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

by Vincent Bevins

What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation.

I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.

The United States, a Western European settler colony in North America, emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state on Earth. This was a surprise to most Americans, and to most of the world.

To say that the United States is a settler colony means that the land was overtaken by white Europeans over the course of several centuries in a way that differed from the way that most countries in Africa and Asia were conquered.

Internationally, the country came to represent and champion revolutionary, democratic ideals. But internally, things were much more complicated. The United States remained a brutally white supremacist society. The consequence of the a priori dismissal of the native population was genocide. Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population.

Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.

When the United States entered World War II, it was what we would now consider an apartheid society.

The second most-powerful country in the world in 1945, the Soviet Union, also emerged as a victor in that war. The Soviets were intensely proud too, but their population had been devastated. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, despised their left-wing ideology and led a brutal invasion into their territory. Before the Soviets finally pushed them back—at Stalingrad in 1943, probably the turning point in the war, a year before the Americans landed in Europe—they had already suffered catastrophic losses. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin in 1945, occupying much of Central and Eastern Europe in the process, at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died.5

Even though hundreds of thousands of Soviet women bravely fought the Nazis, the gender imbalance in 1945 drives home the devastation. By 1945, there were only seven men for every ten women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.

The term was used in the sense of the “Third Estate” during the French Revolution, the revolutionary common people who would overthrow the First and Second Estates of the monarchy and the clergy. “Third” did not mean third-rate, but something more like the third and final act: the first group of rich white countries had their crack at creating the world, as did the second, and this was the new movement, full of energy and potential, just waiting to be unleashed. For much of the planet, the Third World was not just a category; it was a movement.11

A Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh, who had previously worked as a photo retoucher in Paris and as a baker in the United States, embraced revolutionary Marxism after he blamed the Western capitalist powers for refusing to acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty at the Versailles Peace Conference following World War I.13 He became an agent for the Communist International before he led the Viet Minh resistance movement against the Japanese occupation in the 1940s.