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queenluaAs an actual professional might say: "Starred review."
Bevins's aim with The Jakarta Method is straightforward: he wants to tell a history of the Cold War, not from the perspective of the US, nor from the perspective of the Soviet Union, but from the perspective of the global south: those countries that dared to try and forge their own path in the new world economy, post-decolonization. And the central set piece in his narrative is the fallout from the 30 September Movement in Indonesia (1965), when the US aided and abetted a right-wing coup, and helped to produce & disseminate propaganda for the new regime, resulting in the extrajudicial slaughter of somewhere between 500,000 and one million people.
Which, uh, sure was news to me.
I always feel a bit shy, typing up a review of a book like this, because it's bound to show how ignorant I am. My education has historically been a bit scattershot—some pockets of depth, and a bit of breadth, but a lot of gaping knowledge gaps. So admitting something like, say, "wow, I didn't realize how fucked-up the Contras were" has me preemptively wincing, because like, damn, how could I be so dumb? (Perhaps this is a side-effect of watching too many Twitter fights from afar, sigh.)
But while I know I'm quite ignorant wrt Central and South American history, what's striking about Indonesia is how ignorant a lot of people are about this mass killing, including a lot of people who are a hell of a lot more qualified and broadly knowledgeable than I am. From an interview with the author:
1) Unlike Vietnam, not a single US soldier died in the fallout from the 30 September Movement—so there was little incentive for the US or even the broader Western press to dig deeply into what happened there, since, you know, their guys weren't dying. Also, (1b), good ole fashioned racism; reporting at the time depicted the killings as some kind of collective savage mania, ugh ugh ugh. (Special "fuck you" to the New York Times, here!)
2) Unlike other Cold War conflicts, which were often at least contests between two armed groups, the purge in Indonesia was entirely one-sided.
You see, prior to the coup, Indonesia was an honestly-pretty-successful up-and-coming multiethnic multilingual democracy. While they were happy to talk to both the US and the Soviet Union, they were quite determined to do things their own way—while "Third World" nowadays tends to refer to poor, underdeveloped countries, the term was originally coined and popularized to indicate a movement—various pan-African and pan-Asian governments resolving to develop in their own way, apart from the "first world" US or "second world" Soviets.
And within this context, the PKI (the Indonesian communist party) was having fantastic success advancing their agenda solely via democratic means. At its peak, the PKI had two million members, and was the third largest communist party in the world (behind the USSR and China). They had a deft, popular, progressive president in Sukarno, who, while not himself a communist, was broadly supported by a coalition of leftist groups, and it seemed clear the PKI would continue to enjoy significant electoral success in the future.
So, like, the PKI did not have guns. They did not even have the type of infrastructure that would allow them to obtain guns, if they had wanted them. (They did not collaborate with the Soviet communist party in any materially significant way.) In a different world, this would make them broadly admirable and committed to their ideals. But in this world... it set them up to be slaughtered.
Turns out, after you murder the shit out of a few hundred thousand people whose only "crime" was "sometimes voting for the party that liked unions," people will stop admitting they were ever involved with the PKI in any way whatsoever. And if they won't do that, it's hard for anyone to write the history about what happened to them.
3) The right-wing dictator ruled for another thirty-one years, which is plenty of time for an authoritarian government to endlessly repeat lies about heroically thwarting the evil communists, produce an annual TV special depicting said distorted version of events, socially shun any remaining suspected communists among the populace... Thus, even in Indonesia, many citizens only know this "official" version of events, or else are too traumatized to say much to contradict it. (There's a gut-wrenching bit where Bevin talks to a survivor of the purge, who's lived in basically the same Hindu temple his whole life. The survivor remembers when the beach next to the temple was covered in skulls, from how many people were killed there. That beach is now a resort. Bevins asks the staff at the resort if they knew this place was once a killing field; all of them act confused, say they've never heard of such a thing, why would the beach have ever been piled up with skulls? It's unclear whether they actually have no idea, or if they're just lying in understandable self-defense—probably a mixture of both—but either way, it's chilling.)
You might suspect this all makes for grim reading, and you'd be right. The chapter covering the months directly after the 30 September Movement, in particular, is devastating. It's almost clinical in its presentation: all it does is present various excerpts of memos between US officials describing the "revolution" and how well it's going and hello army can I provide you with anything you need, would you like a list of communists to kill... and alternates those memos with the stories of what was happening to the victims, the who-what-when-where of these same events. Turns out that clinical presentation is enough; no extra embellishment is needed. I'm really, really not a very emotional person, as a rule, but I did have to put the book down and cry while reading that chapter.
Still, I'm glad I read it. Obviously.
Also, I very much appreciated just how much Cold War history the author is able to tie together, in a coherent and engaging fashion, in such a tight space (just 250 pages!). Bevins clearly shows how the Indonesian coup has reverberations throughout the rest of southeast Asia, and throughout Latin America, for the next several decades, with the events in Jakarta often serving as a "blueprint" for US policy. (Hence the book's title.) A reason I learn so much better from books than from, say, Wikipedia, is that a well-written book will always manage to draw out connections and narratives that lodge into my brain far better than rote facts ever will. So while I vaguely knew about many events in the book's latter half before, they all seem to "fit" better in my head now, and I'm thankful for that.
Finally, I appreciate Bevins's honesty with the reader, in terms of, where and how he got his evidence (the book is well and heavily cited, and I followed a lot of those links), and how he conducted his interviews, and so on. I don't get the impression he set out to write an anti-US screed, and in cases when the evidence is ambiguous or contradictory, he clearly outlines all possible interpretations. Nevertheless, the evidence, presented honestly, is damning all on its own. I kinda get the impression you could hand this book to, like, a stereotypical conservative Boomer parent, and even they may be forced to grapple a bit with some of their preconceived notions about the Cold War. It'd be an experiment to run, at least, and would be impressive if it worked!
So, yeah, this book is really good. Highly recommended if anything I mentioned here is news to you.
Bevins's aim with The Jakarta Method is straightforward: he wants to tell a history of the Cold War, not from the perspective of the US, nor from the perspective of the Soviet Union, but from the perspective of the global south: those countries that dared to try and forge their own path in the new world economy, post-decolonization. And the central set piece in his narrative is the fallout from the 30 September Movement in Indonesia (1965), when the US aided and abetted a right-wing coup, and helped to produce & disseminate propaganda for the new regime, resulting in the extrajudicial slaughter of somewhere between 500,000 and one million people.
Which, uh, sure was news to me.
I always feel a bit shy, typing up a review of a book like this, because it's bound to show how ignorant I am. My education has historically been a bit scattershot—some pockets of depth, and a bit of breadth, but a lot of gaping knowledge gaps. So admitting something like, say, "wow, I didn't realize how fucked-up the Contras were" has me preemptively wincing, because like, damn, how could I be so dumb? (Perhaps this is a side-effect of watching too many Twitter fights from afar, sigh.)
But while I know I'm quite ignorant wrt Central and South American history, what's striking about Indonesia is how ignorant a lot of people are about this mass killing, including a lot of people who are a hell of a lot more qualified and broadly knowledgeable than I am. From an interview with the author:
You were a foreign correspondent in Latin America, so I assume you had some critical awareness of US foreign policy and power. But there are a few moments in this book where you gesture to how much the process of researching the topic rattled your preconceived notions. I’m curious — what were your preconceived notions about the Cold War, and what was it that was revealed to you during the research process?The reasons for this collective historical amnesia are threefold:
I’m still really grappling with those questions myself. Before I started, I don’t think that I was underinformed, relatively speaking as an American. I had a decent sense of the legacy of the coups in Latin America, the Vietnam War, etc. I was the kind of correspondent who would always put “after the US-backed coup of 1964” in my articles about Brazil. I thought I knew my history, more or less. But I didn’t expect to find this [. . .]
1) Unlike Vietnam, not a single US soldier died in the fallout from the 30 September Movement—so there was little incentive for the US or even the broader Western press to dig deeply into what happened there, since, you know, their guys weren't dying. Also, (1b), good ole fashioned racism; reporting at the time depicted the killings as some kind of collective savage mania, ugh ugh ugh. (Special "fuck you" to the New York Times, here!)
2) Unlike other Cold War conflicts, which were often at least contests between two armed groups, the purge in Indonesia was entirely one-sided.
You see, prior to the coup, Indonesia was an honestly-pretty-successful up-and-coming multiethnic multilingual democracy. While they were happy to talk to both the US and the Soviet Union, they were quite determined to do things their own way—while "Third World" nowadays tends to refer to poor, underdeveloped countries, the term was originally coined and popularized to indicate a movement—various pan-African and pan-Asian governments resolving to develop in their own way, apart from the "first world" US or "second world" Soviets.
And within this context, the PKI (the Indonesian communist party) was having fantastic success advancing their agenda solely via democratic means. At its peak, the PKI had two million members, and was the third largest communist party in the world (behind the USSR and China). They had a deft, popular, progressive president in Sukarno, who, while not himself a communist, was broadly supported by a coalition of leftist groups, and it seemed clear the PKI would continue to enjoy significant electoral success in the future.
So, like, the PKI did not have guns. They did not even have the type of infrastructure that would allow them to obtain guns, if they had wanted them. (They did not collaborate with the Soviet communist party in any materially significant way.) In a different world, this would make them broadly admirable and committed to their ideals. But in this world... it set them up to be slaughtered.
Turns out, after you murder the shit out of a few hundred thousand people whose only "crime" was "sometimes voting for the party that liked unions," people will stop admitting they were ever involved with the PKI in any way whatsoever. And if they won't do that, it's hard for anyone to write the history about what happened to them.
3) The right-wing dictator ruled for another thirty-one years, which is plenty of time for an authoritarian government to endlessly repeat lies about heroically thwarting the evil communists, produce an annual TV special depicting said distorted version of events, socially shun any remaining suspected communists among the populace... Thus, even in Indonesia, many citizens only know this "official" version of events, or else are too traumatized to say much to contradict it. (There's a gut-wrenching bit where Bevin talks to a survivor of the purge, who's lived in basically the same Hindu temple his whole life. The survivor remembers when the beach next to the temple was covered in skulls, from how many people were killed there. That beach is now a resort. Bevins asks the staff at the resort if they knew this place was once a killing field; all of them act confused, say they've never heard of such a thing, why would the beach have ever been piled up with skulls? It's unclear whether they actually have no idea, or if they're just lying in understandable self-defense—probably a mixture of both—but either way, it's chilling.)
You might suspect this all makes for grim reading, and you'd be right. The chapter covering the months directly after the 30 September Movement, in particular, is devastating. It's almost clinical in its presentation: all it does is present various excerpts of memos between US officials describing the "revolution" and how well it's going and hello army can I provide you with anything you need, would you like a list of communists to kill... and alternates those memos with the stories of what was happening to the victims, the who-what-when-where of these same events. Turns out that clinical presentation is enough; no extra embellishment is needed. I'm really, really not a very emotional person, as a rule, but I did have to put the book down and cry while reading that chapter.
Still, I'm glad I read it. Obviously.
Also, I very much appreciated just how much Cold War history the author is able to tie together, in a coherent and engaging fashion, in such a tight space (just 250 pages!). Bevins clearly shows how the Indonesian coup has reverberations throughout the rest of southeast Asia, and throughout Latin America, for the next several decades, with the events in Jakarta often serving as a "blueprint" for US policy. (Hence the book's title.) A reason I learn so much better from books than from, say, Wikipedia, is that a well-written book will always manage to draw out connections and narratives that lodge into my brain far better than rote facts ever will. So while I vaguely knew about many events in the book's latter half before, they all seem to "fit" better in my head now, and I'm thankful for that.
Finally, I appreciate Bevins's honesty with the reader, in terms of, where and how he got his evidence (the book is well and heavily cited, and I followed a lot of those links), and how he conducted his interviews, and so on. I don't get the impression he set out to write an anti-US screed, and in cases when the evidence is ambiguous or contradictory, he clearly outlines all possible interpretations. Nevertheless, the evidence, presented honestly, is damning all on its own. I kinda get the impression you could hand this book to, like, a stereotypical conservative Boomer parent, and even they may be forced to grapple a bit with some of their preconceived notions about the Cold War. It'd be an experiment to run, at least, and would be impressive if it worked!
So, yeah, this book is really good. Highly recommended if anything I mentioned here is news to you.
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Date: 2021-05-18 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-05-18 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-19 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-20 05:55 pm (UTC)d'aww, thank you!