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

by Vincent Bevins

Malaya, a colonial possession covering the Malaysian peninsula from the Thai border down to the tip of Singapore, was one of Britain’s last and most important territories in Asia. When London finally decolonized the region and began to create the new country of Malaysia, Sukarno became adamantly opposed to the form it took. He believed that the English were employing imperial trickery to weaken revolutionary forces in Asia. He was mostly right. And Howard Jones knew it.10 The British did not want to create a country that was majority Chinese, since too much of Malaya’s population, especially in Singapore, sympathized with communism for their liking. As a solution to this “problem,” London added its possessions on the top half of the huge island of Borneo into what would become Malaysia, and excluded the island of Singapore. This move would combine the entirely distinct peoples of Sarawak, Borneo, and Sabah into the new Malaysia, which would dilute the proportion of ethnic Chinese to levels the British considered acceptable. The southern half of Borneo was part of Indonesia—so Indonesians would share a long border with British colonial territories shoehorned into Malaysia just to dilute the power of leftists. One very rough way to understand this is to imagine that, after revolution swept through the United States, King George III made Protestants in Northern Ireland citizens of Canada, allowing him to make sure loyalists to the crown would win elections in perpetuity north...