The Jakarta Method

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins is one the most haunting books I've read in recent years. It's about the Cold War-era, US-backed mass killings of suspected communists around the world. Between 500,000 and 1.2 million people were killed in Indonesia alone between 1965 and 1966.

I recently read this excerpt from the New York Review of Books to refresh my memory, but I noticed some of the more harrowing details were missing, such as the role of civilians in carrying out the massacre (brings to mind the Tulsa Massacre and similar actions in the US) and just how suddenly tangential association with a mainstream political organization became grounds for extermination. The Wikipedia article on the Indonesia mass murders is quite good if you're looking for an overview of what happened, but I've also stitched together some quotes from an electronic copy of Bevins's book [page numbers are noted in brackets] in an effort to highlight some of what stuck out to me.

Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list. [145] [...] It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered. [159] [...]

They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier. [148] [...]

Military and police took captives to special locations at night and killed them. But very often it was not the actual uniformed officers who pulled the trigger or plunged the machete into human flesh. [...] In Aceh, the military press-ganged and threatened suspicious civilians, politically suspect individuals or outcasts, into carrying out the murders. [148] [...] Locals in Central Aceh understood, they recall, that they were being instructed to help kill the communists, or be killed themselves. [142]