The Jakarta Method

The Jakarta Method is a 2020 non-fiction book by American journalist and writer Vincent Bevins. It concerns American support for and complicity in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, during which an estimated one million people were killed in an effort to destroy the political left and movements for government reform, and subsequent replications of the strategy in Latin America and elsewhere.[1][2] The killings in Indonesia by the American-backed Indonesian forces were so successful in culling communism that the term "Jakarta" was later used to refer to the genocidal aspects of similar, later plans.[3]

The Jakarta Method
AuthorVincent Bevins
LanguageEnglish
Publication date
2020
Media typePrint (Hardback)

Reception

According to literary review aggregator Lit Hub, the book received mostly "Rave" reviews.[4]

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.[5]

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.[6] 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".[7]

References
  1. Bevins, Vincent (29 May 2020). "Opinion | The 'Liberal World Order' Was Built With Blood". The New York Times.
  2. Pagliarini, Andre (5 June 2020). "Where America Developed a Taste for State Violence". The New Republic. The New Republic. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
  3. "Lifting the veil on 1965 mass murder of Indonesian communists". South China Morning Post. South China Morning Post. 28 June 2020.
  4. "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World". Book Marks. Literary Hub. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
  5. Larison, Daniel (5 August 2020). "The Jakarta Method: How the U.S. Used Mass Murder To Beat Communism". The American Conservative.
  6. Blakeley, Grace (10 June 2020). "Remembering Capitalism's Crimes". Jacobin Magazine.
  7. Sugarman, Jacob (19 May 2020). "America's Cold War Crimes Abroad Are Still Shaping Our World". Jacobin Magazine.
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