1968 (not counting 3 million Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam War, including 2 million civilians, plus many more in Cambodia and Laos, pp. 160-161, 295).
Nicaragua, 1979-1989: 50,000
Sri Lanka, 1987-1990: 40,000-60,000 pp. 238, 305
Taiwan, 1947: 10,000
Iraq, 1963 and 1978: 5,000
Iran, 1988: 5,000
Colombia, 1985-1995: 3,000-5,000
Thailand, 1973: 3,000 pp. 175, 297
Mexico, 1965-1982: 1,300
Venezuela, 1959-1970: 500-1,500
Honduras, 1980-1993: 200
Sudan, 1971: <100
The United States isn't listed. Political assassinations in the U.S. have tended to be individual, rather than mass murder.
Faraway countries that are stable and reliably pro-American do not make headlines. p. 3.
"Antiwar" Obama bombed Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan in 2016, dropping over 26,000 bombs that year. pp. 230, 305, https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bom...
Bevins conducted survivor interviews and research in Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Odd Arne Westad, 2005
The Cold War: A World History, Odd Arne Westad, 2017
The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2007. See also Prashad's website, https://thetricontinental.org/
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Eric Hobsbawm, 1994
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change, Stephen Kinzer, 2006
Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, Alexander Aviña, 2014
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel, 2017
Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World, Christian Gerlach, 2006
Revolutionaries for the Right, Kyle Burke, 2018
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher, 2009
Books: INDONESIA, EAST TIMOR, & SOUTHEAST ASIA
East Timor: A Nation's Bitter Dawn, Irena Cristalis, 2009
My War with the CIA, Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk, 1974
A History of Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid, 2015
Vietnam: A New History, Christopher Goscha, 2016
Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow, 1991
Books: LATIN AMERICA
A Short History of Guatemala, Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., 2008
The Last Colonial Massacre, Greg Grandin, 2004
The American Connection, Vol. II: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala, 1985
Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report, Daniel Rothenberg (Editor), 2008
A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War, Greg Grandin and Joseph M. Gilbert, eds., 2010
Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America, James Dunkerley, 1988
Bitter Fruit, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, 2005
Shattered Hope, Piero Gleijeses, 1991
Inevitable Revolutions, Walter LaFeber, 1993
Los Caminos de Nuestra Historia: estructuras, procesos y actores, Volumen II, Bárbara Arroyo et al, 2015
The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976, Paul E. Siegmund, 1977
Allende's Chile, Tanya Harmer, 2011
Predatory States: Operation Condor and the Covert War in Latin America, J. Patrice McSherry, 2005
The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents, John Dinges, 2004
The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina, Federico Finchelstein. "Dirty War" is incorrect: there was no war. It was a top-down anticommunist extermination campaign. Ford Motor and Citibank collaborated with the murders of union workers. p. 215.
La Historia Fue Otra. Memorias, Carmen Hertz, 2017. Chile.
Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982, Adela Cedillo and Herrera Calderón, eds., 2012
Books: AFRICA
The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth, Tom Burgis, 2015
Books: BRITISH EMPIRE
The Oxford History of the British Empire, 1998
Books: EASTERN EUROPE
The Soviet Experiment, Ronald Grigor Suny, 2011
Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, 1996
The Unknown Stalin, Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, 2003
Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party, A. James McAdams, 2017
The Sino-Soviet Split, Lorenz M. Luthi, 2008
Books: WESTERN EUROPE
Confronting America, Alessandro Brogi, 2011
Books: UNITED STATES
The Age of McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker, 2002
Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, 2007
The Very Best Men, Evan Thomas, 2006
America's First Spy, George Cristian Major, 2018
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963, Robert Dallek, 2003
A Conspiracy So Immense, David Oshinsky, 2005
Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schlesinger, 1978
Portrait of a Cold Warrior, Joseph Burkholder Smith, 2018
Poverty is /because/ of wealth. 3% of landholdings--plantations for export--take 65% of the farmland. Leaving 90% of landholdings too small to subsistPoverty is /because/ of wealth. 3% of landholdings--plantations for export--take 65% of the farmland. Leaving 90% of landholdings too small to subsist on. [p. 16] Eisenhower's CIA deposed reformer Árbenz in 1954. Ever since, the U.S. has given money, arms, training to brutal military dictatorships. [pp. 21-22, 254] Any failure to worship the military was crushed. 200,000 were murdered. Kill "communists." The worst period was 1982-1983 under Reagan and Ríos Montt. Landless people slash and burn jungle to farm; this soil doesn't yield for long. Poverty is /because/ of wealth.
People with power /never/ give it up voluntarily. Though leftists won in Nicaragua in 1979, and were doing well at the time in El Salvador, Guatemalan leftists didn't know the extent to which /every/ U.S. president from Eisenhower through Clinton /loved/ to lavish money and military hardware and training on the Guatemalan army. (Carter was the lone exception. (view spoiler)[Carter's political enemies, servants of wealth, torpedoed his presidency by treasonously making a deal with Iran, arms in exchange for releasing U.S. hostages /after/ Carter's presidency ended. (hide spoiler)]) The leftist guerrillas had no chance. The peasant population was a casualty of the army's scorched earth policy, which Americans had learned in Vietnam.
The book is an academic cultural anthropology, focusing on one village in northern Guatemala, that turned out to be the center of the storm. All its inhabitants the army could find were massacred in 1982. Survivors eventually rebuilt; refugees returned from Mexico. But wealth is still hoarded by the few, who prey on the many poor. The author spent several weeks there, every year or every few years, from 1973 through 2003. (In 1973, the terror was not yet thought of.)
Thomas Ray
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