In the center: Minister of Defense and future President of Indonesia, Lieutenant General Suharto. Jakarta, 1966 / Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
At the heart of this book written by a former correspondent of the Washington Post covering Southeast Asia are the events of 1965–66. It was during this time that the United States made the decision to weaken and root out the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it posed a threat, but simply because it was exceedingly popular and ranked as the third-largest national communist party globally after China and the USSR. Consequently, General Suharto replaced the eccentric, womanizing semi-dictator Sukarno, whose peculiar faith consisted of three words: ‘nationalism’, ‘Marxism’, and ‘Islam’. Subsequently, ‘Indonesian army officers understood perfectly that the more people they killed, the weaker the leftists would become, and the happier Washington would be.’ Estimates suggest they killed up to a million people. In Bali alone, about 80,000 people were slaughtered with machetes, including on Seminyak Beach, where the first tourist hotel would later be built.
The Soviet Union chose to stay out of the conflict. After the left-wing faction was eradicated, Indonesia, which had previously maintained a distance from the United States, immediately opened its doors to American entrepreneurs. Economists from Berkeley were not at all concerned about working with General Suharto to establish clan capitalism. Interestingly, from 1949 to 1959, as Dutch colonizers were leaving the region, the Indonesian state was already named the United States of Indonesia. The operation to de-communize Indonesia was considered successful, after which the term ‘Jakarta Method’ came to signify a certain, as Bevins describes it, ‘preventive coup’ carried out in the interests of the United States in various parts of the world, such as Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina.
Vincent Bevins’s straightforward, fact-based style bears some resemblance to the police noir books of James Ellroy (incidentally, whose American Tabloid deals with the US invasion of the Cuban Bay of Pigs). However, unlike Ellroy, Bevins does not relish scenes of violence; he is more interested in the calculated intent of the instigators and the horrors endured by the book's heroines, Indonesian girls Magdalena and Francisca. All of this pales in comparison to a single statement by Henry Kissinger: ‘I can't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
Bevins's central argument revolves around the idea that the malevolence of anti-communist eradication programs extends beyond the physical victims themselves. By eliminating communists, these programs have eradicated alternative paths for global development (a notion supported by the thoroughly imperialistic warfare in use currently). Bevins's The Jakarta Method ends in a similar manner to Max Hastings’s recent extensive work on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy. In both books, the final message is straightforward: capitalism has prevailed.
However, Bevins's perspective is considerably more radical than Hastings's. He contends that the crimes of communism have vanished along with its leaders; there are no more Stalinist purges or Pol Pots committing genocide as they have been condemned and forgotten (although this dreamy perspective is left to the author's conscience). In contrast, representatives of the American elite, who terrorized the Third World in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ and caused the deaths of millions of people, continue to hold power globally with no intention of repentance—even Henry Kissinger still lives.
Cover of the English-language edition of "The Jakarta Method"
If you were to start looking online for the events of 1965 in Indonesia, you'd likely come across texts that still perpetuate Cold War-era propaganda, claiming that communists personally tortured Indonesian generals in black rituals. According to Bevins, the primary losers of the twentieth century are those who genuinely believed in democracy and the liberal international order, ‘who trusted the words of wealthy countries without scrutinizing their actions and were subjected to extermination’.
While one could debate whether Bevins's writing style resembles that of Ellroy's detective novels, one thing is clear—the depictions of the politicians described here undoubtedly evoke the Soviet caricatures of Kukryniksy. This book touches on various subjects, including the fluidity of memory, and people who grew up in the Soviet Union, even in their early years, should remember both El Salvador and Guatemala—everything Bevin writes about fits into the narrative of Soviet propaganda. However, with a change in ideology, the focus shifted to crimes not of capitalism but of communism. The tragedies in Latin American, once portrayed as blood-soaked, eventually became subjects of satire, as seen in Sergey Solovyov's perestroika comedy where the chants of ‘Chile! Chile!’ are seen as comic groans. Like Hegel's spiral, this book throws us back into the antitheses of the past era, forcing us to acknowledge the accuracy of Soviet propagandists at the time.
The events of the book are reminiscent of President Sukarno's desperate cry, as quoted in this book: ‘Again and again, the same ... blades, blades, blades, a grave for thousands of people ... again and again, the same!’
Poster for the film "The Act of Killing"