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

by Vincent Bevins

course, sun and surfing. If aliens from another world landed on Bali, they would immediately conclude that our planet has a racial hierarchy. The white people who come here for vacation are orders of magnitude wealthier than the locals, who serve them. It is just accepted as a natural part of life. Almost everywhere in Southeast Asia, white people have the disposable income to buy lavish hospitality, or sex, from the locals. They were born with this wealth. Compared to the rest of Indonesia, Bali has done OK for itself economically as a result of the tourism, and Balinese people often obediently reproduce the “Bali smile” as they get Australian surfers their eggs or Russian Instagram models their coconuts. Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here, says Ngurah Termana, the nephew of Agung Alit, the man who spent a darkly absurd afternoon sifting through skulls in search of his father’s body. In contrast to Cambodia, where Western backpackers faithfully (or morbidly) visit the Killing Fields Museum outside Phnom Penh, few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs. “Even when we meet with NGO groups, the most internationally informed type of people, that know about Rwanda, Pol Pot, everything, no one has any idea what happened here,” said Ngurah Termana, who is a founding member of Taman 65, or the 1965 Garden, a collective de...