In the pantheon of national self-delusions, none persists with such magnificent arrogance as America’s conviction of its own benevolence. Vincent Bevins’ “The Jakarta Method” serves as a forensic examination of this psychosis — documenting with clinical precision how the United States orchestrated the slaughter of roughly one million Indonesians in 1965–66, not as an unfortunate aberration but as the deliberate implementation of imperial policy. The book peels back the propaganda to reveal the true face of American hegemony: a coldly calculated campaign of extermination that would make Goebbels blush with professional admiration.
The sheer scale of the Indonesian massacre staggers the imagination. Entire villages liquidated, rivers choked with corpses, detention camps overflowing with those whose political affiliations earned them the death sentence. All with the explicit blessing, tactical support, and gleeful congratulations of officials in Washington who supplied kill lists and later boasted of their “decisive victory.” The American ambassador, Marshall Green, described the Indonesian bloodbath as “a gleam of light in Asia.” One wonders what sort of moral cataracts allow a man to perceive genocide as illumination.
What makes the Indonesian case particularly instructive is its replication across the global south. Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina — the pattern repeats with such metronomic consistency that one must abandon any notion of coincidence. The same playbook appears across continents: identify leftist movements (or even moderate reformers who threaten American corporate interests), train right-wing death squads through the School of the Americas, provide intelligence support for the “disappearing” of opposition figures, and install compliant regimes who will maintain the proper investment climate. All while prattling endlessly about freedom and democracy like a sociopath reciting wedding vows.
To comprehend the Jakarta Method is to understand that Cold War body counts were never about ideology but about property. The elimination of suspected communists was merely the blood sacrifice required at the altar of unfettered capitalism. The United States didn’t merely tolerate these massacres — it encouraged, facilitated, and celebrated them. As the CIA’s own documents revealed years later, American officials provided the Indonesian military with detailed lists of Communist Party members to be eliminated. “They probably killed a lot of people,” a senior CIA official later acknowledged, “and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands.”
“The chief business of America is business.” — Calvin Coolidge, whose utterance reveals more truth about American foreign policy than all State Department press releases combined.
The parallels with Nazi Germany are not as strained as America’s court historians would have us believe. Both regimes justified their atrocities through ideological purification — the Nazis targeting “Judeo-Bolshevism,” America eliminating “Communist subversion.” Both employed euphemism to disguise industrial-scale killing. Both convinced themselves of a moral superiority that somehow sanctified their crimes. The primary distinction lies in the Nazi’s comparative honesty about their objectives and America’s pathological need to drape mass murder in the language of liberation.
When placed alongside the toll of the Nazi regime, America’s imperial body count holds its own with grotesque distinction. The Indonesian massacres alone claimed up to a million lives. Add the victims of America’s interventions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ledger runs deep into the millions. The Nazis compressed their killing into an industrialized frenzy; America has preferred the slow drip of decades-long counterinsurgency, sanctions, and proxy wars — a more sustainable business model for empire.
Bevins documents how American officials referred to Indonesia as the “model” to be replicated elsewhere — a template for extermination that would be exported throughout Latin America. In Brazil, Operation Condor would claim thousands more lives. In Chile, September 11th meant something entirely different long before 2001 — the day when American-backed forces overthrew Salvador Allende and inaugurated Pinochet’s reign of terror. The corpses multiplied, but the architects in Washington remained the same, moving between government positions and corporate boardrooms with frictionless ease.
What distinguishes “The Jakarta Method” from standard leftist critiques is its meticulous documentation of how these massacres were not regrettable excesses but the deliberately engineered outcomes of policy. The book confirms what George Kennan, architect of American containment policy, admitted in Policy Planning Study 23 from 1948: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” The maintenance of disparity required rivers of blood.
“I spent years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.” — Major General Smedley Butler, who grasped the essence of American foreign policy with unusual clarity.
The capitalism that demanded these sacrifices has exacted a toll that dwarfs even the most ambitious state-directed killing programs. Mike Davis’s “Late Victorian Holocausts” meticulously documents how capitalist market forces and imperial policies combined to kill between 30–60 million people in famines across India, China, and Brazil in the late 19th century. These were not “natural disasters” but the predictable outcome of forcing export-oriented cash crops onto subsistence economies while dismantling traditional famine protection systems in service to laissez-faire dogma.
The sheer creativity of capitalism’s death-dealing demands a certain perverse admiration. Unlike the unimaginative bullet-to-the-head approach of traditional tyrannies, market imperialism kills through structural adjustment programs, through privatization of water systems, through intellectual property regimes that price life-saving medications beyond reach, through “climate solutions” that somehow always prioritize bondholders over the drowning. The victims are no less dead, but the culpable parties can sleep soundly, telling themselves comforting bedtime stories about invisible hands.
What makes the American case particularly nauseating is the simpering righteousness that accompanies its crimes. At least the Nazis didn’t insult their victims with claims of humanitarian concern. When the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, they didn’t announce they were bringing democracy. When America backed Suharto’s butchers in Indonesia, it was packaged as “saving Asia from communism.” When it armed death squads in El Salvador, it was “promoting stability.” The consistent psychological operation has been convincing Americans that their nation’s atrocities constitute a form of global philanthropy.
The ledger of communist regimes’ crimes has been calculated with forensic precision — entire libraries filled with documentation of Stalin’s purges and Mao’s famines — while America’s imperial body count remains curiously unexamined in mainstream discourse. Historian John Coatsworth estimates that from 1960 to 1990, the governments the United States helped install and support in Latin America killed far more of their own citizens than the Soviet Union killed during the entire Cold War. This inconvenient arithmetic contradicts the central mythology of American exceptionalism.
“The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” — Simon Bolivar, whose prophecy has proven tragically accurate across two centuries.
What Bevins’ account makes painfully clear is that there was nothing accidental about these outcomes. The men who designed these policies understood precisely what they were doing. When Henry Kissinger declared, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” before green-lighting support for the Chilean coup, he was expressing the fundamental contempt for democracy that has always animated American foreign policy. The people are “irresponsible” when they vote for policies that threaten American investments.
The Jakarta Method reveals that the true genius of American imperialism lies in its plausible deniability. By working through proxies, by ensuring that local actors pull the triggers and wield the machetes, the United States maintains both effectiveness and innocence. Indonesian hands were bloodied while American hands remained theoretically clean, signing the checks from a comfortable distance. This outsourcing of brutality allows for the maintenance of America’s cherished self-image while the corpses pile up offshore.
Perhaps most disturbing is how these mass killings were celebrated within policy circles as examples of successful strategy. Robert Martens, a member of the U.S. Embassy’s political section in Jakarta who had helped compile the lists of Communist Party cadres, later said: “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.” This casual evaluation of mass murder as “not all bad” reveals the moral calculus of empire — Indonesian lives weighed against American interests and found wanting.
The psychological operations continue within America itself. Citizens are encouraged to regard the Pentagon as a force for global stability rather than what history clearly reveals it to be: the enforcement arm of an economic system that requires regular blood sacrifices to sustain itself. What “The Jakarta Method” ultimately exposes is that American foreign policy is not a series of mistakes or overreactions but the functional application of imperial power in service to capital — a system working precisely as designed.
The true achievement of American propaganda has been convincing its citizens that their nation’s global dominance represents the natural order rather than an actively enforced hierarchy maintained through structural violence and periodic mass killings. Bevins’ account of the Indonesian massacre and its replication across the global south shatters this comforting delusion. The Jakarta Method was not an aberration but the blueprint — the standard operating procedure of an empire that speaks of freedom while dealing in death.
“I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” — Martin Luther King Jr., whose critique of American militarism and capitalism earned him the enmity of the same agencies that orchestrated overseas massacres.
The most damning aspect of “The Jakarta Method” is what it reveals about the continuous present. The same institutions that orchestrated these Cold War atrocities remain the architects of American foreign policy today. The same economic imperatives drive intervention. The same language of liberation disguises the same objectives of domination. Only the enemies change — from communists to terrorists to autocrats — while the imperial project continues uninterrupted, leaving shattered societies and mass graves as its monuments.
For those who find such an assessment too harsh, I can only recommend they ask the ghosts of Indonesia, of Chile, of Guatemala, of Iraq. America’s self-anointed role as global liberator looks rather different from the perspective of those buried in unmarked graves, those disappeared in the night, those whose democratically elected governments were overthrown to make the world safe for United Fruit Company or Standard Oil or whatever corporate interest required their sacrifice. The Jakarta Method stands as testimony to their systematic elimination — and to the empire that orchestrated it while congratulating itself on its benevolence.