Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London. Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, Folha de S.Paulo, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, The Awl, The Baffler, and New York magazine. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Jakarta.
"The Jakarta Method dismantles and re-positions the American
mythos, similar to two recent Pulitzer Prize winners: Nikole
Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project and Greg Grandin's The End of the
Myth.... The Jakarta Method is a devastating critique of US
hypocrisy during the Cold War, and a mournful hypothetical of what
the world might have looked like if Third World movements had
succeeded."
--Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Jakarta Method is a gripping, thoroughly original exploration
into the global covert Cold War, the passions it provoked, and the
corpses it left in its wake. A full tally of the body count of the
transnational counterinsurgency Washington has been waging since
the early 1960s is impossible. But Bevins' excellent book offers a
different kind of reckoning, of moral costs and ongoing political
consequences. 'Jakarta is coming' was spray-painted on the walls of
Santiago Chile in 1972, just before that country's CIA-backed coup,
a way for that nation's rich to let the poor know the fate that
would befall them were they to continue to fight for a more just
society. 'Jakarta' did come, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead
throughout Latin America. And, in a way, it never left."--Greg
Grandin, Yale University, author of Fordlandia and The End of the
Myth
"The Jakarta Method is a must-read to better understand how the
U.S. intelligence apparatus became what it is today, and how it's
ravaged so many other countries along the way."
--GQ
"[The Jakarta Method] sheds a welcome light on the crimes that took
place in Indonesia, a history largely forgotten in the West...but
it also asks the fundamental question of why America aided such
atrocities... Bevins persuasively argues for his country's blanket
anticommunism as a kind of zealotry, an irrational pull with
origins in the foundation of the United States."
--Times Literary Supplement
"A shocking portrait that few readers will forget....[Bevins's]
research is solid and his conclusions convincing. A well-delineated
excavation of yet another dark corner of American history."--Kirkus
Reviews
"An exceptionally well-written narrative.... In a fascinating and
disturbing journey around the world, Bevins documents the effects
of Washington's virulent anticommunist crusade across several
continents."
--Tribune (UK)
"Bevins gives a concise account of how US-supported carnage in
Indonesia inspired other countries to unleash their own murderous
suppression of left-wing movements. By focusing on Indonesia and
nations not aligned with either the United States or the Soviet
Union, he goes beyond the typical Cold War history of arms races
and intrigue....As Bevins effectively describes, we are still
living in the world created by these anti-communist purges....[His]
account raises necessary questions. Did the anti-communist mania of
the 20th century make the world any safer? And if so, for
whom?"--Foreign Policy
"Bevins has created a powerful record of the often-muddled events
in Indonesia....The Jakarta Method offers an easily digestible
chronology of this bloody period of Indonesian and world
history."
--South China Morning Post
"Bevins has deftly chronicled the genocide of Indonesian communists
in 1965.... a brilliant history of the Cold War told through global
anti-communist violence."
--New Statesman
"Bevins is less interested in long descriptions of torture and
death and more in understanding the geopolitics that lie behind
them. The great originality and insight of the book is its emphasis
on the international scale...The Jakarta Method is a deft and
necessary reckoning."--Baffler Magazine
"Bevins is not the first to note that the Cold War frequently
burned hot in the Third World, but he excels at showing the human
costs of that epic ideological struggle."
--The New Republic
"Bevins is well-positioned to trace the lineage of suppression
across the world aided and abetted by the U.S., which provided
material support and intelligence, including lists of communists
and alleged communists, to client governments....Interwoven among
the politics in the books are testimonies from former communists
Bevins interviewed in several countries, which he relays with
novelistic brio."--The Irish Times
"Bevins wrote The Jakarta Method to show how this recent but
largely ignored part of our history very much informs the way we
live today. He concludes with current information about his
sources, some still fighting to simply have the truth of what
happened in their countries acknowledged, others expatriated to
places that will never completely feel like home. It can be
inspiring to hear from people willing to excavate mass graves and
bury victims with dignity, but to this day that truth is struggling
to be heard."
--Progressive Populist
"Essential and devastating."--Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The
Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
"Excellent...anchors itself in a history most Americans never
learned or would rather forget."
--Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post
"Exceptional...If Indonesia is counted as a 'win' for the
pro-regime change crowd, the idea of promoting regime change is
absolutely bankrupt and should never be employed again."--The
American Conservative
"Gripping...[Bevins]'s analysis of these events is lucid and
judicious, and his narrative is driven by effective use of
interview material."
--Asian Affairs
"In The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins argues persuasively that
during the Cold War, the U.S. approved of mass murder campaigns to
roll back communism in the Third World. This is a provocative,
necessary book, an essential guide to anyone seeking a deeper
understanding of our imperfect world. Highly recommended."--Jon Lee
Anderson, New Yorker staff writer, author of Che Guevara and Inside
the League
"One of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories
yet of [the CIA] and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than
the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world."
--Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
"Riveting....As a polemic, The Jakarta Method is never anything
less than conscientious and persuasive, but Bevins's book truly
takes flight as a work of narrative journalism, tracing the history
of America's violent meddling in Southeast Asia and Latin America
through the stories of those it brutalized."
--Jacobin
"This fascinating book is a meticulous and shocking analysis of a
little-known and horrifically bloody battle of the Cold War, but it
is also something more. It places the Indonesia massacre of 1965 in
its global context, showing how the United States both supported it
and used it as a model for repression in other countries."--Stephen
Kinzer, author of Overthrow, All the Shah's Men and Poisoner in
Chief
"This is an indispensable book for all those interested in the
Third World during the era of the Cold War, and in the links
between various operations of 'the Anti-Communist International', a
subject whose importance will I think only increase. It might in
effect emerge that the decisive global changes were not the ones
that we currently see as such (the fall of the Berlin Wall), but
rather what happened in countries like China, India, Vietnam,
Indonesia, Brazil."
--Branko Milanovic, Brave New Europe
"This, for my money, may be the must-read book about the Cold War.
There have been quite a few, but this one is current, it's
sweeping, and it's an absolute must-read, if you're only going to
read one book to think about what that -maybe the most eventful
period in human history - was all about....You cannot dismiss this
book."
--Robert Scheer, KCRW
"Through this transnational perspective, Bevins finds connections
between unexpected locations.... [He] takes a broader approach,
situating the violence within the global context of the Cold War,
but the story he tells is still grounded in deep on-the-ground
investigation and extraordinary personal narratives."
--North American Congress on Latin America
"Tragically, that which everyone believed we had left in the past
has returned to spread throughout Latin America once more. The
Jakarta Method allows us to understand the moment that Brazil is
now living through, and its connection to a much larger, global
scheme."--Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist and The
Pilgrimage
"Trenchant....powerful....[Bevins] translates the findings of
complex scholarly accounts into smooth and readable, if often
heartbreaking, prose."
--Boston Review
"Truly captivating.... Vincent Bevins offers us a compelling
historical narrative, which he combines with thorough analysis and
deeply personal reflections. He merges the big story of the Cold
War with the stories of real individuals whose lives were
profoundly affected. He masterfully connects the 1964 Brazil coup
with the mass violence that took place in Indonesia in 1965, before
connecting that slaughter with a series of mass murder programs in
Latin America and around the world. In doing so, he offers new
knowledge and insights not only into the brutal anticommunist purge
in Indonesia, but into the ways that US foreign policy reshaped the
world following the Second World War. Bevins is a brilliant and
compassionate writer, and The Jakarta Method is eye-opening. I
really hope the world pays attention to this book."
--Baskara T. Wardaya, Sanata Dharma University Indonesia, author of
1965 and Truth Will Out
"Well-researched, packed with information, and very
well-written."
--O Estado de S. Paulo (Brazil)
"The Jakarta Method is a clear and comprehensive indictment of US
interventionism since 1945...but it can be poignant, too."--The
Herald (Scotland)
"The Jakarta Method recasts the Cold War battle for the Third World
as a series of mass-killing events, carried out by the U.S. or its
proxies -- a pattern much of the world witnessed but could do
little to stop. It sounds like a grim read, and it is, but it's
also a gripping one."--Talking Points Memo (Favorite Non-Fiction
List)
"A thoroughly-researched and fiercely-unflinching reconstruction of
the events surrounding the killings of millions of Indonesians
under the US-backed dictator Suharto. Drawing from world histories,
archives, and personal interviews with survivors, Bevins charts the
historical trail, from Brazil to Indonesia, of coup d'etats,
assassinations, tortures and massacres, which served to uphold the
interests of global capitalism and created a new world order"--CNN
Philippines
"An excellent book, and I don't write that lightly. [Bevins] weaves
interviews with academic sources, backroom CIA dealings with
thwarted dreams of would-be revolutionaries, and delivers a
well-researched and tightly written work that is at times extremely
provocative, both politically and emotionally."--London School of
Economics Review of Books
"Bevins has written a well-researched history of how the American
campaign against Third World democracy shaped the geopolitics of
our world today, with echoes still felt through Brazil President
Jair Bolsonaro's virulent anti-communism; the childhood experiences
of Barack Obama's Jakarta upbringing; and the dominating
proliferation of neoliberal globalization."--Canadian Dimension
"The book's most important achievement is in explaining how
Washington's policies from more than 50 years ago shape the world
we live in today."--The News Lens (Taiwan)
"The intrepid author devoted more than a decade to work on this
impressive overview of worldwide anti-communist repression....
[Bevins] sifted through archives and consulted with historians,
giving his work a solid grounding in historical detail."--Counter
Punch
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