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The Jakarta Method

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In just a few months, the US foreign policy establishment achieved there what it failed to get done in ten bloody years of war in Indochina. — location: 83 ^ref-37658

Brazil’s dictatorship had transitioned to the type of democracy that could safely remove anyone—like Rousseff or Lula—whom the economic or political elites deemed a threat to their interests, and they could summon Cold War demons to go to battle for them when they pleased. — location: 125 ^ref-19666

Both these leaders rejected the Leninist model and wanted to forge their own path, but when push came to shove, they often preferred to align with the Soviets rather than with the Americans and their European allies. Even if he had known about the worst tragedies of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, it would be hard to blame Nehru for distrusting the Western powers. During World War II, British policies created a famine that took the lives of four million people. — location: 459 ^ref-46988

Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.” — location: 468 ^ref-58456

By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11 Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.” — location: 688 ^ref-10555

The Soviets offered little help, but to Washington’s surprise, Mao’s tired and ragged Red Army mobilized to help the Korean communists, largely because they felt they owed the Koreans a debt for the assistance Kim’s insurgents had offered them against the Japanese in Manchuria. — location: 709 ^ref-56608

Mossadegh and the Iranians had a lot of reasons to resent the British. During their period of imperial glory, Iran suffered a famine that took the lives of two million people. — location: 725 ^ref-553

Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s global anticommunist crusade. The US government expended significant resources over years engineering the conditions for a violent clash, and then, when the violence broke out, assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving US geopolitical goals. — location: 2870 ^ref-4208

how could the international press, and the State Department, remain entirely untroubled by the fact that this was achieved through the mass murder of unarmed civilians? Howard Federspiel, at the State Department, summed up the answer perfectly. “No one cared,” he recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.” — location: 2889 ^ref-44020

Indonesia was by far the biggest domino. When influential officials in Washington realized how decisive their victory was in Jakarta, they came to a conclusion. They could afford to lose the battle in Vietnam, because the war was already won. — location: 2903 ^ref-37410

Pravda asked in February 1966, “What for and according to what right are tens of thousands of people being killed?” The official Communist paper reported that “rightist political circles are trying to eliminate the communist party and at the same time ‘eradicate’ the ideology of Communism in Indonesia.” They compared the slaughter to the “White Terror” unleashed in Russia in 1917. — location: 2942 ^ref-53922

After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam. — location: 3830 ^ref-56488

Chile’s Operation Condor continued to expand its activities all around South America, until the continent was a veritable anticommunist killing zone. Thereafter, any real threat to US-aligned authoritarian capitalist development existed mostly in the paranoid minds of the Condor alliance dictators and their US allies. The fanatical anticommunists won the continent. — location: 3896 ^ref-14649

The close collaboration of US officials with Central American dictatorships as they slaughtered their own populations is well documented, far better than US activities in Indonesia leading up to October 1965. — location: 3988 ^ref-64637

others who lived through the late 1970s and ’80s in Central America always stress that these new Central American guerrilla movements emerged after attempts at peaceful transition to democracy were brutally suppressed or, indeed, exterminated. They say that almost every political ideology in the world—not just the socialism and Marxism dominant in those guerrilla groups—allows for armed resistance against tyrants, and that includes the US revolutionary tradition. Nor is it surprising that the surviving movements were left-wing militants: by the late ’70s, most of the moderate dissidents were dead. — location: 3991 ^ref-26216

Deng Xiaoping was furious, and unwilling to tolerate what he perceived as Vietnam’s aggression against China’s ally. He resolved to invade Vietnam, and told the US about the plan. — location: 4002 ^ref-30300

The United States chose to recognize the remnants of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, keeping its tiny regime alive, and refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-allied government. This would last for years. Partly, it was a way to appease Carter’s new ally in Beijing. But Benny knew that it was something else too. “They hated Vietnam too much,” Benny said. “They couldn’t forgive them for winning the war.” — location: 4020 ^ref-32437

Like Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Árbenz, Fidel, Sukarno, and Allende before them, the terceristas initially hoped to set up a government that Washington could tolerate. Infamously, these hopes would be dashed when Reagan took over and began funding the Contra rebels. — location: 4047 ^ref-33788

The Contras were not a regular army, and never seriously tried to best the Sandinistas in a direct confrontation.45 They were a well-funded terrorist group, seeking to destabilize the regime however they could. — location: 4063 ^ref-18141

In 1983, D’Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well. “You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.” — location: 4091 ^ref-27558

it was in Guatemala, Central America’s biggest country and the site of the CIA’s first major “victory” in the hemisphere, back in 1954, that normal people faced the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere. — location: 4103 ^ref-22243

In many parts of this region, the military simply killed every man, woman, and child. The government had decided that the Ixil were intrinsically communist, or at least very likely to become communist. In Indonesia, it may not have been the case that the mass murder was genocide. It was simply anticommunist mass murder. In Guatemala it was anticommunist genocide. — location: 4138 ^ref-8282

From 1978 to 1983, the Guatemalan military killed more than two hundred thousand people. — location: 4155 ^ref-38955

Anticommunist extermination had spread all across Latin America, always with the assistance of the United States. Taken together, the death toll approaches the estimated size of the 1965–66 massacres in Indonesia. — location: 4159 ^ref-24087

historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time. — location: 4162 ^ref-12783

The Contras never stopped their terrorism. It was clear to everyone, as the country went to the polls again in 1990, that the violence would not stop until the leftists lost power. The Nicaraguan people voted them out, and they left peacefully. — location: 4179 ^ref-7262

For the two biggest anticommunist governments ever set up in the former Third World, the end of the Cold War had an indirect effect. Both Indonesia and Brazil transitioned from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. — location: 4184 ^ref-60208

Nor did Washington change its stance toward Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of moderating pressure on Havana or trying a different tactic, Washington tightened the screws, passing the Helms-Burton Act in 1992 and penalizing all companies doing business with Cuba. — location: 4193 ^ref-59426

From 1960 to the present, Cuba was very far from the most repressive political system, or the worst violator of human rights, in the hemisphere. — location: 4197 ^ref-17772

The past two decades have led the best historians to take a wider view of US behavior. Before and after the Cold War, the United States was always an expansionist and aggressive power. “In an historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means,” — location: 4206 ^ref-46829

“When I finally got to go back to Indonesia, it was shocking to hear what people think communism is,” Nury said. “I lived through it, and they are just wrong. And living in Bulgaria under communism was a hell of a lot better than living in Suharto’s Indonesia.” — location: 4219 ^ref-51676

But to participate in the modern economy that has grown up around them, they also need money. For that, they send their teenage sons and daughters to the United States. — location: 4226 ^ref-41118

Ilom keeps sending more of its youth up north. This is not about love for the United States, or the American dream. They don’t want to go. They know who was responsible for the violence they’d suffered. — location: 4229 ^ref-3880

we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.” — location: 4233 ^ref-58824

a short essay titled “For Whom the Wall Fell?,” looked at postcommunist countries in 2014. Some countries still have smaller economies than they did in 1990. Some have grown slower than their Western European neighbors, meaning they are falling further and further behind even from the low point in 1990, when the collapse of their system cut down the size of their economies. — location: 4300 ^ref-65498

only five real capitalist success cases: Albania, Poland, Belarus, Armenia, and Estonia, which have been somehow catching up with the First World. Only three are democracies. — location: 4303 ^ref-41637

only 10 percent of the population of the former communist world in Eastern Europe got what they were promised when they tore the wall down. The Second World lost, and lost big. They lost the geopolitical power they had during the Cold War, their citizens often lost material wealth, and many did not even gain democratic freedoms to counterbalance that loss. — location: 4304 ^ref-36590

what world did you believe that you were building? What did you believe the world would be like in the twenty-first century?” Then I’d ask, “Is that the world you live in now?” Often, their eyes would light up when answering the first part. They knew the answer. They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice. The answer to the second question was so obvious that it felt cruel even to ask. — location: 4319 ^ref-8979

They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different. — location: 4324 ^ref-48690

I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradictions of Soviet Communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. — location: 4342 ^ref-61586

this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today. — location: 4344 ^ref-18726

For better or worse, almost all of us now live in the global economic system that Indonesia and Brazil entered in the mid-1960s, a worldwide capitalist order with the United States as its leading military power and center of cultural production. That may change soon—who knows. But we’re still here. — location: 4358 ^ref-13786

We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence. — location: 4365 ^ref-50759

The establishment of Americanization was helped along by the mass murder programs discussed in this book. In a way, they made it possible. — location: 4365 ^ref-57842

Washington’s violent anticommunist crusade destroyed a number of alternative possibilities for world development. — location: 4376 ^ref-27588

there’s increasingly robust agreement that the developing nations lost their chances to “catch up” economically with the First World around the early 1980s, when an explosion of debt, a turn to neoliberal structural adjustment, and “globalization” put them on their current path. — location: 4383 ^ref-37404

the only real examples of large Third World countries becoming as rich as those in the First World since 1945 are South Korea and Taiwan, and it’s very clear that these nations were given special exemptions from the rules of the world order because of their strategic importance in the Cold War. — location: 4386 ^ref-62891

It’s now probably broadly accurate to say that all of Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, consists of crony capitalist nations with powerful oligarchies. In Southeast Asia, the same is true for the majority of countries, and even the communist nations were integrated into ASEAN, which Indonesia and the Philippines set up as anticommunist in 1967. — location: 4390 ^ref-43159

when the Second World collapsed, those countries were integrated into a global system that only had two basic structural types—Western advanced capitalist countries and resource-exporting crony capitalist societies shaped by anticommunism—and they slid right into the second category, becoming very much like Brazil. — location: 4394 ^ref-65376

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. — location: 4416 ^ref-60379

They often admitted, without hesitation or — location: 4418 ^ref-38443

pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington. — location: 4419 ^ref-28688

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated. — location: 4420 ^ref-37656

the fifth consequence of the crusade: fanatical anticommunism has never really left us, even in the First World. Not only in Brazil and Indonesia in the past few years, it has become clear that this violent, paranoid style in politics remains a very potent force. But I think it’s clear that the ghosts of this battle most actively haunt the countries of the “developing” world. — location: 4423 ^ref-33526

“Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America’s Long Cold War,” — location: 5681 ^ref-23492

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