Book Review/Heather Seggel

Method and Madness

America’s history of murder in the name of preventing communism from taking root around the world, using the CIA to create false narratives and cultivate militants to turn against their own people, makes for queasy reading. The scope of the violence and its justifications can be so overwhelming as to send one first into shock, then denial. So you may want to begin at the back of this book. “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World” (PublicAffairs Books) describes deeply upsetting acts, which will not be recounted in this review. The charts and graphs at the end share data as to where and to whom the benefits of this strategy accrued, and offer context about the allure of concentrated power and the ways it can be seized. They don’t make it right, but they do make some sense of the incomprehensible.

Author Vincent Bevins takes his title from a massacre in Indonesia, where in 1965 our government helped their military to kill more than one million nonviolent civilians, an operation so successful for the CIA that the so-called “Jakarta Method” became a common practice used in countries around the world. Bevins talks to people in a dozen countries where this happened and is able to verify many of their accounts with newly-declassified documents, as well as archival research and the journalism he had already done at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Financial Times.

In countries where authoritarian rule is a fact of life, an anticommunist philosophy can become like a “national religion.” That’s great for getting people fired up at rallies, but it is also used to justify firmly shutting down almost anything the leaders don’t like. You sure aren’t going to unionize or expect to participate in a free election, and if you ask for more regulations to protect the rights of citizens? Those concerns are easily redefined as communism, and thus punished accordingly.

Bevins points out that Indonesia and Brazil were both anticommunist dictatorships in the 1950s, but the stranglehold their rulers had on the people, while certainly not a democracy, was also not capitalism as it was originally understood. There were no built-in protections from market competition, just a top-down system that sluiced its waste onto those least equipped to swim. These were the early days of so-called “crony capitalism,” which used to be more of a unicorn but is now much more the norm.

When I started taking notes on this book in preparation to review it, the coronavirus was very much in the news, but not as an American story yet. It certainly is one now. On March 21, author and history professor Heather Cox Richardson wrote a column (I find them on Facebook, they can also be read at Substack) about the Department of Justice asking Congress for a massive expansion of powers during this national emergency. If granted, they would allow the arrest and indefinite detention of anyone without cause until the emergency was declared over. She then described Trump’s unwillingness to enforce the Defense Production Act, instead nudging businesses to manufacture needed medical equipment, and writes: “These two stories reveal the same ideology that would underlay a law permitting arrest and imprisonment without trial: that society works best when it defers to a few special people who have access to information, resources, and power.”

Bevins wrote “The Jakarta Method” to show how this recent but largely ignored part of our history very much informs the way we live today. He concludes with current information about his sources, some still fighting to simply have the truth of what happened in their countries acknowledged, others expatriated to places that will never completely feel like home. It can be inspiring to hear from people willing to excavate mass graves and bury victims with dignity, but to this day that truth is struggling to be heard. Jakarta has an entire museum dedicated to preserving the false story of a communist attack on generals that never took place, the pretext under which the slaughter of nonviolent civilians was carried out, blaming the “savagery” of the party and entreating visitors, “Don’t let something like this ever happen again.” The labels may change, but the pattern keeps repeating.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020

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