How we got like that
Oct. 2nd, 2023 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAs part of my project to slowly re-integrate into chapter life by doing reading groups, I joined the reading group for Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. As you can probably tell from the subtitle, this is not a lighthearted or uplifting book.
If you are involved in the U.S. left you are probably at least somewhat aware that the U.S. has done a lot of coups; the ones that I see discussed (or at least posted about) the most tend to be Chile and Iran, and I was aware that there were several more–in the dozens–but I didn’t know anything about any of them in particular. I knew some of them had to do with bananas, and I knew some of them had to do with oil reserves. I remember when Elliot Abrams resurfaced in public life and there was a big controversy about whether it was somehow Going Too Far or whatever to say that he shouldn’t be allowed to show his face in respectable society ever again given that his prior claim to fame was running PR for death squads in El Salvador. But what information I had about the CIA’s bad behavior for the rest of the 20th century after World War II ended was all in bits and pieces; I’d never really sat down and read a whole book about it before.
Well, I have now been enlightened, and as is generally the case upon digesting a large load of political enlightenment on the left, I feel punchy and awful and distracted. Everything around me feels very dumb and I want to go pick a fight with someone. I’ll feel better soon when I have actual concrete, useful things to do, but for right now I feel like I’ve eaten an entire rotten watermelon and I want to puke it back up all over Henry Kissinger.
This is probably not a great way to start off this review, given that the main thing I have to say about this book is that I think everybody should read it. It’s fantastically done–incredibly engaging, information-dense, easy to read, full of both paradigm-shifting historical context and illuminating interviews with individual survivors of anticommunist massacres, which serve to humanize the effects of US policy. It addresses both the outright lies that the US public has been told, and a number of the false assumptions about the Third World that we are quietly encouraged to not examine.
A constant and infuriating thread in the U.S.’ actions is that we treat the rest of the world as if they are dumb babies, and when they do something insufficiently babyish, we are very threatened and throw a big tantrum and knock all their toys over, then immediately hide-slash-forget that we did that, and just see this other country sitting in a big mess and conclude that they probably had the tantrum themselves and this just proves that they’re dumb babies who need us to tell them what to do… and the cycle continues. These days it is fashionable among mainstream liberals to look at the various repressive, right-wing governments in Third World countries around the world and lament at the backwardness that allows such right-wing dictators to thrive, maybe the U.S. should intervene and establish a democracy? In every case, the right-wing dictatorship was brutally installed by U.S. forces after we deliberately destroyed the postwar democracies. This book barely touches on the right-wing regimes that we “humanitarianly intervened” with in my lifetime–the Taliban, who we armed in Operation Cyclone, and Saddam Hussein, who we helped take power in 1963. This is not to say that the book ignores them, just that there are too many overthrowings of democratically elected leaders, installations of military dictatorships, providing of arms and training and kill lists, and other such crimes against humanity to give them all the in-depth treatment. The countries we spend the most time reading about, and the ones that Bevins posits are the most influential, are Brazil and Indonesia.
Indonesia gets to be the title country here for several reasons, one of which is that it seems to be the least known despite possibly having the highest body count of all the mass murder programs the CIA backed in the postwar period. In the twenty years following the end of WWII, Indonesia had the largest unarmed Communist party in the world. The PKI, as it was known, did all the things people lament those stupid modern leftists don’t have the sense to do–they participated in normal parliamentary politics, stood elections, built support by carrying out their campaign promises and meeting regular people’s needs, developed a reputation for not engaging in corruption, played nicely with the other parties–including supporting the immensely popular non-Communist president, Sukarno–and otherwise were an active and well-respected political party, full of normal people who also were Marxists, doing normal politics from a Marxist perspective.
In 1965, in the weeks following the 30 September Movement, as it became known, the PKI was completely obliterated from the face of the Earth. Over the course of about half a year, the Indonesian army, trained and backed by the U.S., murdered somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesian civilians for suspected previously-entirely-legal ties to the PKI, and put another million or so in concentration camps. Targets were picked in part from kill lists that the CIA supplied to the military death squads in full knowledge of what was going on. From 1966 onward, Indonesia has been a quiet and compliant ally state of the U.S., and basically no one in the U.S. has had any reason to think about it in fifty years, unless they are planning a scenic beach vacation to the killing fields of Bali. Apparently, no one except the locals, who still sometimes find skulls and bones in the sand, have any idea that the swanky tourist resorts of Bali are built on the sites of some of the largest mass killings of the 20th century.
The Indonesian coup was so spectacularly successful that the CIA would use it as a playbook for all of its post-1965 coups in Latin America, with the added twist that right-wing forces in Chile etc. started using “Jakarta is coming” as a threat, much the way modern fash use helicopter imagery as a threat.
Anyway, if you ever wondered if maybe Martin Luther King Jr. was exaggerating a little bit when he said that the U.S. was the largest purveyor of violence in the world today (the today in question being the ‘60s), be assured that he was not. You can read all about it here. And then, as Anthony Bourdain once said, you will never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
If you are involved in the U.S. left you are probably at least somewhat aware that the U.S. has done a lot of coups; the ones that I see discussed (or at least posted about) the most tend to be Chile and Iran, and I was aware that there were several more–in the dozens–but I didn’t know anything about any of them in particular. I knew some of them had to do with bananas, and I knew some of them had to do with oil reserves. I remember when Elliot Abrams resurfaced in public life and there was a big controversy about whether it was somehow Going Too Far or whatever to say that he shouldn’t be allowed to show his face in respectable society ever again given that his prior claim to fame was running PR for death squads in El Salvador. But what information I had about the CIA’s bad behavior for the rest of the 20th century after World War II ended was all in bits and pieces; I’d never really sat down and read a whole book about it before.
Well, I have now been enlightened, and as is generally the case upon digesting a large load of political enlightenment on the left, I feel punchy and awful and distracted. Everything around me feels very dumb and I want to go pick a fight with someone. I’ll feel better soon when I have actual concrete, useful things to do, but for right now I feel like I’ve eaten an entire rotten watermelon and I want to puke it back up all over Henry Kissinger.
This is probably not a great way to start off this review, given that the main thing I have to say about this book is that I think everybody should read it. It’s fantastically done–incredibly engaging, information-dense, easy to read, full of both paradigm-shifting historical context and illuminating interviews with individual survivors of anticommunist massacres, which serve to humanize the effects of US policy. It addresses both the outright lies that the US public has been told, and a number of the false assumptions about the Third World that we are quietly encouraged to not examine.
A constant and infuriating thread in the U.S.’ actions is that we treat the rest of the world as if they are dumb babies, and when they do something insufficiently babyish, we are very threatened and throw a big tantrum and knock all their toys over, then immediately hide-slash-forget that we did that, and just see this other country sitting in a big mess and conclude that they probably had the tantrum themselves and this just proves that they’re dumb babies who need us to tell them what to do… and the cycle continues. These days it is fashionable among mainstream liberals to look at the various repressive, right-wing governments in Third World countries around the world and lament at the backwardness that allows such right-wing dictators to thrive, maybe the U.S. should intervene and establish a democracy? In every case, the right-wing dictatorship was brutally installed by U.S. forces after we deliberately destroyed the postwar democracies. This book barely touches on the right-wing regimes that we “humanitarianly intervened” with in my lifetime–the Taliban, who we armed in Operation Cyclone, and Saddam Hussein, who we helped take power in 1963. This is not to say that the book ignores them, just that there are too many overthrowings of democratically elected leaders, installations of military dictatorships, providing of arms and training and kill lists, and other such crimes against humanity to give them all the in-depth treatment. The countries we spend the most time reading about, and the ones that Bevins posits are the most influential, are Brazil and Indonesia.
Indonesia gets to be the title country here for several reasons, one of which is that it seems to be the least known despite possibly having the highest body count of all the mass murder programs the CIA backed in the postwar period. In the twenty years following the end of WWII, Indonesia had the largest unarmed Communist party in the world. The PKI, as it was known, did all the things people lament those stupid modern leftists don’t have the sense to do–they participated in normal parliamentary politics, stood elections, built support by carrying out their campaign promises and meeting regular people’s needs, developed a reputation for not engaging in corruption, played nicely with the other parties–including supporting the immensely popular non-Communist president, Sukarno–and otherwise were an active and well-respected political party, full of normal people who also were Marxists, doing normal politics from a Marxist perspective.
In 1965, in the weeks following the 30 September Movement, as it became known, the PKI was completely obliterated from the face of the Earth. Over the course of about half a year, the Indonesian army, trained and backed by the U.S., murdered somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesian civilians for suspected previously-entirely-legal ties to the PKI, and put another million or so in concentration camps. Targets were picked in part from kill lists that the CIA supplied to the military death squads in full knowledge of what was going on. From 1966 onward, Indonesia has been a quiet and compliant ally state of the U.S., and basically no one in the U.S. has had any reason to think about it in fifty years, unless they are planning a scenic beach vacation to the killing fields of Bali. Apparently, no one except the locals, who still sometimes find skulls and bones in the sand, have any idea that the swanky tourist resorts of Bali are built on the sites of some of the largest mass killings of the 20th century.
The Indonesian coup was so spectacularly successful that the CIA would use it as a playbook for all of its post-1965 coups in Latin America, with the added twist that right-wing forces in Chile etc. started using “Jakarta is coming” as a threat, much the way modern fash use helicopter imagery as a threat.
Anyway, if you ever wondered if maybe Martin Luther King Jr. was exaggerating a little bit when he said that the U.S. was the largest purveyor of violence in the world today (the today in question being the ‘60s), be assured that he was not. You can read all about it here. And then, as Anthony Bourdain once said, you will never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.