To quote from the blurb: “In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020) journalist Vincent Bevins links the history of the overthrow of Sukarno – a leader of 1960s Third Worldism –, the rise of the Suharto – one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators – , and the slaughter of 500,000 to one million Indonesians allegedly linked to the Indonesian Community Party (the PKI) to the Latin American “dirty wars”, including Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America.”
As someone who managed the Bangkok Post’s coverage of the fall of Suharto, this is all a story that I should have known, yet I confess I knew little of it. That there’s been a huge massacre certainly, but not the US role, or the way that this became a model for so many other US dirty wars to follow.
It can’t but provoke thoughts about alternative histories, how if national aspirations had not been crushed in the service of capitalism, if the world had not been divided into two camps of US and USSR, how we might be in a very different place now.
But, since I’m always looking for the hopeful side, how the ending of US hegemony, a more unstable time, frightening as it can often feel, could allow time for developments of genuine self-determination and democracy, rather than pseudo-democracies and outright dictatorships.
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