The Jakarta Method: A Review
The notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is unquestionably a cliché. Yet, those of us living in one such victorious entity, the United States, still underestimate how all-encompassing this concept really is, even within living memory. Take the Cold War, for instance, a conflict that, for Americans, conjures images of the Berlin Wall or of tanks driving through Eastern European streets. Perhaps we can add images of the Vietnam War, carefully curated from Platoon or Apocalypse Now.
For the majority of countries, however, the Cold War meant something much different — particularly if those countries were not rich or white. In broad swathes of the Third World, the Cold War meant instability, foreign intervention, and most of all, mass murder and terror.
It began, in many of these countries, with a brief moment of optimism, as they threw off the yoke of colonialism, and the idea of joining the community of developed countries seemed entirely within reach. Some of the leaders of these nationalist movements were Marxists, some social democrats, and some merely capitalists who sought a degree of autonomy from the former colonial powers. It didn’t matter; none would prove acceptable to the United States and its allies, and few of these countries were able to transcend their starting position at the bottom of the global hierarchy. The Jakarta Method, by journalist Vincent Bevins, is about this sad legacy — the initial hope for anti-colonial solidarity and for left-wing political movements across the world, and the U.S.-backed programs of mass murder that destroyed it.
The book’s primary focus is on the single most deadly anti-communist mass murder program: Indonesia, 1965, death toll one million. General Suharto, who seized power from Sukarno, the country’s founder, transformed it from a leader of the Third World movement to a reliable, virulently anti-communist U.S. ally. Bevins explains in great detail how involved the United States was in the carnage. The military officers responsible for the coup and the violence were largely trained in the U.S and were given assurances of U.S. economic and military aid if they succeeded. The CIA even provided lists of suspected communists to be killed and therefore ‘checked off’ by the armed forces and associated militias.
Indonesia is the fourth most-populous country on Earth, and its communist party (the PKI) was the largest in the world outside of China and Russia. As Bevins points out, winning the battle in Indonesia was considered far more important than Vietnam to the planners in Washington. So why isn’t it discussed more?
Bevins offers two main explanations. First, the murder campaign in the country was so successful that there was simply no need to discuss it afterwards; Indonesia never caused us trouble ever again. His second explanation returns to the notion of the memory hole; he explains: “I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, or what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.”
Indonesia didn’t neatly fit the image of a looming communist threat, a nation of guerrillas with army fatigues and AK-47s like Cuba or Vietnam. Sukarno, the independence hero of Indonesia, was not a communist himself. He sought a syncretic and eclectic blend of Marxism, Islam and nationalism, believing all the factions that had ousted the Dutch could work in concert. Additionally, the communist PKI was an entirely nonviolent, electoral party, completely integrated within a democratic structure. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Indonesia was even held up in Washington as “the axiomatic case of a sufficiently anticommunist anti-colonial movement”, and diplomats like Howard Jones, at one point the ambassador, saw working with Sukarno as an effective, nonviolent way to prevent communists from taking power.
It was not to last, however; the wedding of anti-colonial rhetoric to the specter of communism would become all-encompassing. It must be noted just how influential Sukarno was, not just as the George Washington of Indonesia, but as a leader of the nascent Third World movement. In 1955, he hosted the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference, bringing together leaders from all over the former colonized world. In his opening speech, he warned of the threat of neo-colonialism, of continued economic exploitation and deliberate underdevelopment by the rich colonial powers.
In the 1950s, two of the chief cold warriors in Washington were the Dulles brothers, John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State and Allen Dulles as head of the CIA. They sought regime change through aggressive backing of small rebel groups, and found some ‘success’ in Iran and Guatemala. Ultimately, however, this strategy would prove too unstable, with notable failures like the Bay of Pigs, and in Indonesia itself in 1958.
By the 1960s, the US sought instead to win over the most powerful actors in countries’ armed forces, creating a ‘state within a state’ of reactionary, anti-communist generals, educated and trained in America. Indonesia, along with Brazil in 1964, would be the test case for this approach. Bevins acknowledges that Brazil may have been uniquely primed for such a dictatorship, with its long history of white minority rule, but this fact does not excuse the United States for its role in encouraging the fledgling dictatorship either. He is clear about how deliberate this was: “The violence that took place in Brazil, and Indonesia, and twenty other countries around the world, was not accidental, or incidental to the main events of world history…The violence was effective, a fundamental part of a larger process. Without a full view of the Cold War and US goals worldwide, the events are unbelievable, unintelligible, or very difficult to process.”
If The Jakarta Method were simply a retelling of these events, with some new documentation, it would still be a valuable work. However, Bevins goes beyond rote historical analysis to provide a more human perspective, sharing the stories of some of the survivors of this atrocity. For instance, there is Francisca Pattipilohy, a European-educated young woman from a wealthy family, who becomes active in left-wing politics upon returning to Indonesia with her husband. Or Magdalena, a 16-year-old garment worker who is targeted merely for belonging to a trade union, despite being totally uninvolved with politics. Or Benny Widyono, of Chinese descent, who would study at the University of Kansas and witness Indonesian officers being trained at nearby Fort Leavenworth and indoctrinated into militant anti-communism. Bevins regularly jumps between a broader overview of events and these more specific narratives, adding both context and pathos.
Bevins also moves past a mere retelling of events when he discusses the global ripple effects of this Jakarta method. Other countries soon began to adopt the same tactics of the Indonesian military, such as mass targeting of unarmed political dissidents, the use of disappearances to sow terror, and a specific sort of propaganda projecting these same actions onto the communists as justification. Bevins points to 22 different cases of mass anti-communist killing during the Cold War, particularly in the Operation Condor countries of South and Central America. Even the term ‘Jakarta’ was reused: “I found evidence indirectly linking the metaphor “Jakarta,” taken from the largest and most important of these programs, to at least eleven countries.” The story of the Cold War, Bevins argues, cannot be told without factoring in the deliberate mass murder of civilians in order to stop communism, or even nationalist social democracy, from succeeding anywhere and serving as a beacon to other countries.
Bevins concludes with some of the consequences of these Jakarta programs and the world that they created. He discusses both the ongoing trauma of the survivors and the persistence of fervent, paranoid anticommunism, embodied by figures like Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. He points out that the dreams of the Third World movement, of economic parity and independence, were also crushed: “The US economy is not just a little bigger than Indonesia’s. It is twenty times larger. Brazil’s GDP per capita number is less than one-sixth the US number. With very few exceptions, the countries that were at Bandung have remained in the same structural relationship to the former imperial powers.” These countries have been kept in a state of underdevelopment, with the same U.S.-backed oligarchs and global resource extraction firms holding onto power.
Just as noteworthy, the possibility of a peaceful, democratic left-wing movement was destroyed. Many of the people Bevins interviewed in Indonesia had believed in that vision, had followed a non-violent path. And what was their reward? “They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.” Bevins broadens this point to the Third World in general: “Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported — what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.”
Finally, in Indonesia itself, there has been no truth and reconciliation commission. There is no memorial to the victims of the mass murder campaign. Survivors are treated as outcasts, viewed with suspicion, and the propaganda about godless communists has persisted to this day. If you want an example of what it looks like when history is written by the victors, look no further than the birthplace of the Jakarta method.