The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Much like Caroline Elkins' Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Bevins tracks the evolution and propagation of coercive techniques. While Elkins focused on the British empire, Bevins examines the anti-communist violence and intimidation used by right-wing despots to crush the burgeoning third world movement in the decades after the second world war. He also roots out the ways in which the CIA actively supported these mass murder campaigns, providing materiel, lists of names, and green-lighting military coups against left-leaning leaders like Sukarno in Indonesia and Allende in Chile.
Bevins background as a journalist comes through in the intimate personal narratives that he weaves through the global geopolitical events of book. He keeps the spotlight focused on individuals whose lives were decimated without thought by policy decisions in America and military regimes in the third world. Ultimately, Bevins makes the case that this consistent and intentional policy of brutal anti-communism was in no small part responsible for the current hegemonic dominance that America holds today, and the persistent poverty and oppression felt by many in the third world still.
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