On this week’s episode of Yeah Nah, we talk to Vincent Bevins [Twitter]. Vincent is a journalist and the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (PublicAffairs, 2020).
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.
See also : The True Story of Indonesia’s US-Backed Anti-Communist Bloodbath, Michael G. Vann, Jacobin, January 23, 2021 | Book Review: The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevin, Thomas Kingston, LSE Book Review, July 29, 2020 | Enduring Cold War Imperialism: On Vincent Bevins’s “The Jakarta Method”, Leo Schwartz, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 25, 2020 | The Jakarta Method Comes to Latin America (Review), Philip Luke Johnson, NACLA, May 27, 2020 | Island Off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy, Clinton Fernandes, Monash University Publishing, 2018 | The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, South End Press, 1979.
4.30pm, Thursday, February 25, 2021 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
NB. The podcast version of the episode contains a longer discussion with Vincent.
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