Chapo Trap House - Bonus: The Jakarta Method feat. Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Will and Matt talk to journalist Vincent Bevins about his new book “The Jakarta Method,” detailing the U.S.’s involvement in the mass killings of leftists in Indonesia in the 60’s, and how it set the stage for American-backed violent anti-communist action throughout the cold war. Buy The Jakarta Method: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/vincent-bevins/the-jakarta-method/9781541742406/ Follow Vincent on twitter: https://twitter.com/Vinncent Outro is Shark Move's "Evil War" off the excellent Indonesian 70's psych-rock comp "Those Shocking Shaking Days": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ZCZElkWKM&list=PL5075D7AE3D47F1BA&index=4

Hello, everybody. We are back with a bonus episode for you this week. This time, it's me and Matt joining you with a guest who has joined us. We are speaking with journalist Vincent Bevince about his newly released book, The Jakarta Method, about the Indonesian genocide in the early 1960s and the long shadow it's cast over American foreign policy and really pretty much the lives of everyone on the planet that we lead continuing into the 21st century. So, Vincent, thank you very much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks, sir. Thanks for having me. I guess, like, just like to start off with, like, because, you know, your book is kind

of about how this is like a major forgotten chapter in the history of the 20th century and the history of this country, certainly. But just to start from, like, the broadest possible perspective, what was the Indonesian genocide? When did it happen? Like, who carried it out and who did they kill and why? Yeah, so this was, as you said, very important but forgotten. I think it's probably the most important turning point in the Cold War and probably the most important victory for the side that ultimately won, which was the construction of sort of a capitalist world order. But it happened in 1965. It was the U.S. assisted execution of approximately one million innocent

people. These were mostly members of the Indonesian Communist Party, which was the largest party in the world at the time. And it was an unarmed, moderate party that had won elections for most of its existence. And this was done so that Suharto, the U.S.-backed dictator, could take over. And when he did take over, in 1965, he replaced Sukarno, who was a very important leader of the left-leaning Third World movement at the time. And then after Suharto was in there, you never hear about Indonesia again because he is a faithful U.S. ally. And despite the crimes that allowed him to take power and the horrible crimes that he continues to commit in his own country and in the region, he just kind of fades into

the memory hole for decades and decades. A big part of what you talk about is how important Indonesia was to overall Cold War strategy. And I remember reading a long time ago from Noam Chomsky, who talked about how from the perspective of U.S. state planners, America had already won the Vietnam War by 1965 because of this genocide. Could you explain that and also give us some perspective about just how big a success this genocide was from a U.S. policy perspective? Yeah, absolutely. So in the early 60s, basically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment agreed that Indonesia was far more important than Vietnam. So Indonesia is now the fourth

largest country in the world by population. Sukarno, who was this leader of this global movement to oppose the hegemonic order as it was taking shape in the first decades after World War II. Perhaps I'll just go back and explain sort of what Indonesia is. So Indonesia is 13,000 islands that used to be dominated by Dutch colonialism, right? The only thing that brought these 13,000 islands together was hundreds of years of brutal European colonialism. So in 1945, after the Japanese were kicked off these islands because they invaded during World War II when they were aligned with Nazi Germany, President Sukarno, who was this very, he's like a founding father more than a president, right? So he was a real visionary. He brought

together the different religions and ethnicities and kind of political strains on these islands to create Indonesia, right? And in the early years of the Cold War, he was seen as somebody the United States could deal with more or less. They didn't like that he was left leaning. They didn't like that he was Marxist friendly. They didn't like that he was such a strident anti-colonialist, but for a long time it was seen as okay. Like he could exist in this world order that the United States was now leading as it emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation in history. But the problem was in the 1950s, the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, which is the oldest Communist Party in Asia, they started winning

more and more elections, right? And we know now from declassified documents, the CIA and the US Embassy in Jakarta, they knew that the reason they were winning these elections is because they were the best organized and they were doing all the things that a party should do. They were going out and talking to people and convincing people they can improve their lives. So in the first part of the 50s, not only is the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, doing really well, in 1955, Sukarno organizes this hugely important meeting of the countries of Africa and Asia. It's the 1955 Bandung Conference. And as he calls it, it's the first ever meeting of the so-called color peoples in the history of the world.

And the idea is to stand up to hundreds of years of European colonialism and create a new world, so the third world in the most positive sense. You know, the first world had their try. The second world is the Soviet Union and its allied countries in Eastern Europe. And we're going to be the new unity that overthrows this order and takes their place on the world stage. And these two things really bothered Washington. Sukarno leading this third world movement, along with other leaders from India and Iraq, and that the Communist Party was just doing better and better. And so the first thing that the United States tried to do was to bribe other actors in the political scene. So they tried to give loads

of money to the right-wing Muslim Party in elections, and that just didn't work, right? So in the middle of the 50s, Indonesia goes from being, oh, it's a former colonial power, it's a post-colonial nation that we can kind of deal with to being something they're trying to solve. And then the entire sort of CIA, the young CIA apparatus kicks into force and a lot of varied and ridiculous ways in the 1950s. Oh, that reminds me. This is one thing from the book that I really wanted to talk about. And you're talking about how Sukarno became this boogeyman in Washington as a potential challenge to America's post-war hegemony, and that there were a bunch of things that

the CIA did. One of them, of course, you might talk some more about it, I don't know, was to arm and support a separatist movement within Indonesia, an armed insurgency to undermine Sukarno. But I think my favorite one is the most James L. Roy thing I've ever heard of happening in real life. And I've actually read about this before, but this is the first time I've ever encountered it anywhere else, and I wanted to talk to you about it. One of my favorite CIA plans of all time, which was to hire a Mexican guy, make him look like Sukarno with makeup, and film a porn with him that would then be released in Indonesia and undermine his credibility, I guess, was the plan.

And hire Bing Crosby to do it. Bing Crosby was the producer of this film. Do we know anything about the actor that they cast in this? There's various racially insensitive terms that you can find in the extant literature of either whether he was like Sukarno or Sukarno looking or Mexican-American looking. They tried to get pornographic actors active in Hollywood, and they tried to create a fake sex tape. And the idea was, and this is a really interesting thing about the United States as an entity, because all these CIA guys are Yale, blue blood, Protestant guys. And they sort of think, in a very American way, that the rest of the world has the same

morality as they do. So they don't realize that everybody in Indonesia already knows that this guy has loads of sex all the time, and nobody cares. So it's really famous that Sukarno is, at one point, he has several wives. But they think that they're going to destroy his reputation, so they hire actors in Los Angeles, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry, I think it is, produce the film according to our reports. And the idea is they're going to say that the KGB did a honeypot on him, and now he's in the KGB controls him because he had sex with a Russian blonde girl. So it was going to be like, I think there's different reports that they were going to put the actor in a bald way because they wanted

to make him look bald, which was going to make him look like they thought that Indonesians would no longer respect him if he was bald and look like shit. And then they also put a mask on this Mexican maybe guy to make him look Asian. In the end, they did not release the film, not because they thought this was a horrible thing to do to the founding father of one of the most important countries in the world, but because the film was just like shit, like they knew that it wouldn't work. That's why you need the industrial lights and magic guys. Yeah, I mean, I think now, I think now you could just say it, right? And everyone will just believe it. But in that same period,

we now know the CIA authorized his assassination, but again, didn't go through with it. And in 1958, this was a tip number two to stop Sukarno and the PKI. As Matt said, the CIA bombed Indonesia. And then this is again, this is like totally in the memory hole at the time. This was the largest CIA operation that had ever been undertaken. And the reason that we know that it happened is because the CIA pilot crashed his plane into one of the islands and got caught. He had his identifying papers on him. His name was Alan Pope. And for all of 1958, the left wing of Indonesian politics was saying like, I think the United States is trying to break our country into pieces. And the US ambassador who didn't know

about the invasion because he was brought in precisely so he would not know was saying like, what are you talking about? Like that's crazy. And then like an American guy just got caught on the island. And so yeah, I mean, and this was sort of phase two of their attempt to get rid of Sukarno. And they tried every single thing they could. And they were very badly discredited by this failed invasion, right? So the left side of Indonesian politics was sort of proved right. Sukarno, even though he couldn't even, you know, no matter how much he wanted to be independent of America, he couldn't stand up to Washington at this point. He still had to sort of pretend that it was okay. I mean, this is the, this is

what US and Germany really was at the time. I mean, countries in this part of the world, including Vietnam, they really wanted to make America think that they were not their enemies. They really wanted to stay on good terms with them. So even after the CIA blew up the country, he still stayed, stayed sort of friends with the United States, but he was close, he moved slightly closer to the Soviet Union. And the United States shifts its tactics and starts training army officers in Kansas, thousands of them with the idea of instead of taking the military on directly, bringing them to America, taking them to strip clubs, giving them loads of money, and getting them to believe in American values, whatever that is, and

trying to, trying to train anti-communists in, in Kansas. And one of the characters in the book, like, spent a lot of these nights out with these guys in Kansas and sort of understood what they were going through back in America after, after the CIA invasion. All right. So like, that was their, that was the first attempt to get rid of Sukarno. Then like, how, how do things like, like really ramp up, like with, could you talk about the guy they choose who'd like to do the coup? It's a General Suharto, like, comes in and like, you know, could you talk about like how, like this, this, this next phase where like the usual forms of subversion or overthrow of like a government who's not in the fold

of U.S. hegemony, like that didn't work. So then like, then they're going just like straight to like the death squad option. So like, how do they, how do they start doing this? And like, like, how, how does it become, like, how did, what were the steps they did to lead up to this genocide? Exactly. So from 1958 to 1963 or so, they're training these officers in the United States, but they still kind of maintain the sightie that they're going to be friends with Indonesia. And then two things happen. John F. Kennedy is murdered. Lyndon Johnson changes tactics because he doesn't want to spend the political capital to keep Sukarno on site. He doesn't

want to have to justify in Congress why he's on such good terms with a quote unquote communist. And he withdraws the ambassador that is supposed to be friendly with Indonesia and brings in one of these ambassadors that is obviously going to do a coup. Everybody knows that's why the ambassador is brought in. Secondly, Sukarno picks a fight with this, with the United Kingdom over the creation of Malaysia, because the United Kingdom kind of draws Malaysia into weird shapes on purpose to weaken the left and Southeast Asia in a way that I think a lot of people are familiar with in Africa and the Middle East, like one of these imperial tricks where they draw lines across the map to make sure that the left can't take power.

And Sukarno picks a fight. As a result of these two things, the shift, the LBJ shift in this fight with the UK, who was very important at the time to Washington because Washington needed to make sure that the Western powers were not standing up to them on Vietnam, the CIA and MI6 start talking about a plan. And we only know about this through declassified documents. We don't know the entire thing, but we know that they start saying repeatedly that they're going to try to create a clash between the army and the communists and that that clash would ultimately result in the army victory and crushing the left because the left in Indonesia had always been an unarmed party that believed in constructing socialism

like 50 years from now. So their ideology was we're going to build bourgeois capitalism, anti-imperialism is first, then in the year 2000 we're going to build socialism. They had no sort of Maoist theory of armed struggle. So in 1965, this class happens. At the end of September 1965, there is a small officer's uprising which is meant to kidnap a few officers. We still to this day don't know the exact nature of this uprising, but the clash has been created. This confrontation between the army and the PKI that MI6 and the CIA wanted to create, it happens. And right away now all of this is declassified and in the book I lay out exactly what the ambassador is saying. They realize, he says, it's now or never.

This is a chance to crush the Indonesian Communist Party. So the army, specifically two guys who were trained in Kansas, they activate a plan in a western part of Indonesia where they're telling people in speeches, you have to help us get the PKI or else we're going to get you. And then they start arresting people in mass. And people are arrested because they don't think anything's going to happen to them. So a lot of the people that I met that were victims of this violence that survived or had their friends killed, they were like, yeah, I'll go down and give an interview at the station. You know, I'm just like in the teachers union or I'm a farmer, whatever. But they take them in and they never come out.

So over the next three or four months they have one million people that stay in concentration camps and another 500,000 to a million that are taken out in the middle of the night and just thrown in the river, killed. And this dynamic is very hard for people to stand up to because nobody knows what happened to their relatives. We know about disappearances in Latin America. It may be the case that disappearances in Latin America were sort of a copy of this really effective strategy. And at every step of the way, the U.S. State Department got reports, encouraged more killings by making it very clear that in order for them to receive international recognition that the PKI needed to be crushed and handing lists of people

to be killed over to the Army and then waiting to see if they'd been checked off properly. And this is all stuff we didn't know for a very long time. It's only like work of like academics and activists that have been going at this for decades and decades that we finally put this picture together. But now it's very clear that the U.S. was an active participant in the massacre. And you profile one woman in your book who was 17 years old who had just moved to Jakarta to make money working in a textile factory. And because she was in a trade union to get that job, it was a pretty good job and she would send money home and then she goes home

to visit her family when this all happens. And the cops come to her house and arrest her for just being a member of a trade union. And she wasn't like a political person for the most part. She was a 17-year-old girl. And they arrest her and then like that's the beginning of like a years-long ordeal, like a nightmare. No, it's not over for her too. Her name is Magdalena and her life is still very, very difficult. It's never, like unlike Latin America, these victims were never given in like a big, I'm sorry, you didn't do anything wrong. They still sort of live as outcasts and being told that they were, they were guilty.

I mean like, and you say that that really is kind of what the point of this atrocity was to like to both like to instill such a sense of fear and silence in the entire country that like that no one would ever, like to remind you that the people who did it are the victors. We won. And like part of our victory is making sure that like the shame of what we did will never be discussed. Or like not only that, but that like it's shameful to have been a victim of this or have a family member who was murdered and taken away from you and like without any official recourse or acknowledgement of that. Yeah. And I mean, it was extraordinarily effective. And I think the reason that people like Magdalena

can get swept up in this is that right before the massacre started, about 25 to 30% of the country was somehow in or affiliated with the Communist Party. So like you wouldn't be able to just take power and say, oh, we're the government now. Like you needed this kind of very brutal, horrible, mass demonstration of as you said, who's really the boss? If you're going to take over a country where the party that would have won the elections was the Communist Party, right? And this was extraordinarily effective. Everyone in Washington understood how effective this was. New York Times columnist James Reston wrote a very, you know, euphoric column about this, this huge success and anti-communist movements

around the world. And this is kind of where the book like takes its name. They understood how hugely effective this was. And they start talking about this, this Jakarta method or this Jakarta plan or Operation Jakarta as something they could do in their own country. Because obviously, Suharto got away with it, right? So if you could kill a million innocent people and nothing happens to you, you become, you know, best friends with the White House, people in Latin America, people in Southeast Asia, they all realize, oh, we could do really anything as long as we say that anti-communism is the reason. And they started coming up with copycat programs all around the world. And I found like, in total, the entire Cold

War from 1945 to, you know, 1995 or so. Over 20 countries backed by the United States rallied with the United States carried out some kind of mass murder of civilians, intentional extermination programs to get rid of either leftists or people they claimed that were leftists. I mean, so the final sort of thing that I think becomes clear after looking at all these horrible stories is that the mass murder of innocent civilians was a fundamental part of the way that the United States won the Cold War. And it affected the way that the Cold War shaped the order that followed it. I mean, I want to get into this connection to other countries, and particularly Brazil

and how living and working there led you to this story. But like just what you just said, you write, I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it. And when I read that, I thought about how so much of our American national identity is tied up in World War II, and the idea that we were the good guys in World War II, and we intervened and we stopped a genocidal dictator, and that if we hadn't intervened, he would have got away with it. And we might never have even known about it, that we were the good guys and there was an unambiguous bad

guy. And then to know about something like this, so violently upends that, like stories like this, because the people who carried out those atrocities were the victors, and they were victorious because they were on our side. And not only that, they're pretending that they're the real victims in all of this. And it's just like to win the Cold War, essentially, we had to become the thing that we are all so proud of ourselves for defeating in World War II. And I think not only did they win because they were on our side, the reason that they never got punished at all is because they're on their side. So we all know about sort of

Pol Pot, right? We all know about any time a communist in the 20th century committed a crime. And it's very easy for us to make these connections. Like, oh, that was the international communist movement, and whenever a communist in this country does something that everyone's guilty, but it's equally true, if not more true, that in the 20th century there was an international anti-communist movement that learned from each other, traded officials, traded, you know, they had these big meetings, there were several anti-communist international organizations, and we don't hear about that side of it. And I think, I mean, it's only speculation, but my best guess is that it's just too, it's not nice to think

about, right? It's fear, if you run the world, which we do, and you know, the three of us are all sort of beneficiaries indirectly, whether or not the United States does a good job of distributing those benefits well to its people, we are sort of indirectly the beneficiaries of that victory. And it's just like, it's easier to talk about World War II. This is why, you know, that is the big historical thing that always happens, even though Indonesia in 1965 was, like I said, probably the most important victory of the Cold War. And do you say that because you introduce a concept, a historical sort of interpretation

of the Cold War as not about ideology, or even really competition between the Soviet Union and the United States as such, but more a contest to make, to ensure from the point of view of the United States that the decolonized countries of the new post-world order in which the old European, old Europe basically couldn't afford the price tag for their empires anymore. It was the, the Cold War was essentially the United States ensuring that even though those governments would no longer be colonial, they would have a neocolonial relationship to the Western powers. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, it's hard to say what the original intent was,

but I think that's what ended up happening, right? So in 1945, you had, you know, before World War II, you had a small group of white European countries that had formal dominance over the vast majority of humanity, and as a result of that formal dominance, the countries in the global south experienced violence and economic underdevelopment, and they were excluded from the world system. After 1945, what you get is the United States becoming the most important and powerful country on earth, and the United States exercises informal dominance over those countries. But the outcome is the same, right? There's still economic underdevelopment, there's still

constant violence, there's still intervention when they get out of line. So for a lot of characters in my book, whether it be Sukarno himself, or a lot of the victims, or even academics who study this, whether or not it was the plan, the Cold War was the means through which colonialism became neocolonialism. And if you look at sort of the countries in the Third World, the countries that came out of World War II and got their independence right afterwards, I make a list at the end of the book of the 25 largest countries by population. None of those countries went from Third World to developed, right? Every single large country remains far, far behind.

And this is like, this was one of the more emotionally difficult things about doing the book is that when I met these people that were, they grew up in Indonesia or Chile or Brazil in the 50s and 60s, they believed that, oh well, okay, colonialism's over, we're going to take our place alongside the rich white countries. That's obviously what's going to happen, right? I mean, if there's no more colonization of Africa and Asia, then we're going to catch up. And the way that they described their vision of what the future was going to be was both deeply inspiring but also quite tragic because you could see their eyes light up and talk about this world that they thought that they were going to participate in and

it didn't happen. And I'm not saying that the only reason it didn't happen was because there was US backed murder, US backed mass murder, but I think it's part of the story. Like to go, like to take over the title of your book, The Jakarta Method, how like this went from being like an active genocide in Indonesia to becoming like a tactic because it was so successful. It sort of crossed the planet to like, you bring up Brazil, Chile, Portugal, and South America. You were a journalist like living and working in Brazil and like that kind of brought you to this story because you talk about your interaction with the now president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, at a time when the Dilma was being essentially impeached

for corruption charges that let's just say in hindsight look rather paltry. Yeah, it was a technicality, it was a political impeachment. Yeah, so I'm in Sao Paulo now, so I mean, my daily life is affected by Bolsonaro's sort of violently anti-communist approach to everything. But yeah, I was a correspondent here for the Los Angeles Times from 2010 and 2016 and I first met Bolsonaro on the day of impeachment and I said, I asked him, well, you know, don't you, aren't you worried about the fact that the international community is going to see this as kind of a stitch up? Like, don't you think, aren't you worried that this is going to appear as an illegitimate impeachment? And he said, oh no, we have to

do this or else Brazil is going to become North Korea. And that was such a like a ridiculous thing even for him to say at the time that I didn't even use it, but lo and behold, two years later he's the president. And I mean, his and his entire political ideology is explicitly a celebration of the Jakarta Method, right? So you can watch on YouTube, there's a clip of him saying the only way Brazil is ever going to advance, we're ever going to improve this country is if we do what the dictatorship didn't finish doing and we killed 20, 30 million people, sorry, 20, 30,000 people and translating from Portuguese. So in a very like when I started working on this book, I told like the publishers and

things I was like, well, my contention is that the ghosts of violent anti-communism are haunting the politics of many, many countries. But I ended up being proven far more right than I would have liked, right? I mean, he like the ghosts are like really back in Brazil. So the point is like his foreign minister a couple of weeks ago, he did like a late night blog post where he reviewed the New Zizek book to like confirm his theory that coronavirus is an international communist plot. He liked it at 3am, you know, super like super screed, where he claims like it's called Comuna, Comuna like communist virus instead of coronavirus. And this is like this is back and it never went away and like it

was clear even in my time as corresponding here, I think it's clear to most people that live in the so-called developing world, even though that's a question of what's happening. Most people understand that the violent interventions of the Cold War were formative, right? And this is sort of an academic literature. This is sort of fairly recognized now. And regular people know this in Chile and regular people know this in Vietnam or whatever. But in the United States, we don't view this view this in the United States view the Cold War as a heroic battle that happened in Berlin and maybe Moscow and then the bad guys lost and then it was over and then just like everything else just gets shoved shoved deep into the

memory hole. But here in Brazil, it's like it's, I mean, on the way here, I saw like on the way to this like little bunker I have that actually has good internet, there was a protest where they were claiming that the right wing governor of Sao Paulo is communist because now he's in a fight with Bolsonaro. So like communism is just, is a perfect way to attack anything that you need to attack to solidify your power in South America. And you talk about how like after 1965, like the word jacarta becomes sort of a buzzword and you talk about how in sort of like various like dueling and like, I guess street art, like in Brazil and otherwise like right wing groups who just write like jacarta is coming,

essentially as a warning, a preview of what they like they were planning to do to the left in their country, which is mass murder, torture, disappearances, things like that. Yeah, and they did it. So when Allende took over in 1970 in Chile, we now have declassified files indicating that what Nixon was worried about was the possibility of democratic socialism succeeding in Chile. So the CIA, the White House, they needed to stop Allende not because he was going to screw up the economy, not because he was bad for US business, but if it worked, it would be a guiding light for other opponents of US, Germany and South America. And that was a real problem. So they started US backed right wing terrorism before Allende

even takes power. And the Brazilian military who was running a dictatorship here that took over in US backed in 1964, they're in constant contact with the Chilean military. And during Allende's term in office, you start seeing this graffiti on the walls, jacarta is coming or they would send postcards to the houses of socialists, one of whom I got to know pretty well, Carmen Hertz. And like it happened, it was right, jacarta came. So 1973, the CIA doesn't, you know, assists in the coup. You know, she takes over and they kill thousands of people. And of course, just like in jacarta, they get away with it. And then over the next few years, Chile and Brazil get together and they form Operation Condor, which is this

transnational terror network across South America that is created so that they can kill anybody that escapes across the border, you know, they're killing tens of thousands of people in Argentina. But what happens if he gets away to Uruguay? Well, we have a, we have a Operation Condor, which will take, take care of that. And this was a fundamental way of it. That Latin America entered the 20th century, like this was this dominated Latin American politics for the second half of the 20th century. And it's only the democracy came back very recently, like it's, it's very, very fresh stuff. And yeah, in Brazil, it was called operação jacarta, which was, again, it was just, it was a mass murder program, Operation

jacarta. Here it kind of backfired because they ended up killing a very famous journalist, Vladimir Herzog. And that caused a big backlash, including in the Catholic church. And that movement in the left side of the Catholic church ended up sort of eventually leading to Lula in the early 21st century. But like, it's right, right just below the surface. And it's only because like you said, it contradicts so violently, the English language narrative about the Cold War that I think we don't talk about it so much. Matt, I know you told me, because like, you know, you, you've read much more of the book than I have. You're telling me about like these sort of tunic wearing street gangs.

And I know you wanted to bring that up. Yeah. Because there's, you usually have in these situations where you have really heightened ideological conflict within a country and there's a lot of polarization. You get people who want to, who are sort of outliers, they're early adopters, like they're the pre-coup sort of incipient beings. And one of them, I just wanted a little more information. It was a group, I think you said in Brazil and also in Chile, that went around beating up communists while wearing medieval tunics. Yeah. Yeah. TFL. So tradition, family and liberty. They're back by the way. Like if you hang on and like weird, do they still wear the tunics?

I don't, I imagine they, I'm sure they have like, yeah, I imagine they still do like sort of strads. There's like 1960s strad Catholics, right? So they, they were, it was an anti-communist group and they would stand on the street and like sort of heckle. I mean, they also did karate, right? So like to, in order to be in the group you had to do martial arts, cut your hair short, like sort of idealize a medieval past that never exists. I mean, this is Brazil, right? Like what, you know, what, what tunics? But this was really, and they're, they're back. Like they're like, and so were the integralists. So the integralists were the 1930s fascists in Brazil and they, they would like have a sigma on there, like the Greek S on their

arm that, you know, to obviously to copy European fascism and with Bolsonaro they're back too. So like TFL is a like still existing anti-communist Catholic group. I think things that they, they like expanded to the United States at one point as well. Yeah. Tradition, family and liberty. It won't be too long before they drop the Catholicism, like the rest of the Brazilian right probably. Yeah. Well, no, well they, they're, yeah, like now the Catholics tend to be like, it's really the evangelical church, which like that powers Bolsonaro more than the old Catholic

fascists. Yeah. That's so square. Like get out of here. But when you talk about like, yeah, like the, the, the, the tunic wearing trads and just like overall the kind of, I don't know, like the, the, the psychology of, of, of this terror, but also the propaganda of it. One thing I was struck by, and you know, you brought this up a little bit when you were talking about the, the CIA being Crosby produced porn movie where they're like all of these like intensely like wasp guys from Connecticut and Maine sort of projected their own values or sense of like morality onto the world and

thought that everything would sort of neatly align with that. But like to go back to Indonesia, like I was fascinated by how like one of the sort of catalysts for like much of this mass murder were these like intensely baroque fantasies that were invoked by the coup plotters about what PKI were doing and also like these sort of communist witches were kidnapping military officers and cutting their dicks off. And it was just like, it was all made up. It was all complete fantasia. But what was fascinating about that is became a big part of the propaganda effort in that this was of course picked up by the New York Times, like these, these horrible blood curdling, curdling stories about what

the PKI is doing to these innocent people. But like also it's, it's even more frightening because it's just this massive act of projection where they're telling you what they're going to do to you by accusing you of it. And then when an outlet like the New York Times picks it up, when you do those things to the people that you're targeting, it's like it's justified because they did all these horrible like acts of witchcraft and sexualized violence that is really this like weird form of like wish fulfillment on behalf of the people who are doing it. Yeah, it was a, so that story, we still don't understand it. It's like, I guess the best

way that I could summarize like academic consensus about that story is like, it's too good. So like, there was this, it's hard to believe that Suharto came up with this like perfectly crafted sort of misogynistic version of anti-communist propaganda overnight by himself, right? So a lot of people think that he, he had some help there. But he turned around and this, this story of quite literally like an orgiastic torture castration. So that's the story, right? Is that like the, so like, first of all, let me say that Gerwani, the Indonesian women's movement, which was associated with the Communist Party, was maybe the largest and most important feminist movement in the world at the time, right? So this was like Gerwani stood for

things that probably every liberal now believes in, like they were the ones championing like equal treatment for women and polygamy and, uh, general mutilation. And this was obviously they were, they wanted to, they wanted to end polygamy and general mutilation just to be clear about. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, did I say the opposite? Yeah, exactly. So, so they were a really easy scapegoat, right? So they put it all on the women and they claimed that it was sexual deviancies, like a literally satanic ritual that literally removed the male organ from troops. Like they, the guys that were killed were like the top troops of all time and they had their dicks cut off by crazed Communist women. This is still the truth in

Indonesia. Like they, they made a three hour film of this that Suharto played every, every year on the anniversary of the beginning of the violence on public TV. And even though Jaco, we took over who's this kind of like Obama figure in Indonesian politics, the military still plays it. So like that version is more officially true than what we all know actually happened. Cause they have, they have the power there. And like, as you said, like everybody always, before you do a coup, you always convince yourself that their other team is going to do a coup to you. Like every time, like you go up and down in Brazil, even though they had no evidence for this, they convinced themselves, Oh, if we don't do a coup, there's

going to be a coup. Just like I'm sure if I ever, you know, if I get an interview by like Fox or whatever about this book, they're going to say, well, if we didn't kill a million people, I'm sure they would have killed 1.5 million, you know, like, right? Yeah. Yeah. You always convince yourself that if you don't do this thing, the exact same thing is going to happen, but, but worse. And it's a very, I just want to say that it's, that that goes like from every level of person from grunts, carrying out things like this to the highest levels of policy, because a lot of those top level CIA guys and a defense department people who made these policies, they really did believe that they were justified because the Soviets

were doing the exact same thing and worse. Yeah. And they're part of the great game. And the thing is, is that we knew kind of at the time and now in the historical retrospective, it's unarguable. They absolutely were not. No, they were Soviets were doing anything. Honestly, you could criticize them for not doing more to help some of these goddamn fledgling anti-colonial movements. They were not helpful. They were not there. They were not at any of these places seating, seating, you know, the military with, with, with secret agents and shit. They were not planning coups. They did not do it. When they're what, when somebody would like what an anti, what a communist would take power, most of the more time than

not, they were like, Oh shit, now what do we do? No, that, I mean, that's how the Cold War started. The Cold War started because the Greeks refused to stand down after World War II, the Greek leftists, even though Stalin was like, No, just give up and lose and let them kill you. And Truman, you know, stood up and said, we have to, we have to take this on because the Greek communist, but Stalin, I mean, obviously Stalin is not someone that cares about human rights, but he was afraid of the United States, right? Like he was like, you don't want to, you don't want to provoke them. They're crazy. And that you see this like up and down in the Cold War. So like when Allende was elected in 1970, Fidel calls

him and he's like, don't provoke the, like don't do anything to provoke Washington. They're like, they're out of control. They will overreact. So Fidel stayed away from Allende's inauguration for precisely that reason. And in countries like Chile and Brazil, when there was like a tiny left that was being used by the United States as an excuse to crush whatever government they wanted to, the official Moscow line was, Oh, no, Latin America is a semi-colonial part of the world. You have to develop capitalism. Don't do, just like do nothing, right? Like just help the bourgeoisie create a capitalist power because, you know, there was that element of Marxism, Leninism, you could find a reason to say that, but also they were just like,

we don't want to provoke Washington. If we, if we just got blown up, we want to rebuild a little bit. We don't want to do any of that. I mean, so there was this, the, the wise belief that Stalin's going to invade Western Europe. He didn't want to do that at all. He thought, Stalin thought that there would be another intra imperialist war that, you know, that, that Europe and the United States would, would go after each other because they believed that communism would just happen. But no, you're totally right. Like they were to, in order to justify the things they were doing, they had to believe that something else was going to happen, even though there was no evidence for that.

Um, like in talking about like the way, like the massive things like this that have been effectively memory hold, like because they worked so well, that's the reason most people don't know about them. It's safe for the, you know, and not even the people like in the country who, who believe the official party line, you know, the, like the, the victor is narrative of why they did this or why they had to do it or why the people they were killing were criminals or subversive or, you know, revolutionaries or something like that. But like, what does it mean to our understanding of genocide? Do you think about this entire era of history where genocide was directed not at an ethnic group or religious minority,

but at a politic, like a, a, a political part of existing within like the democratic body politic and that like the world that we live in now has been so deformed by the actual like extermination of like a vast swath of political belief and practice. Yeah. I mean, it's a, like that's an ongoing question. Like there's a, there's like a really like raging debate whether or not it should be called a genocide or whether or not there should be like a different category of thing. What I will say is that going through these stories, like, and I spent like three years with these people that like lived through it or survived it or had their friends that didn't survive, it, it doesn't just raise

a question about the nature of certain, this crime or that crime, but I think it, it raises questions about the nature of US hegemony, like the nature of the world that has been created in the shadow of the United States. So what extent this is something we want to celebrate to what extent it's something that needs to be preserved by going to Cold War two with China, but it's woven right in there. Right. I mean, if it wasn't woven right into the fabric of the order that we all inhabit, it would be obvious to us, right? It would stand out. The reason it doesn't stand out is because it's right. It's right in there. And like, and thinking about like the ongoing

silence as being basically one of the big parts of victory is that the silence surrounding things like this. And I'm thinking about like the continued silence from like the heights of American power and like liberal intelligentsia, like not people he would generally regard as like, you know, sort of ghoulish University of Chicago coomongers. But like the prime example in my head is Samantha Power and her book, you know, a problem from hell about US policy and genocide in the 20th century that omits the story of Indonesia entirely. I mean, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's not I think it's just very, very inconvenient, right? I mean, like it's it's remarkable because

like Indonesia is like pretty far back, right? So okay, it's 1965. But the the end of this wave of anti communist mass murder happens in Central America in the 80s. And like these are to a very large extent the people who send their children to the United States to work. Like these are a lot like, I met a lot of people in like Guatemala, Guatemala and Highlands that are like, Yeah, yeah, they came and they killed half my village. And now there's no source of income. And that's why we have to go to United States. And like, it's just never discussed that this is what be might be the reason that there is a wave of migrants from Central America. And like we have this liberal, this liberal narrative

like, Oh, well, no, they just like, like believe in America so much. Or they or George Soros has got them on speed dial is paying them. Yeah. And now when I asked them, like, Well, do you believe in America? They're like, No, I think you killed my whole village. Like we just have to we have to go there. And I think like, um, it's if you're the hegemon, it's just not in your best interest to talk about those kinds of things, right? Like it's just, and then what was the name of skill me, I'm forgetting his name. But yeah, no, the guy that they brought back who was whose explicit job was to tell the press that they were, they were wrong. Yeah, Elliott Abrams, he came back to justify coup attempt number, whatever

that was last year, two or three in Venezuela. Yeah. And you know, like, it's just doesn't matter what he did. And like it every like, there's no, there's no dispute that what his job was, was to lie about war crimes being committed by our allies. And then he just comes back and he's allowed to do it again. And like, I think if there's something to be said for like that old Chomsky thing that like, if you let people talk about it, but only in like a small amount of space, it just doesn't like, it doesn't matter. Like you can, you don't have to censor it if, if it's just like not something people want to hear or want to speak about.

And I think one of the big reasons they do have a such a hard type talking about it, it's not even necessarily the, the, uh, uh, the, the messy fact of our involvement in these things. I think that could be massaged, especially when you're talking about people like power, uh, the whole point of talking about genocides is to mark, if you're talking, if you're someone like power and you're assuming America is the sole hegemon of the world, American military is the world's police officers. Like they really do think that. And therefore the cops represent like in a country, their police represent legitimate force and authority. And so that means the US military represents legitimate force authority. The United States

political structure and state capacity represent illegitimate authority. And so even when something happens, like a million people get massacred in Indonesia, that is essentially maybe excessive force, but it is violence carried out in the pursuit of peacekeeping of the greater mission of maintaining a world order. Definitionally, right? By, by definition, if the US government does it, it must somehow be, uh, fueled by either good intentions or be in the service of some larger project, whichever one, which is going to be good for everyone. It's like, we are sort of like epistemologically unable to consider these things as what they are, right? It's like, well, the, you know,

we did it. So it can't be, it can't be bad, right? And, and so that's why people would rather not remember that it happened because it's harder to, it's harder to assimilate. Yeah. And like, I don't know, for example, if I would have been allowed to do this book, like if Obama was still the president, for example, right? Yeah. And there would be less, I think, yeah, there'd be less demand. People would be like, why, why are you bringing up old shit?

Like, what are you talking like? Cause he was, you know, that's why he became Muslim. Just, I mean, not just kidding, but like that's why he moved to, that's why he moved to Indonesia and had exposure to Islam is because his stepfather was called back from Hawaii, just like everybody else that was living in Indonesia and living abroad. They had to come back and sort of prove to Suhart that they were loyal to the new regime, not, and not communist. And the communists, quote unquote, were stuck abroad. And so Obama moved back to Jakarta in 1966 or maybe 67 or something right after the genocide because of the genocide. And in Dreams for My Father, he writes very clear, like he understands what happened. Like he not only understands

what happened, he understands what it did to the country, how it deforms, how it deformed Indonesia. Yeah. I wanted to find the quote that he did, that he has from his stepdad. Well, there's one, there's one moment where he and his mother realized that he's been changed, that he's been sort of corrupted morally by this new world, that he's unhappy, that he doesn't want to talk about things. And at one point he asks him, like, have you ever killed a snake or something like that? I don't know. I could look this up. But at

one point, his father was like, well, look, basically there's two types of, you know, do you want to be the person that gets killed or the person that does the killing? Like that's the only option. I'm paraphrasing, but it was a very like sort of brute realization of what power looks like. I mean, you know, it's in Dreams for My Power. He says something like, back in America, power is hidden, but here power was bare. Power was something that was right in your face. And they eventually left Indonesia kind of partially for this reason. They didn't like it, right? They didn't like the obviousness of the brutality of what sustained that system. And it was clear that he understood how it compromised the

people under it, that his stepfather had to make these horrible choices of either, like, I kind of keep my mouth shut about this regime, or I could be called a communist too. And, you know, that's not going to help anybody. Yeah. And like, obviously, you know, you know, we know, I mean, I'm the age where when I remember when Obama ran as an anti-war president, right? And like, we know what happened when he actually gets into office. And like, if you look, if you take a big step back and you look at all the presidents that enter the White House, you know, the government of the United States, the same thing happens to all of them, right? They end up operating the national security apparatus, the foreign

policy war machine that is existing, right? They get there and they have to deal with that. And no matter what they said or what they were acting like beforehand, that's just kind of like, what happens to presidents in the United States, it seems like. Matt, do you have any, do you have any further questions or queries from your, from your outline or your notes? I got, I got a couple of questions. One. You had one good, that's, that's one explanation, one explanation for Obama or partial explanation is he went to Venezuela or he went to Indonesia and saw what had happened. And it essentially destroyed any hope that he would believe that

anything could change for any reason. And or also that his mom was a CIA agent. That's the other possible answer, right? I guess there's rumors. I mean, he, in the book, he kind of, he, he says that his mom is working at the embassy and realizes that they are all, everyone at the embassy is one racist and two, a spook pretending to be something else. So in that book, he seems to have a pretty sophisticated, he says like, you know, his mom's like everyone, everyone there is like a quote unquote journalist or economist, but then they just go away for a long time and they never do anything. Like, so, um, I think he, like he ends up, I think he ends

up with a pretty sophisticated understanding of U.S. foreign policy as a young man due to being in the CIA, due to being, due to being literally created by the CIA so that he can be the first Muslim in a, in a laboratory, in a laboratory. I don't think that that's too far of a stretch to claim. I mean, I do believe that in 25 years we're going to find out stuff about 2020 that is more insane than anything we could come up with right now. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. They're just dabbing on us all day. Yeah. 2020 is the year everyone decided all these secret spooks and ghouls decided to just say, fuck it and start dabbing all over us.

Yeah. Just to be like, look, what are you going to do about it? You know? Yeah. And what, like, what are you going to do about it? Yeah. Matt, I was like, uh, there was like the CIA's official Twitter account, like just this last week was like, Hey, looking to travel someone by plane in the world. Did you know that the CIA created its own airplane company called Air America? Yeah, pretty cool. Check it out. Check it out. The CIA had its own fucking airline throughout the seventies. And it doesn't matter. Like, even if like, even if like, they got to figure like five to 10% of the people that see that might Wikipedia, but even then, like, only, you know, half of them will read the whole article or whatever.

And like, they still just get it would just work. Like, it doesn't matter. Like it can be all right out there. And hey, guys, we've been putting that Manson acid in the water supply for the last 30 years. You haven't seen a real thing your entire life. Yeah. What are you going to, what are you going to do? I mean, like, you think that's air you're breathing? Yeah. Like, you don't, I mean, working on this book was really weird because it was like, there was like my normal life where I hang out with people that are like, you know, like me in America or even Brazil or whatever. But I spent like three years going deep into this stuff that made

it like there was profound cognitive dissonance, right? Like it made very hard to just like kind of walk around and interact with the world in a normal way, right? Like it's very hard to maintain this stuff in your head to understand the degree to which it is generative of the world we occupy and to also occupy it. Right? Like, yeah. And it took me a long time to like a murder, like I had like quite, I mean, I feel very like stupid and pathetic complaining about like any psychological difficulties I had, because like everyone that I was talking to like had the worst thing you could ever imagine happened to them. But like, it took me a while to like get back to this world, right? As pretend everything's normal again.

Like, I like, oh, I finished the book. It's over there. Like it's in that book if you want to read it. And now I'm just going to like come back to that world that I like understood to be real before. And it is real, but like it's hard to think about why it became that way. It's, uh, uh, and I, yeah, I think that even, you know, they challenge you to like to do that. And I think most people just don't want to do it. It's hard, you know, it sucks. I have only one more question. And it just be, I have to ask it because, uh, I know Felix would, if he was here, uh, are you related to Ninja? Yeah. I don't know. Why, why do I look like him? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Matt, his name is Bevins. Ninja's

name is, is blevin edited out. How's Tyler edit that out? Yeah. No, but no, that's why I think that my sermon, I think that's not even a real surname. I think that like it's Bevins in like whales. And then they added like different letters when you got to America. Um, no, but, uh, yeah, he's my brother, like in spirit, I guess, you know, okay, okay. Close it up. Close it up. Close it up. Close it up. Yeah. It's good. It's good. Yeah. It's good to have a reference that Tyler Ninja blevins after an hour of talking about state back genocide in the cold war. Yeah. So yeah, that's why people tune in to chop out trap house. But it's the same thing. It is kind of the whole rich human pageant. Um, but no,

seriously, uh, Vincent Bevins, I want to thank you very much for talking to us today. And the book is the Jakarta method. Uh, please, please buy like and subscribe. Yeah, please. Yeah, please buy it. I gotta, I gotta prove to the publishing industry that it should be taken seriously. So bite. If you don't want to read it, it's fine. Just buy it. No, it's, it's, it's rather someone. Yeah, no, it's a really great book, Vincent. And, um, thanks again for coming on. Yeah. Thank you. Bye bye. On the ground, on the ground, on the ground

On the ground, on the ground