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

by Vincent Bevins

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.