The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

The deaths were not “cold-blooded and meaningless,” just tragic errors that didn’t change anything.

You had to get through capitalism to get to socialism, their theory went.

what changed after World War II was that communists were no longer welcome at all.

Maybe he was right to be a bit worried. Not long after the speech, Sukarno’s independence movement was in trouble.

Gerwani became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. It was organized along feminist, socialist, and nationalist lines, and focused on opposing traditional constraints put on women, promoting the education of girls and demanding space for women in the public sphere.16

“No man is perfect,” Sumiyati learned. “This is a time of transition and we have to struggle for the changes we want to see. We move forward step by step, we can’t expect the world to turn over as easily as we turn the palm of our hands.”17

Indonesia was a democratic, multiethnic national republic. Race didn’t matter, and neither did Papua’s level of economic development.