Review | Sukarno, Suharto, and the US-backed mass murder of communists in Indonesia that set the template for Cold War regime change worldwide
- Slaughter in Indonesia in 1965 set template for the systematic mass murder of civilians in the name of anticommunism, Vincent Bevins says in The Jakarta Method
- ‘This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union,’ he writes
The Jakarta Method
by Vincent Bevins
PublicAffairs
3/5 stars
In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as one million of their own countrymen, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).
Not many people were killed in the streets or officially executed, but rather disappeared into the night.
On the island of Bali, at least 5 per cent of the population, about 80,000 people, were killed, but even today, the events of 1965 are little known outside Indonesia, or even within it.
“For more than 50 years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either,” writes journalist Vincent Bevins in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. The book attempts to lift the veil while also putting the bloody events in a global context and pointing an accusatory finger at the United States.
