The terror that came with the cold – Weekend

The Alpina Non-Fiction Publishing House published a book by the American journalist Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method, a documentary geopolitical thriller that forces us to reconsider the familiar picture of the Cold War.

Text: Igor Gulin

Throughout the 2010s, Vincent Bevins worked as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Brazil and The Washington Post in Indonesia. Traveling through South America and East Asia, he discovered a huge layer of Third World history – a layer not entirely unknown to people of Western culture, but present deep on the periphery of their political consciousness.

The very concept of the “third world” is important here. We are used to hearing it in a somewhat pejorative context: underdeveloped countries, global province. In the 1950s, when the term first appeared, it was almost the other way around. For young politicians and theorists of Asia, Africa and South America, the united “third world” meant the idea of ​​the future – the possibility of full self-government and entry into the great history for the former European colonies, exit from the sphere of influence of both the “first”, capitalist, and “second”, socialist worlds. Many of its ideologists were moderate socialists, others were moderate nationalists; one did not exclude the other. The birth point of this movement was the Bandung Conference, held in 1955 on the island of Java in Indonesia. In the next three decades, the movement was essentially destroyed – and the United States of America played a major role in its destruction.

The most significant episode here was, as the title of the book suggests, the 1965 Indonesian massacre. In the 1950s and 1960s, the former Dutch colony under President Sukarno became a major player in world politics, the leader of the “non-aligned movement” – that is, non-participation in the Cold War on either side. Sukarno maneuvered deftly between the right and the left and sometimes carried out moderate social reforms (in particular, trying to limit the influence of the American oil companies that came to the archipelago after the Dutch left). The Communists, however, represented a rather tangible force in the country: the Indonesian Communist Party was the third largest in the world (after the Soviet and Chinese). The balance held until the mid-1960s, until the crisis broke out. It began with the moderate left “September 30 Movement” capturing several generals who were allegedly plotting a right-wing coup. For reasons that are not entirely clear, all the hostages were killed, and the hands of the rightists were untied. The previously little-known adventurer General Suharto took power. He accused the communists of all possible crimes, conspiracies, sexual debauchery and even witchcraft. In the next two years, Indonesia became the site of the bloodiest massacres in the second half of the 20th century. About a million people were killed on charges of having links with the communists, countless were subjected to torture, sexual violence, and imprisonment in concentration camps.

This story is more or less known – in particular, thanks to Joshua Oppenheimer’s wonderful documentary “Act of Murder”, but in recent years a number of documents have been declassified, from which it follows that America not only silently looked at the Indonesian terror, but also accepted it active participation, supplying the pogromists with weapons and lists of communists. Indonesia was for American intelligence agencies, military and diplomats a grand victory over the global red threat. It is noteworthy that this massacre was not a bloody excess, but rather a model that was actively used in the following decades.

That’s what Bevins’ book is about: how the “Jakarta Method”—organized massacres of real and alleged communists, politicians, journalists, activists, members of small ethnic groups, and a huge number of just random people – spread around the world. the experience of Indonesian colleagues was applied in South America. On the eve of the Pinochet coup, the capital of Chile, Santiago, was even filled with graffiti like “Jakarta is coming.” The book has two narrative layers. supported the seemingly leftist Pol Pot to annoy Vietnam, which the Khmer Rouge fought) and in a dozen other countries. Here Bevins works as a journalist: meets with survivors, collects scary and sometimes touching stories. The second layer is American politics. Here Bevins performs rather, the role of a historian.There are many blank spots in this history, but there is enough information available to understand that world right-wing terror was in many ways a project of the United States. Of course, right-wing groups existed everywhere, but without the active help of American intelligence agencies and corporations, they were a rather marginal force. By the end of the 1970s, they essentially took over the third world and doomed it to a status dependent on the West, destroying the post-World War II anti-colonial movement.

The view of the Cold War from the West and the view from the former socialist bloc are not so different from each other. We are accustomed to seeing in it a confrontation between two superpowers, the main content of which is an ideological struggle and a technological race; there were, of course, crises like the Caribbean, but there was little real violence. In fact, the Cold War was not so cold after all – it was just that blood was not shed where the gaze of a person of European culture was directed. In addition, the victory of the capitalist bloc in it was due not only to the turmoil of Soviet policy. We know much more about the failures of American expansion in the Third World—like Vietnam—than about its successes. Meanwhile, it is they, Bevins shows, that largely determine the global world in which we live.

Vincent Bevins. The Jakarta Method: US Anti-Communist Terror That Changed the World. Publishing house “Alpina non-fiction”. Translation: Natalia Kolpakova

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