Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
Jakarta Method (2020, PublicAffairs)
320 pages
English language
Published Aug. 3, 2020 by PublicAffairs.
In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.
I think most will find this book eye opening. During the Cold War, the U.S. government helped reactionaries in Indonesia slaughter a million communists. They then repeated that approach (the Jakartra Method) in Brazil. This book gets into the weeds, but it does a nice job of balancing personal accounts of victims with the bigger picture history.
