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

by Vincent Bevins

That term, “Third World,” was born in 1951 in France, but it really only came into its own in 1955, in Indonesia. As historian Christopher J. Lee has written, it was the Konferensi Asia-Afrika, held in Bandung in April, that really solidified the idea of the Third World.60 This remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union. It didn’t happen automatically; it was the result of concerted efforts by a few of the world’s new leaders. In 1954, Indonesia got together with Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Pakistan, and India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the same leader who gave the Kennedy brothers a lecture over dinner. They formed the Colombo Group, named after the Sri Lankan capital, where they met, and began planning a bigger meeting. Indonesia’s prime minister initially proposed a 1955 conference as a response to the founding of SEATO, the US-sponsored copy of NATO in Southeast Asia. But the invitation list soon expanded rapidly, as Nehru invited China (this necessarily excluded Taiwan), while apartheid South Africa and both Koreas (technically still at war) as well as Israel (whose presence might have upset Arab nations) weren’t invited. The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening spee...