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

by Vincent Bevins

Sukarno’s natural predilection toward inclusion was extremely well suited to the historical moment. Indonesia is an archipelago whose islands sprawl across two million square miles of sea and are home to hundreds of distinct nationalities speaking more than seven hundred languages. Nothing brought them together other than the artificial boundaries imposed by a racist foreign power. The young nation needed a shared sense of identity more than anything else. Sukarno was the prophet of that identity. In 1945, he provided an ingenious, impassioned basis for what it meant to be Indonesian when he put forward the Pancasila, or five principles. They were, and remain: belief in God, justice and civilization, Indonesian unity, democracy, and social justice. In practice, they combine the broad affirmation of religion (that would likely mean Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism), revolutionary independence, and social democracy. They certainly didn’t exclude the communists, either, since the vast majority of them were abangan Muslims like Sukarno, or Balinese Hindus like his mother. Even if a tiny minority of high-level communists might have been without religion, they were happy enough to sign off on Pancasila within a few years.