The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade And The Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

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

Product Description NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2020 BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQ The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States. In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War. Review "Trenchant....powerful....[Bevins] translates the findings of complex scholarly accounts into smooth and readable, if often heartbreaking, prose." -Boston Review "Excellent...anchors itself in a history most Americans never learned or would rather forget." -Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post "Bevins is not the first to note that the Cold War frequently burned hot in the Third World, but he excels at showing the human costs of that epic ideological struggle." -The New Republic "Riveting....As a polemic, The Jakarta Method is never anything less than conscientious and persuasive, but Bevins's book truly takes flight as a work of narrative journalism, tracing the history of America's violent meddling in Southeast Asia and Latin America through the stories of those it brutalized." -Jacobin "One of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of [the CIA] and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world." -Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept "Essential and devastating."-Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence "This, for my money, may be the must-read book about the Cold War. There have been quite a few, but this one is current, it's sweeping, and it's an absolute must-read, if you're only going to read one book to think about what that -maybe the most eventful period in human history - was all about....You cannot dismiss this book." -Robert Scheer, KCRW "This is an indispensable book for all those interested in the Third World during the era of the Cold War, and in the links between various operations of 'the Anti-Communist International', a subject whose importance will I think only increase. It might in effect emerge that the decisive global changes were not the ones that we currently see as such (the fall of the Berlin Wall), but rather what happened in countries like China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil." -Branko Milanovic, Brave New Europe "Well-researched, packed with information, and very well-written." -O Estado de S. Paulo (Brazil) "An exceptionally well-written narrative.... In a fascinating and disturbing journey around the world, Bevins documents the effects of Washington's virulent anticommunist crusade across several continents." -Tribune (UK) "Through this transnational perspective, Bevins finds connections between unexpected locations.... [He] takes a broader approach, situating the violence within the global context of the Cold War, but the story he tells is still grounded in deep on-the-ground investigation and extraordinary personal narratives." -North American Congress on Latin America "Bevins wrote The Jakarta Method to show how this recent but largely ignored part of our history very mu