The beginning of the book charts the development of the Third World as the Third World, from the Indonesian proclamation of Independence in 1945 to the Second World Festival of Youth and Students in Budapest in 1949, to the mighty Konferensi Asia-Afrika in April of 1955. He links it with the coup in Guatemala in 1954, the installation of the military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, the coup against Allende’s democratic socialist government in Chile in 1973, and a slew of actions against other nascent, powerful, or at the time growing left wing forces in the Third World.

Rather than a mass act of mindless violence, by crazed Asians run ‘amok’ who didn’t appreciate the value of human life – as the American press reported it at the time – Bevins convincingly lays out the case that the violence was part of a programme of transnational extermination led by an organized anticommunism directed and encouraged by the United States, the most deadly (and successful) tool against world communism.

Bevins sticks with the figure 1 million, emphasizing that estimates are the only thing we’ve got the Indonesian government won’t support a commission to determine the scale of the crime, not least because they don’t think it was a crime at all. The 1965-1966 Indonesian state-orchestrated massacres of communists – or anyone suspected of being a communist, including ethnic Chinese specifically because they were suspected of being communists, or even associated with the left at all – were a horrific series of mass killings that left up to 3 million dead. As Vincent Bevins’ difficult and provocative new book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World details, it represented the greatest and most significant victory in the Cold War for the US-led capitalist bloc, one which led to its ultimate victory that still defines the current world order today.

That’s what the Indonesian Army called it – Operasi Penumpason.

Vincent bevins the jakarta method