Trusting peasants and factory workers turn themselves in for what they think is routine questioning and are never heard from again. The police and military arrest leftists and their sympathizers en masse. The mass murder starts on October 7 on Sumatra with a fanatical anticommunist commander named Ishak Djuarsa who trained at Fort Leavenworth. The two-million strong (but fatefully unarmed) Indonesian communist party, the PKI, had to be exterminated “down to the roots.” After years of cultivating and training the Indonesian military the US decided it was time for the Indonesian working class to put away childish things like land reform and resource nationalization. While the Vietnam War got most of the headlines, in Indonesia, the world’s third largest communist party was winning hearts, minds and elections - much to the alarm of the United States. The book is a summation of the US government assisting the Indonesian military in killing approximately one million civilians from October 1965 through March 1966.

It was said to be the largest conference of coloured peoples across the world in 1955 and it challenged the status quo set by the twin polar opposite forces of Soviet communism and American capitalism.Prepare to read Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down.

The PKI had three million card-carrying members and, according to Bevins, had support from a quarter of the rising nascent nation, which had made itself a starlet of the post-colonial world hosting the world-renowned Bandung conference. Indonesia had the largest communist party (PKI) in the non-communist world after its ruling Russian and Chinese counterparts. Nasakom comprised Islam, communism, and nationalism. Indonesia at that time consisted of a mix of communists, nationalists, and Islamists led by the charismatic Sukarno who coined his political philosophy as NASAKOM. The Jakarta Method, as its namesake suggests, starts in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country and the leader of the Third World movement-a movement that looked to neither the US nor the Soviet Union to design its own socio-economic philosophy.

The jakarta method vincent bevins