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.

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.”

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.

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.

The specific kind of anticommunism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgments: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated.

During World War II, British policies created a famine that took the lives of four million people. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blamed the Indians for the famine his own government caused, saying it was their fault for “breeding like rabbits,” and asked why Gandhi—whom Churchill loathed—hadn’t died yet.48

In Germany, the CIA had no problem recruiting former Nazis, including those who had run death squads, as long as they were anticommunist.