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The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
Top of the pile
98
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
99/100Critics
96/100Scholars
98/100Author:
Vincent Bevins
Publisher:
PublicAffairs
Date:
May 19, 2020
A former Southeast Asia and Latin America correspondent for The Washington Post investigates how U.S. government intervention enabled the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia in 1965 and copycat terror programs in Latin America in its struggle against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
What The Reviewers Say
Bevins isn’t necessarily surfacing groundbreaking new findings, but instead arguing that we’ve been looking at the past all wrong. Through empathetic reporting and fastidious archival research, he examines two overlooked periods of the Cold War.
In brisk but assured prose, Bevins recounts how Brazil and Indonesia became 'the best allies that Washington’s foreign interventions had ever created.' The ruinous legacy of these policies, more than the specific acts of unspeakable violence that they engendered, is the book’s main subject.
... trenchant.
The great originality and insight of the book is its emphasis on the international scale of 1965. Drawing on examples from Indochina to Latin America, Bevins reveals how Washington perfected a form of violent if invisible intervention, constructing an 'international network of extermination' that targeted communist regimes and sympathizers in the developing world.
