What officials in the embassy and the CIA decided the (Indonesian) Army really did need, however, was information. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list.
As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.
“It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
While reading this I kept thinking about that montage from Bowling for Columbine set to It's a Beautiful World about American atrocities during the Cold War. I think people who have even a basic understanding of 20th century can name quite a few of them, but due to some, uhh, let's say deficiencies in our education system and public discourse, we have trouble making sense of them.
That's the value of Bevins' book, the way he ties these coups and atrocities together. Not as some grand overarching conspiracy but as a shared reactionary ideology cultivated by the CIA among ruling conservative elites and high ranking military members of the Third World. Chile looking to Brazil, Brazil looking to Indonesia. This lead to military and intelligence cooperation in anticommunist witch hunts that swept up far more than just communists (To quote Guatemalan war criminal Ríos Montt, “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”)
One fascinating aspect was the mass hysteria stirred up by the anticommunists anytime the phrase l*nd r*form made it to the popular consciousness. Always this hysteria was prelude to a mass killing. I'd've like to learn more about the connection there, but just learning of its existence was wild.
The other great aspect of the book is the way he captures the older, obscured sense of what's meant by Third World. It's not the battleground of the Cold War, but the sort of world where Ho Chi Minh could take inspiration from both Marxism and the Declaration of Independence to plot a path that would lead neither to the Soviet Union of the United States of America. As Bevins put it:
And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.
Did a short thread on the book here, but I sort of gave up on updating it halfway through. My bad. It's a lot to take it and I'm thinking I'll revisit the book in a couple of months or so.
Details
Title: The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
Author: Vincent Bevins
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published May 19th 2020 by PublicAffairs
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