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

by Vincent Bevins

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.

By the time the Red Army reached Berlin in 1945, occupying much of Central and Eastern Europe in the process, at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died.5

During the resulting three-year stalemate, the US dropped more than six hundred thousand tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, and poured thirty thousand tons of napalm over the landscape.

The CIA created pamphlets and posters proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam. They paid off journalists to write that he was a Jew. The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be Tudeh Party members and attack a mosque.

“This is a time of transition and we have to struggle for the changes we want to see. We move forward step by step, we can’t expect the world to turn over as easily as we turn the palm of our hands.”

The IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies.13 Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight. The PKI denounced the measures as an attack on the poor, but the government pressed forward anyway, seemingly committed to securing the next aid package from Washington.

Indonesian leftists knew that the British had used their “Special Branch,” or police intelligence, to capture, bribe, and infiltrate the Malaysian communist movement and make sure decolonization there happened as they planned.

As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965.

US officials were in close contact with the military, making it clear to them that direct assistance could resume if the PKI were destroyed, Sukarno was removed, and attacks on US investments halted. Aid flows were also conditional on Indonesia’s willingness to adopt IMF- and US-approved economic plans.23

They “bluntly and repeatedly warned the emerging Indonesian leadership” that if nationalization went forward, support from Washington would be withheld, and their grip on power was at stake, according to historian Bradley Simpson’s analysis of the declassified communications. The White House enlisted Australian and Japanese officials in the fight.

They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier. A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.

intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic goods like rice, sugar, and cooking oil.34 Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.35

He went on to affirm that “Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.”40 The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally.

When influential officials in Washington realized how decisive their victory was in Jakarta, they came to a conclusion. They could afford to lose the battle in Vietnam, because the war was already won.

They found Moscow cold, but also quite rich and developed. Everyone had health care, free education, the things Indonesians believed they deserved but hadn’t received yet.

Soon after Longan arrived from Venezuela, he formed death squads. Within three months they carried out Operation Cleanup, or Operación Limpieza, which kidnapped, tortured, and executed thirty prominent left-wing figures in March 1966,

But we know that whatever it was, Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation. The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.

The Christian Democrats were the party favored by Washington—and the CIA—and they received very significant help from Uncle Sam. The Agency pumped $3 million into that election. That came out to almost a dollar per vote for Eduardo Frei, more than Lyndon Johnson spent in his own 1964 campaign.42 In addition to funds, the CIA also delivered a crude “scare campaign” to the Chilean people.

He was allowed to get back to work at the UN. But in 1968, a military attaché in Bangkok contacted Benny with a friendly warning. The name he was born with, Hong Lan Oei, was too Chinese. Suharto had severed relations with China and banned all Chinese-language materials in Indonesia. Even Chinese characters were banned.

Internally, when anticommunism is the ruling ideology, almost the national religion, any legitimate complaint from below can easily be dismissed as communist. Anything that would be an obvious inconvenience to the small clique of rich families that run the country can be easily categorized as dangerous revolution, and cast aside. This includes any whiff of socialism or social democracy, any land reform, and any regulation that would reduce monopoly power and allow for more efficient development and market competition. It includes unions and any normal demands for workers’ rights.

When Frank Wisner and Howard Jones were working to re-engineer West Germany’s financial system after World War II, the US government wiped out all public and private debt as they created the new deutsche mark. One shudders to think how a major Third World leader perceived as anti-American or “communist” would have been treated if his country tried the same thing after a war of independence.

The Operation Gladio “stay-behind” networks that grew out of Wisner’s early days continued into the 1980s. But when European governments shifted too far right for citizens, voters shifted to the parties on the left, and vice versa, and that was allowed.

Why did Cold War Washington let Western Europe “get away” with all this light socialism when similar policy orientations led to violent intervention in the Third World? Was it only that, as Francisca said, Americans simply trusted their European cousins—who were white, and therefore responsible—to handle the task of managing democracy? A complementary explanation might be that these countries, some still overseeing remnants of colonial empire, were incredibly rich and powerful. They were much harder to push around, even if Washington had wanted to, and—perhaps more importantly—they sat at the top of the world economy. They were being fully integrated into the US-led system, and so there was much less of a risk they would try to radically reshape the global order, because it had served them quite well.

Marcos and his defense secretary, Juan Ponce Enrile, repeatedly warned of a communist threat. Then, on September 22, 1972, Enrile faked an attempt on his own life. He took a different car as gunmen lit up the car he was supposed to be in. He and Marcos, who helped plan the ruse, said God had saved him. Of course, they blamed the communists. They also claimed, on the same day, that all of this left them no choice but to declare martial law.

The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included.

One recent study asked US citizens to approximate what the average human earns per year. The number they guessed was ten times too big. They were shocked to find out just how the Third World still lives.3

The psychological effects of US covert action are felt everywhere, including in North America. More and more citizens there have connections to countries touched by recent US interventions, and even for white Americans, there are psychological effects. When people find out that some things, important things, have been hidden from them, they start to doubt things they shouldn’t, and embark on wild conspiracy theorizing.

When it comes to pure economics, there’s increasingly robust agreement that the developing nations lost their chances to “catch up” economically with the First World around the early 1980s, when an explosion of debt, a turn to neoliberal structural adjustment, and “globalization” put them on their current path.8 Within the current structure, the only real examples of large Third World countries becoming as rich as those in the First World since 1945 are South Korea and Taiwan, and it’s very clear that these nations were given special exemptions from the rules of the world order because of their strategic importance in the Cold War.9

As for the victors of the anticommunist crusade, it’s clear that as a nation-state, the United States has done enormously well since 1945. It is an extremely rich and powerful country. But if we look at individual Americans, or break down the analysis along class and race lines, it’s clear that the spoils of that global ascendance were shared extremely unequally. More and more of the flows coming in from other nations have accumulated at the very top, while some US citizens live in poverty comparable to life in the former Third World.