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.

Both countries had been independent, standing somewhere in between the world’s capitalist and communist superpowers, but fell decisively into the US camp in the middle of the 1960s.

Most shockingly, and most importantly for this book, the two events led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.

But it was only after I began work on this book, speaking with experts and witnesses and survivors, that I realized the significance of the two historical events was much greater than the fact that violent anticommunism still exists in Brazil, Indonesia, and many other countries, and that the Cold War created a world of regimes that see any social reform as a threat. I came to the conclusion that the entire world, and especially the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that Ing Giok sailed past with her family, has been reshaped by the waves emanating from Brazil and Indonesia in 1964 and 1965.

The violence that took place in Brazil, and Indonesia, and twenty-one other countries around the world, was not accidental, or incidental to the main events of world history. The deaths were not “cold-blooded and meaningless,” just tragic errors that didn’t change anything.5 Precisely the opposite. The violence was effective, a fundamental part of a larger process. Without a full view of the Cold War and US goals worldwide, the events are unbelievable, unintelligible, or very difficult to process.

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.

In comparison, their cousins back in Europe had been conquering the globe for almost five centuries. They had sailed around the planet, carving it up for themselves.

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.

US citizens continued to buy, sell, whip, torture, and own persons of African descent until the middle of the nineteenth century. Women were only given the right to vote nationwide in 1920. They could actually do so, however, while the theoretical voting rights granted to black Americans were beaten back by racist terror campaigns and laws that were meant to exclude them from real citizenship. When the United States entered World War II, it was what we would now consider an apartheid society.3 In that war, however, the better angels of American nature came to the fore. It wasn’t always clear that would be the case. In the 1930s, some Americans even sympathized with the Nazis, a hyper-militaristic, genocidal, and proudly racist authoritarian party governing Germany. In 1941, a senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”4 But when the US did join World War II, in an alliance with the British, French, and Russians against the Germans and Japanese, its troops fought to liberate prisoners from death camps and save Western Europe’s limited democracies from tyranny.

a generation of American boys came back from that war rightfully proud of what they had done—they had looked an entirely evil system in the face, stood up for the values their country was built on, and they had won.

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.

The Soviet Union was an even younger country than the United States. It was founded in 1917 by a small group of radical intellectuals inspired by German philosopher Karl Marx, after a revolution overthrew a decrepit Russian monarchy ruling over an empire that largely consisted of impoverished peasants, and that was considered backward compared to the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, where Marx—and Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader—actually thought the world socialist revolution was supposed to start.

The Soviets became the world’s second “superpower,” but they were far weaker than the United States in every way that counts.

By 1950, the US economy was probably as big as all of Europe and the Soviet Union combined.

That is what we are talking about when we discuss the “First World” and the “Second World” in the years after 1945. The First World consisted of the rich countries in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, all of which had gotten wealthy while engaging in colonialism.

The “Second World” was the Soviet Union and the European territories where the Red Army had set up camp. Since its founding, the USSR had publicly aligned itself with the global anticolonial struggle and had not engaged in overseas imperialism, but the world was watching how Moscow would exert influence over the occupied nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

And then there was the “Third World”—everyone else, the vast majority of the world’s population. That term was coined in the early 1950s, and originally, all of its connotations were positive. When the leaders of these new nation-states took up the term, they spoke it with pride; it contained a dream of a better future in which the world’s downtrodden and enslaved masses would take control of their own destiny. 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.

In 1950, more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in the Third World, and with few exceptions, these peoples had lived under the control of European colonialism.

Washington’s anticommunist crusade had actually started well before World War II. Just after the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson chose to join the other imperial powers in helping the White forces attempt to retake control from the Bolshevik revolutionaries. For two reasons. First, the core, foundational American ideology is something like the exact opposite of communism.15 Strong emphasis is placed on the individual, not the collective, and an idea of freedom that is strongly linked to the right to own things.

But in the years just after World War II, a series of events brought anticommunism to the very center of American politics, in an intensely fanatical new form.

It did not please leaders in Washington that Communist parties won the first postwar elections in both France and Italy.

President Truman had much less patience for the Soviet Union than his predecessor, and he was looking for a way to confront Stalin. Greece and Turkey gave it to him. In March 1947, he asked Congress for civilian and military support to those countries in a special address that outlined what would be known as the Truman Doctrine. “The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists,” he said. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

There was widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe.

It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide,

the USSR had already decided by 1946 that Turkey was not worth the trouble.

Stalin of course did not back off in those parts of the world out of some generosity of spirit or his deep respect for the right of national self-determination. He did so because he had made a deal with the Western powers at Yalta, and he was too afraid of antagonizing the United States to violate it. He was surprised to see that Washington acted as if he had antagonized them anyway.22

In Western Europe, the ancestral home of every US leader to date, Washington introduced the Marshall Plan, a brilliantly designed and magnificently effective economic aid package that put these rich countries on the path to American-style capitalist redevelopment.

Marxism as a guiding ideology, including in the Marxist-Leninist formulation cemented by Stalin, certainly did not prescribe that everyone everywhere make revolution at all times. In their worldview, you certainly didn’t get socialism just because you wanted

One of the main points of Marxism was to reject the idea that you could simply will the world you want into existence, and Marx laid out a theory in which societies moved forward through conflict between economic classes.

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

The case of Mao Zedong in China is an important example. The Comintern provided training to both his Communist Party and the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, directing them to organize along Leninist lines, meaning that they would be strictly disciplined and governed by the principle of “democratic centralism.” The Chinese Communists were ordered by Moscow to work directly with the Nationalists in a broad “United Front,” a concept that the Comintern itself had developed.25 It was believed that because China was such an impoverished peasant society, the country was nowhere near the state of capitalist development that would make revolution possible.

In Eastern Europe, Stalin took a very different approach, as he considered this area his rightful sphere of influence, because his troops had taken it from Hitler, and an important buffer against possible invasion from the West. After the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of the Marshall Plan, Moscow engineered a communist coup in Czechoslovakia.

The Western powers did not play fair in the territory their armies had occupied, either. After it became clear that so many Italians and French wanted to vote freely for Communist parties, the US intervened heavily in Western Europe to make sure that the leftists didn’t take over.

By the end of the 1940s all of the area that had been liberated by the Red Army consisted of one-party Communist states, and all of the area controlled by Western powers was capitalist with a pro-American orientation, regardless of what the people may have wanted in 1945.

McCarthyism is named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a wild search for communists in the US government in the early 1950s, but it’s best understood as a process that started before that man famously began drunkenly berating people in front of the entire nation, and its consequences extended long after he was exposed as a liar.

The famous public trials weren’t simply “witch hunts,” in which mobs went after entities that don’t exist; there really were communists in the United States. They were active in labor unions, Hollywood, and some parts of the government, and the Communist Party USA had attracted many black and Jewish members.

Hoover had presented a logical death trap. If anyone accuses you of being communist, or communist-adjacent, no defense is possible. If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do, in order to conceal their true motives. If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness, as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows. And if there are a lot of you, or you’re openly, proudly communist, that’s just as bad.

At the levels of government that mattered, everyone who remained was a fanatical anticommunist—which meant that some of the smartest experts in the State Department, the US diplomatic service, were purged.

By the end of the 1940s, the lines defining the First and Second World had become relatively stable. What was still in flux, however, was the future of the Third World.

It was not so clear, on the other hand, what the men running the US government would do with the growing wave of radical Third World movements that were opposed to European imperialism, were not communist, but resisted forming an explicit alliance with Washington against Moscow. This was a very common phenomenon. Many leaders of Third World independence movements associated the United States with its Western European imperialist allies; others believed the Soviet Union was an important friend in the struggle against colonialism. Even if they did not want to be ruled by the Soviets, they wanted as many allies as they could get.

Under Truman, the US foreign policy establishment saw Sukarno’s nascent Indonesia as the axiomatic case of a sufficiently anticommunist anticolonial movement, and so the name of its capital, Jakarta, came to signify this principle of tolerance for neutral Third World nations. As Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad put it, Washington adopted the “Jakarta Axiom.”

JFK believed that emerging nations were insisting on their right to forge their own path, and that this was entirely understandable.

In 1951, he went on a trip to Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, and came to the conclusion that the United States had failed to understand the importance of “nationalistic passions… directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West.”

Later that year, he went on another one of his long jaunts, this time to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Singapore, French Indochina, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. He observed that the US “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.”

Reflecting on the situation in Vietnam, he reported that the United States had “allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of Empire.”

“If one thing was borne into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East, it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms.”

But it was in India that Jack and his brother Bobby really got a lecture from one of the world’s new class of leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power in Egypt in 1952, favored the construction of a socialist society.

Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.”49

Frank’s favorite book was Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, which told its story against the backdrop of the “Great Game” between the British and Russian Empires.

By 1951, Wisner’s OPC had been absorbed into a newly formed, permanent organ called the Central Intelligence Agency,