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The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World is a 2020 non-fiction book by American journalist Vincent Bevins about the history and legacy of US-sponsored anti-communist mass killings during the Cold War. Written for lay readers, The Jakarta Method outlines a CIA clandestine operation in Indonesia that culminated with a mass extermination and copycat campaigns aiming to entrench America's capitalist hegemony. Bevins informs the book's analysis with declassified US State Department documents and survivor testimonies.

Background and publication


Vincent Bevins is a journalist in the field of politics and economics. He had worked in São Paulo as a Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent covering Brazilian political affairs for six years, and was pursuing new work. He considered positions in Russia and then West Africa, before moving to Jakarta to join The Washington Post as the newspaper's local correspondent. Bevins pitched ideas within seven or eight months of living in Indonesia. Once a publisher commissioned The Jakarta Method, he left his job at The Washington Post to commit to developing the book.

Bevins was investigating Cold War literature by 2017, and his research lasted several years. Even though Bevins acknowledged the effects of American imperialism globally, he was overwhelmed by the immense brutality that accompanied the operations. The experience interviewing of the dispossessed Indonesian victims further troubled him. The journalist recalled, "It really rattled my sense of my own national identity, and of the type of globalization we ended up getting after the Cold War. It took me a long time to kind of reintegrate into the English-speaking society of my peers and to feel normal again after hanging out in parts of Indonesia with survivors of this violence for so long."

Interviews for testimony

Reception
According to literary review aggregator Lit Hub, the book received mostly "Rave" reviews.

In the LSE Review of Books, Thomas Kingston praises The Jakarta Method as an excellent book, well researched and tightly written, which "manages to piece together events that have often been relatively unknown outside of academic or activist circles." He says while he is familiar with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, he did not consider "their echoes and influence around the world" until reading this book, meaning that it would likely be informative and enlightening to most readers, and cannot be dismissed by possible critics as simply "an anti-American diatribe." Kingston remarks that towards the end of the book, Bevins offers a good example of how it would be nearly impossible to write a truly balanced account of these terrible events when he asks one of the Indonesian survivors "How did we win [the Cold War]?", who responds: "You killed us."

Writing for The American Conservative, Daniel Larison lauds The Jakarta Method as "exceptional" in its "dispassionate, matter-of-fact" reading of history that reveals aspects of American history lost in its current memory of the Cold War. Larison commends how Bevins links the accounts of individual survivors with the events that affected tens of millions and killed over a million, making solid these large, society-level events. Larison further commends Bevins for effectively "trac[ing] the use of the tactics" beyond Indonesia itself, exploring how these historical events arose from the context of international relations, influenced later anticommunist dictatorships in Latin America, and continue to affect the social and political landscape today.

Grace Blakeley and Jacob Sugarman both reviewed The Jakarta Method for the socialist magazine Jacobin. Blakeley says that The Jakarta Method explains the United States' involvement with the Indonesian genocide better than almost any other document regarding the events. She writes that the book excels at tracing how the patterns from the genocide in Indonesia reverberated through future anticommunist actions in other countries in subsequent years. Sugarman says: "As a polemic, The Jakarta Method is never anything less than conscientious and persuasive, but Bevins’s book truly takes flight as a work of narrative journalism, tracing the history of America’s violent meddling in Southeast Asia and Latin America through the stories of those it brutalized".

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept said The Jakarta Method documents not only how CIA-sponsored mass killings in Indonesia served as a model for "clandestine CIA interference campaigns" in myriad other countries throughout Asia and Latin America to destroy the Non-Aligned Movement, but also how "the chilling success of that morally grotesque campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse." He adds that the book "provides one of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of this agency and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world."

The Jakarta Method was praised as "trenchant" and "powerful" in the Boston Review by Stuart Schrader, Assistant Research Professor in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, who says that it "documents the U.S. government’s role in fostering systematic mass murder across the globe—from Southeast Asia to South America—in the name of fighting communism." He notes that Bevins is "particularly well suited to investigate these legacies" as a journalist who is fluent in both Indonesian and Portuguese, writing:"In addition to interviewing survivors and chronicling their struggles, Bevins draws on the latest historical scholarship on the 'global Cold War', which, contrary to its name, entailed hot, violent conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He translates the findings of complex scholarly accounts into smooth and readable, if often heartbreaking, prose."

Writing for Los Angeles Review of Books, Leo Schwartz says The Jakarta Method is a "devastating critique of US hypocrisy during the Cold War, and a mournful hypothetical of what the world might have looked like if Third World movements had succeeded."

Tenny Kristiana of Waseda University writes that "by giving voice to the victims, Bevins writes in opposition to a "history written by the victors," and seeks to correct a long-standing imbalance in historiography on the Cold War."

Kirkus Reviews praised the book, describing it as "a well-delineated excavation of yet another dark corner of American history."

Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times included the book in his list of the best politics books of 2020.