Written by the Victors

A Review of The Jakarta Method

Photo by mz romadhoni on Unsplash

Despite the beautiful beaches and hospitable people that define its modern image, Indonesia is marred by a series of mass killings that occurred from 1965 to 1966. Journalist Vincent Bevins, a former Washington Post correspondent in Indonesia, was uniquely equipped to surface this history and expose it to a Western audience (Bevins). In his debut book, The Jakarta Method, Bevins pieces together a largely unknown facet of history, reconstructing how the United States supported military coups and mass killings in Indonesia and beyond to protect its capital interests during the Cold War. Bevins carefully emphasizes the humanity of the victims of these atrocities, challenging Americans to confront the moral character of both the United States and capitalism.

Through his investigation, Bevins uncovered a macabre history that is barely known, even among Indonesians, due to 35 years of government-enforced silence. After achieving independence from Dutch Colonial rule in 1945, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, was determined to have Indonesia determine its future on its own terms. This meant allowing the existence of the extremely popular Communist Party of Indonesia. Inspired by a successful right-wing coup executed in Brazil, the United States groomed military officers in Indonesia to be firmly anti-communist, eventually resulting in a coup. The United States supported this coup, the subsequent mass murder of up to one million innocents, and the institution of a repressive right-wing dictatorship aligned with American capital interests. Whether through direct CIA intervention and replication of these events, copycats from far-right groups carrying out these methods on their own, or nations bending the knee preemptively out of fear of the former two outcomes, the Third World would dissolve into the modern euphemistic family of “developing nations”. Despite this massive movement across the Third World, those in the First World were left largely ignorant of these events.

The lack of general awareness of this event is emblematic of how those in the imperial core engage with history. In the introduction to the book, Bevins explicates on why most are largely ignorant of this topic:

Indonesia likely fell off the proverbial map because the events of 1965–1966 were such a complete success for Washington. No US soldiers died, and no one at home was ever in danger … I know from thirteen years working as a foreign correspondent and journalist that faraway countries that are stable and reliably pro-American do not make headlines. (Bevins 3)

Bevin’s claim in this book is a lofty one, warranting some skepticism. The idea that our government could support a genocide as part of a larger trend in foreign policy is almost unthinkable. Sure, we were involved in Vietnam, and our own soldiers committed massacres such as those in My Lai, but these are blemishes on our past that exist in isolation, right? Why am I just hearing this now? Bevins gives us the exact reason that Americans only hear about the atrocities that we cannot be stopped from knowing about. If we aren’t the ones dying and our proverbial “zone of interest” is not being interfered with, there’s no reason for the American media machine to churn out headlines that shine light upon the meat grinder.

The Jakarta Method is such an important work because it forces us to understand how we engage with history. History is not an objective science that shows things as they really are, but instead a tool that can be framed and manipulated depending on who is telling the story. Take for example how American media covered the ousting of Guatemlan president Miguel Ángel Albizures, who was by no means a communist, but threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company: “The New York Times referred to the coup plotters as ‘rebels,’ while calling the Árbenz government ‘reds’ or a ‘Communist threat,’ and saying that the US government was ‘helping’ mediate peace talks, rather than organizing the whole thing” (Bevins 51). What we do know is controlled, whether directly or indirectly, to keep us accepting of the systems at large and allow the whole machine to keep running. When we do come to know of such events as they really are, it is only decades later, when time alienates us from them, and there is nothing left to be done.

Time is not the only way in which we are alienated from the events of the world. More important than time is nationality. Bevins importantly states that no Americans were ever in danger, which largely accounts for our ignorance. The lives of our countrymen are simply valued more than those of foreigners by the majority of Americans. Whether this is an inherent part of the human psyche or socialized into us is largely irrelevant. The fact is, one million Indonesian lives being lost was not noteworthy to most of us because they were not American. Real lives were buried in history because they were condemned behind an abstraction. This is exactly what genocide is.

One might argue that what happened in Indonesia was not a genocide due to the grounds for the mass murders being largely ideological. But actually identifying as a communist was far from the only grounds for being tortured or killed during this period. Women were accused of being witches, and ethnically Chinese individuals were automatically assumed to be communists. The dynamics present were certainly those present in genocides. As philosopher Theodor Adorno states: “Genocide is the absolute integration, which is everywhere being prepared, where human beings are made the same, polished, as the military calls it, until they are literally cancelled out, as deviations from the concept of their complete nullity” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Part III). What happened in Indonesia is worse than just a single murder multiplied by one million, because genocide is inherently dehumanizing. It strips away the individual and their right to be ends in themselves by treating them as interchangeable with any other individual in their group. Indonesians were killed because they were perceived as communists, and that label gave them a subhuman status. You are not a person in your own right; you are the enemy, and you must be exterminated. In the imperial core, we don’t care because they are Indonesians, and that difference creates distance and makes us fail to see their individual humanity.

The most important thing that Bevins does in telling the history of these events is centering the humanity of the victims. He invested heavily in research for this work, scouring newly released government documents, historical texts, and interviewing Indonesians firsthand to understand exactly what had happened. One particularly heartbreaking story is that of a woman named Magdalena. Bevins introduces Magdalena as a human being with family, interests, passions, and everything that makes up the life of any individual:

Magdalena grew up in a troubled peasant family, always tossed back and forth as a result of marital strife, sickness, and poverty. Like most residents of Java (with the notable exception of the ethnic Chinese), she was Muslim, but she never got very deep into studies of the Quran. At school, she loved gamelan, the traditional Javanese music form, in which a small percussive orchestra plays meditative, meandering ensemble pieces, which can rise and fall slowly for hours. But she was pulled away from all of that fairly quickly. At thirteen, she dropped out to work as a maid in a nearby household. (Bevins 119)

Instead of recounting just the broader events in a sort of textbook-like manner, Bevins is careful to center the lives of those involved. Genocide is not just some dark, inexplicable stain on history to glance at with a grimace and move on. Genocide has victims who are real human beings. Magdalena was her own individual, but the genocide would take that away from her. Because of her status as a union member in the factory where she would come to work, she would be brought in by the military government to be subjugated and abused:

These interrogations started, and stopped, and started again, for seven days. Then the officers took her to another police station, in Semarang. As soon as she arrived, she collapsed. She was sick, or overwhelmed. She was dizzy all over. She was seventeen years old. She’s not sure how long she was at the second police station before two police officers raped her. She was Gerwani, in the minds of the police, which meant that she was not a human being, and not a woman, but a sexually depraved murderer. An enemy of Indonesia and Islam. A witch. These men were in charge of her now. (Bevins 141)

Bevins is careful not to tell the stories of these individuals en media res. He doesn’t just give the particularly hard-to-stomach excerpts such as this. By also giving us the mundane or even happy moments of these people’s lives, these dark passages actually hit us harder. Bevins forces us to actually get to know them. We meet many individuals and get insight into their ordinary lives before a drop of blood is even spilled. In doing so, he makes these events all the harder to ignore and forget. Seeing these individuals as human beings in their own right means we cannot just brush off what has been done to them.

Given that these events took place half a century ago, Bevins leaves us with many difficult emotions and no immediate outlet. The book left me with a palpable feeling of despair and hopelessness, seeing all the hope and energy of the people of the Third World turn into pain and suffering. The world suffered a great injustice, but it was before my time, and there’s no longer anything to do about it. The Cold War is over, and one can hardly see any examples of the Jakarta Method being executed today.

Even still, the United States has not changed in any major institutional ways, and modern readers must consider these past events to understand the country’s persistent true nature. In his review of this same work, Leo Schwartz highlights how the United States is not a logical and pragmatic actor, but instead driven by “ignorance and bad assumptions” (Schwartz). The United States failed to properly understand the nature of the Third World. Instead, it saw communism, or at the very least its potential, sprouting about everywhere. Those who instituted anti-communist policies saw communists as barbarians and used that perspective to justify actions that ranged from strange to horrific. While communism is no longer the threat it was, the institutions that allowed the country to wreak havoc on the globe have not been reformed in any meaningful way. To those readers who have at least a somewhat positive view of the United States’ role in the world, please reconsider. Please look at the events described in this book and dispel any idea that the United States is somehow different from the one that carried out the Jakarta Method.

As of this writing, the Trump administration has headed many ventures in interfering with foreign nations. Since his second inauguration, the country has sabered with Greenland, abducted the President of Venezuela, and invaded Iran to support Israel’s invasion efforts. One of the most indefensible acts of foreign policy is the worsening of the embargo on Cuba. While it may be a persistent remnant from the Cold War, the Trump administration has worsened the conditions for Cubans by cutting off the nation’s primary oil supplier, Venezuela. The impact is most felt by Venezuela’s healthcare system, where hospitals are now having to hand-pump ventilators for newborns (Augustin et al). Because of irrational and draconian foreign policy, innocent lives continue to suffer at the hands of the American empire. Innocent citizens of countries that dare to decide their own punishment are collectively punished, and the United States does so with impunity. While the methods employed may not be the same as in Jakarta, the outcome remains the same. Mass murder is a policy employed by the American Empire throughout its history, and this has yet to change. In an interview with an Indonesian named Winarso, Bevins asked how the United States won the Cold War. Wisnaro replied simply, “‘You killed us’” (Bevins 254).

Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001. Augustin, Ed, and Jack Nicas. “Cuban Patients Are Dying Because of U.S. Blockade, Doctors

Say.” The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2026,

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/world/americas/cubas-health-system-us-oil-blockade.html.

Bevins, Vincent. “Bio.” Vincent Bevins, 18 Nov. 2025, vincentbevins.com/bio/.

Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass

Murder Program That Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs, 2021.

Schwartz, Leo. “Enduring Cold War Imperialism: On Vincent Bevins’s ‘The Jakarta Method.’”

Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 July 2020,

lareviewofbooks.org/article/enduring-cold-war-imperialism-on-vincent-bevinss-the-jakarta-method/.