Cold (blooded) War - US Style

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

New York: Public Affairs, c2020, 2021.

ix, 340 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm  

It's hard to say whether US citizens have very short memories or face such a powerful propaganda apparatus that it takes a bit of hard work and (soul-crushing honesty) to learn the dirty truths of US history and foreign policy. Considering this, books like The Jakarta Method are wonderful (and painful) antidotes to the flood of official misinformation and willful forgetting that plague the US. 

How many US citizens realize that their government actively helped and encouraged the slaughter of about 1 million unarmed, harmless, and law-abiding civilians in Indonesia in 1965 because of their actual or alleged connections to the completely legal and open communist party of Indonesia.  And how many people who know of this vaguely or in more detail, know that it set the pattern for US sponsored/supported ruthless attacks on civilians in Asia, Africa, Central and South America? Bevins does a remarkable job of pulling together this lethal history from the overthrow of Iran to the rise of the extremist president Bolsonaro in Brazil. The reader learns about the deep connections of the Indonesian slaughter with slaughter and atrocities in Brazil, Guatemala, Angola, Vietnam and other states. The numbers and cruelty are truly appalling.

Bevins also does a good job in scoping out to consider the profound effects that such widespread and cold-blooded killing has had in shaping the world we live in now.  He questions what it means to "win" the Cold War when the means were so depraved and terrible.  He wonders about what kind of world we might live in if the pro-democracy, constitutional parties that leaned left or opposed US hegemony had been allowed to survive. Would we see the same appalling wealth inequalities that plague the world, would the rule of law be stronger, and would there be better human rights protections today? 

His book is profound and timely as both in the US and abroad many leaders are encouraging authoritarian rule and promoting lies and violence as a way to preserve their power.

It is a book I highly recommend.

Hot Read from a Cold War

East German Authorities Guard Control Point At Potsdamer Platz, 1961

From the National Archives (Special Media Archives Services Division, College Park, MD)

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré 
New York: Pocket Books, [2001], c1963.
x, 212 p. ; 21 cm.

I recently saw the critically praised  movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and decided that I had to read a book by John Le Carré.  I've wanted to read Le Carré for a while.  I really enjoyed another film based on his more recent work - The Constant Gardner - and interviews I'd seen of him on Democracy Now! 

I wasn't disappointed in the Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but - like the confusing plot of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - you have to give the novel a lot of attention.  The plot is a twisting confusion of agents, double-agents, intrigue and lethal spycraft.   

What brings this novel above the level of a simple spy thriller is its crisp writing and its philosophical musings on the ethical motives and justifications raised by covert actions.  Le Carré offers no easy answers, but invites his readers - once they have figured out just what happened and have caught their breaths - to wrestle with the moral dilemmas raised in the novel.