The Jakarta Method
by Vincent Bevins
The empire’s darkest export.
For you if
you keep seeing the same political patterns repeat across countries and want to understand where they come from
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$20 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Bevins’ The Jakarta Method is one of the most chilling, clarifying books of the century — an exposé of how the U.S. helped architect mass murder across the Global South during the Cold War, beginning with the slaughter of up to a million Indonesians in 1965. Through meticulous reporting and survivor testimony, Bevins reveals how this “model” of exterminating leftist movements spread from Brazil to Chile to Guatemala, shaping today’s global order through fear, silence, and erased histories. It’s a story of ghosts that still haunt the present — and a reminder that democracy has too often been defended by destroying it elsewhere.
Where This Book Lives
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Citizenfour(2014)
dir. Laura Poitras
Filmed in the room where the leak actually happened.
Laura Poitras films Edward Snowden's first meetings with journalists in a Hong Kong hotel room as he hands over evidence of mass NSA surveillance.
Why it’s here: Poitras was already filming when Snowden reached out, so this isn't reconstructed after the fact — it's the actual hotel room, the actual first read of the documents, tension that isn't staged because nobody knew yet how it would end.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1964)
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Laughing so you don't scream, since 1964.
A rogue Air Force general triggers an unrecallable nuclear strike on the USSR, and the War Room scrambles — bureaucratically, absurdly — to stop the end of the world.
Why it’s here: The original 'laugh so you don't scream' text — mutually assured destruction played entirely for farce, and the farce is the argument: absurdity is what nuclear brinkmanship actually looks like from the inside.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
72 minutes to the end of everything.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
The night someone tried to kill Bob Marley.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
A religion built on lies. A substance that ends the world. Both feel true.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
Peter Pomerantsev
When truth is a weapon, here's how to use it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Different Seasons
Stephen King
How fascism finds the boy next door.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Apocalypse as political strategy.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Meet the original gas-lighting pigs.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
1984
George Orwell
Big Brother still watching your feed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST