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Radio War Nerd EP #230 — Indonesia Holocaust & American Anticommunist Terror, with Vincent Bevins (Patreon)

Published:
2020-05-19 04:26:24
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Vincent Bevins, journalist & author 

Recorded: May 15, 2020

The 1965 anticommunist holocaust in Indonesia killed somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million, though we don't know the actual figure, for reasons we discuss—and it was fully supported by the US Embassy and Washington. Why do we know so little about this seminal Cold War slaughter in the world's 4th most populous country, a massacre that became the model for US-backed anticommunist terror campaigns around the developing world? We talked to journalist Vincent Bevins about his new book "The Jakarta Method"—an amazing, dark, must-read work.

*Map of Indonesia

*JFK and Sukarno

*Time cover, 1966, just as Suharto presided over 1 million murders & 1 million in concentration camps

*Clinton & Suharto, 1997

Buy Vincent Bevins' book The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade & The Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World. Follow Vincent on Twitter.

Total time: 2:18:55

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

ploob

Hey Vincent do you still have the CIA's phone number? Thanks

AG

Looking forward to this.

xnfec

Great stuff! In the beginning, Vincent mentions how the Javanese often merged imported doctrines with local customs. This is common throughout Sout East Asia. In the introduction to his book, A History of South East Asia, Arthur Cotterell recounts that the first elected president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yuhoyono said that "the 'revolving clouds' sent against him by an ill-disposed sorcerer proved to be a greater challenge than the Acehnese tsunami" Doubtless the book has its faults, but if you know nothing of the region and its history, it is a good place to start. The introduction alone is worth it.

Avery

I enjoyed this podcast more than Bevins' book, which is rather poorly written. One thing that Bevins gets wrong in both the book and this podcast is this idea that white guys from the CIA injected the idea of a "state within in a state" into the naive, uncultured minds of the Indonesian army (mentioned here at 1:23:00). Bevins repeats this rather embarrassing claim several times in his book but never discusses it in detail. The Indonesian army was developing "state within a state" capabilities even during the independence war and they understood the Machiavellian possibilities of how this power could be used long before the CIA "taught" it to them. See David Jenkins’ article “One Reasonably Capable Man: Soeharto’s Early Fundraising” in the 2010 academic book "Soeharto's New Order and Its Legacy" (available freely online). It is unfortunate that Mark ends the interview at 1:51:00 saying that Suharto was a "number two kind of guy" and "nothing signaled" his capability for a coup, because he is precisely the person who came up with the "state in a state" method in the 1940s. He was simply good at keeping quiet about it because he read the domestic and foreign situations well.

Benjamin Cheney

I’ve been waiting for an episode on this topic, which must never be forgotten

Avery

[deleted an exchange with the interviewee, we've agreed to communicate privately]

julio

Mark wasnt sure what to call it at the beginning since the UN Genocide Convention doesnt include the killing of political groups. Worth pointing out that, originally, Raphael Lemkin intended to include this kind of killing as genocide, but he couldn't get the convention ratified if the category was included. Member states worried they'd be accused of genocide retroactively, if it was, and they didn't want their "right to suppress internal disturbances" to be limited by the Convention.

Ellen Harold

Origin of “disappearance “? Wikipedia: “Nacht und Nebel”ˈa directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in World War II to be imprisoned or killed, while the family and the population remained uncertain as to the fate or whereabouts of the Nazi state's alleged offender. Victims who disappeared in these Night and Fog actions were never heard from again. (Phrase supposedly taken from remark by Goethe that evil deeds take place under cover of night.) 1944 Nazi massacre of civilians at Ardeatine Caves in Rome a famous example.

Mark Ames

A lot of US counterinsurgency strategy comes directly from Nazi experience, they didn't even hide it in their manuals from the 50s.

Annibale

This is true - and interestingly, German counterinsurgency strategy was mostly a mixture of "violent improvisation" and crude ideology, and was spectacularly ineffective except in limited spaces when they could use overwhelming military force (i.e. Warsaw). Italy's a textbook example for this: after Sept. 8th 1943 and the invasion of Italy by the Wehrmacht, the initial number of "rebels" was as low as 200 people in small groups dispersed over the mountains. Eight months later, despite using 9 divisions (plus thousands of RSI puppet troops) for counterinsurgency duty, the number had swollen to 100.000 and the German command had to admit they had mostly lost control of the western Alps. So the US was not precisely copying from the first of the class...

Vincent Bevins

This is in the book - not in the podcast - but the paramilitary wing of the Islamic Nahdlatul Ulama (which carried out a lot of the killings) was named "Banser" to sound like "Panzer" and its leader said he had been reading Mein Kampf as a guide to "dealing with communists." So in Indonesia 1964-65 they were looking to Nazi Germany as well.

Vincent Bevins

This is an ongoing debate and I never really take a position. Jess Melvin, in her groundbreaking recent book, puts forward the best case for calling it a "genocide." But for me that often kind of seems like a way to get it slotted in the right academic categories, or under the scope of the right international treaties, etc. Purely analytically I think it could go either way. The vast vast majority were killed for their political beliefs and I question why it is needed to lump that in with other types of mass murder.

Vincent Bevins

[I sent a message directly to Avery about something else but I'm including the bits here that might be interesting to everyone else]: Ha OK, so I actually agree with 60% of this. Obviously, US officials did not create the idea of a military running a country in a lab in 1958. Nor did Indonesian military officers from 1945-1958 themselves create the idea of a military running a country. Both parties had been watching what had happened out there in the world. I do think you're really overstating the extent to which Suharto was important before 1964, or the inevitability that the military would ever take that kind of power. Once someone is established as a dictator it is easy to look into the past and find what led to that particular outcome, but insider accounts in 1964-65 describe Suharto as an unremarkable man who got his ass kicked (literally) by Yani and Nasution for blatant corruption, and almost got kicked out of the Army. Parallels here with Castillo Armas, whom most of the Guatemalan military despised as a real shithead. But you obviously know a bit about competing ideologies in the TNI from 1945-1965, so you might find it interesting that I found Nasution once told Howard Jones that he would never ever lead the Army to a Latin-America style military government. That might raise parallels with René Schneider, the stubbornly constitucionalista General in Chile killed in the kidnap attempt in 1970. I discuss that in an Indonesian-language interview out yesterday: https://tirto.id/penulis-jakarta-method-anti-komunisme-fanatik-kini-berkuasa-lagi-fziz. Even State Dept officials in the early days of October didn't understand why Nasution didn't take over after he survived the raid. But in general I cut loads of in-depth analysis like that, in the attempt to make it digestible to totally lay readers. As with the decision to eschew academic language for narrative twists and turns, who knows if it was wise. I think I'm clear in the book that the whole point of the tactical shift in 1958 was about finding existing elements in the Army and cultivating them, rather than fighting them head-on, and I say that energetic US backing for negara dalam negara happened after it already started (the CIA unintentionally accelerated the process in 1958). But the whole thing is just a sentence or two in The Jakarta Method. I gathered probably enough material for 700 pages or so, but worked very hard to get it under 260. Again, who knows if it worked. But I do know you could write an entire book on negara dalam negara in the TNI pre-1958, and you could also write a whole book with what we don't know about Jan 1-Sep 30, 1965. I hope someone does both, and maybe my book will spark interest. For now I'm just exchanging notes with academics or specialists who ask, and if anybody else wants to do a really really deep dive, I can usually provide what I have, or recommend the best academic books for those who want to go much much deeper (Simpson, Roosa, Melvin, Wardaya, Wieringa, in English). Anyways thanks for listening and reading

Avery

Thank you Vincent for updating & reposting that comment, it helped me understand the international relevance that you emphasize in your book

Mark Ames

Annibale--this is one of the things that really struck me when reading about US COIN strategies taken from the Nazis: they were largely a massive failure! But as I read them, I realized failure vs success wasn't really the main issue with the US military doctrine. What mattered was anticommunism ideology to drive morale for successful COIN, and the Nazis were assumed to be the best at anticommunist ideology, if you just stripped out the antisemitism and anti-Slav racism (which of course means stripping Nazi ideology of Nazism). I couldn't help thinking as I was reading it, "Operation Paperclip in action"—no one believed in the military genius of ex Nazis like the Anglos and Americans, god knows why. Another key point they emphasized in those manuals over and over was Nazi COIN ideological insistence that any insurgency was inherently the fault of some outside power, rather than a genuine local reaction to genuine grievances--and so all COIN strategy should be based on the assumption that you have to cut off the outside power backing the insurgents. Again first thought was "But that's how we lost just about every COIN war"--but then you realize that winning and losing are more of an afterthought, what matters more than anything is the political faith or ideology that binds together the ruling class that's in charge of the COIN war (officer and political class, and the arms manufacturers and "peddlers of secondhand ideas" that feed off this faith).

Mark Ames

Far as I know no one’s gotten in trouble for calling Pol Pot’s holocaust a genocide, and without looking I’d say in the popular conscience out here it pretty much is considered genocide. The word/designation does have huge political consequences and uses.

julio

Thanks for the replies; I am currently working on a piece about structural genocide in the US, so I have been cruising through some of the literature in genocide studies. I found the interview useful in helping me to see connections between global anticommunism and the domestic liquidation of Black radicals (not the topic of my piece, but relevant to it). So I'll be purchasing the book. Regarding the concept of genocide, I think the (conveniently narrow) legal definition cant capture cases of violence that should go under that umbrella. So the legal definition should be distinguished from a broader notion. I think the reason to do that is not just to account for past cases like this without multiplying theoretical categories that always seem to fall just short of genocide ("politicide", "democide", "cultural genocide," etc) but also to identify new genocidal forms in the present. For instance, in Lemkin's earlier work, he says economic disruption intended to destroy a peoples' way of life is also an act of extermination (he hadn't coined "genocide" yet). By that definition, virtually all of neoliberal regime change strategies that are ostensibly nonviolent, e.g., the sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, are genocidal since they are directly producing death and seeking to disrupt the pre-existing social bonds and lifeways of peoples. That's important and no one talks about it, I think, in part because the language of genocide calls forth public opprobrium in a way other labels don't--and this would run against the US imperial narrative of America as progressive white hegemon.

Simon

If you want to get into the weeds about the September 30th Movement, John Roosa's Pretext for Mass Murder is excellent. He does a sober analysis on a number of the theories about what happened and does some important original research.

Vincent Bevins

Yes, his is probably the "best" theory (though it's very very from the final word) - btw he has a new book coming out next week

Simon

Just ordered your book and will have to pick up Roosa's too. Looking forward to both

Jon

Can RWN do a Hong Kong update on the next episode? Chinese national security law is being debated

Steff

Superb episode.

Smutticus

My very common understanding of 'genocide' is that the 'geno' part shares a common Greek ancestor with English words like 'gene', and 'genetic'. I don't know anything about the political history of the word, but given the etymology I would expect some kind of biological commonality amongst those killed.

Smutticus

Thank you for this excellent episode.

Jack Firman

Get well soon Gary! At least they stop for pedestrians there. They don’t stop in Central Europe until you step out onto the road and take the leap of faith.

radiowarnerd

Yeah, that would be bad in a crowded city. Most places you can just wait until no one's in range but if there's constant traffic, you may as well be looking across a fast river.

radiowarnerd

Thanks! We're proud of this episode and everybody should do what they can to promote Vincent Bevins' book.

radiowarnerd

We'll need a guest for that. Any nomination?

radiowarnerd

Thanks. I've been thinking, once you get past the different jargons, this is an ancient practice. I know from studying Sade's strange career that he was imprisoned under 'Lettre de Cachet', meaning: Taken one day, put into solitary confinement (at the behest of his embarrassed in-laws), never charged, never publicized in any way, no release date. He was effectively disappeared.

radiowarnerd

Interviews with mass killers rarely prove much. If you're looking for satanic depths or heights, they're not there. You recruit the losers and the most ordinary men in a community to do this, and I do mean men. Again, Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season is the best book on this. There's nothing there in these peoples' minds except self pity when they get caught. Don't expect anything else.

mt

I watched The Look of Silence a few years ago. What stuck was 1) the existence of this ugly piece of history 2) the laughters of the killers when they relived a killings indicating the total support of the massacre from higher up 3) the open wound in the society and that some people do feel very threatened when people ask too many questions and start to threat those asking questions 4) the tensions in the small communities after the massacre between the butchers and those whose family members were killed.

mt

All new to me at the time and why it at least made an impression.

RN

Great episode guys. In multiple episodes now there have been side references to the Soviet habit of abandoning their allies. I’m very interested in that topic but I dont have enough Soviet-centric cold war knowledge to know what yall are referring to. Does anyone know a sort of comprehensive list of these instances to prime my reading? -clueless millennial

Aditya V

Great episode! Whoever created the deadly cockamamie story about Devil worship and used it to target the communist would have known about Indonesian psyche and culture. It has the fingerprints of the folks who did the vampire story in the Philippines

Aditya V

Will be buying the book.

Aditya V

Indira Gandhi was supposedly paranoid about possible CIA activities in India when her rule started becoming unpopular during the 70s world economic crisis. The paranoia if it was real is understandable when you see what happened in Indonesia.

Michael lefsky

Another excellent interview-although to quote Mark "Ah shit...". Now that you have both decamped from NYC to Rochester and Portland, I have the courage to ask you something that has been bothering me for some time. Say it becomes time to decamp from the United States for political or economic reasons. You're not rich (i.e. you can't live off your investment income indefinitely) but you have some funds. You don't have any other citizenship but US. Where do you go and (just as importantly) why? What is the signal that it is time to go? Any insight from history? Any place likely to be stable when (i have shown my bias) the shit hits the fan here?

Winterborn

Best episode in a while and that's not a knock on your recent work - this was just really great.

Jon

Or someone from Lausan Collective

Andy

Hope you can at least enjoy Rochester for a little bit while you're here, Mark.

Mark Ames

It's a good question. I have 2 very young kids, so our options are extremely limited. If I didn't have kids I'd be out of here. One thing I learned—and this will seem laughably obvious to everyone but me—is that you HAVE to have a car if you have kids and a respiratory pandemic comes round your dense, disastrously-governed neighborhood. I haven't owned a car in 20 years and I ain't making that mistake again if I can afford it.

Mark Ames

Let me know when you finish this, it sounds really interesting.

Michael lefsky

I find the caveat about your kids to be interesting. Do you think this country is likely to have reasonable opportunities for your kids in 15 or 20 years relative to, for instance, Canada or the Netherlands? Would you be willing to bet that the climate in Calgary will be better or worse than the climate in NYC?

Mark Ames

No, it's clearly going downhill hard here. But I can't take a family of 4--with two very young kids, and all the special problems that go along with that--to Canada or the Netherlands and country-hop around due to visa limitations. How would they do school? What services would they get, unless we got citizenship? How would we get citizenship? Here at least I understand the system, dysfunctional as it is, and have a sense of where it's more doable and less doable.

Michael lefsky

I'll quote you again- "Ah shit". I was hoping it was my ignorance that kept me from seeing a solution to this problem. Apparently not.

xnfec

Sukarno had a Japanese wife, calledd Dewi. she used to be a bit of a socialite into the 70's as I recall. She is still around and apparently glassed someone in the 90's in Aspen.

Mark Ames

Honestly we really like it here a lot, the more time we're here.

Mark Ames

We're scheduled to interview Piero Gleijese tomorrow about his excellent book "Visions Of Freedom" about the Cold War battlegrounds in southern Africa. It's just one of many such battleground examples, but the differences between the Soviets and the Cubans are legion.

Avery

I actually met her in 2016 and that story sounds about right to me

Summerfoolboat

One of the most chilling details to me was the CIA handing lists of communists to the butchers. Knowing tech and intelligence's connections it wouldn't be too tricky to find the "Reds" nowadays. Posting this the day the president tweets about sending the military to Mn to shoot looters.

online Leftist Archive Project (LARP)

Just read this book after hearing the interview on RWN, it was definitely worth the purchase for sure. Really puts the events of 1965 in Indonesia into global context, for instance you see what a huge impact on Latin American politics this had.

radiowarnerd

Thanks! A lot of the book was new to me as well.