There are myriad, complex, and unresolved debates as to why less-rich countries have failed to catch up with rich ones, of course.2 But it’s important to be conscious of the all-too-forgotten size of the gap between nations, and the story of global inequality since World War II, because the events of this book need to fit into that story. One recent study asked US citizens to approximate what the average human earns per year. The number they guessed was ten times too big. They were shocked to find out just how the Third World still lives.3
The reality is that the white world, and the countries that conquered the globe before 1945, remain very much on top, while the brown countries that were colonized remain on the bottom. Almost everyone is better off now in a concrete material sense, because of technological advances and global economic growth, but the gap between the First and Third World remains about as cavernous as it was after the Bandung Conference. It would be too much to claim that this is because of the Cold War, or more specifically because of the loose network of anticommunist mass murder programs that the United States organized and assisted. But it’s true that the period of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, the period in which the US made routine violent interventions in global affairs, was not marked by a drop in the power of the white countries.
It is fair to say that the First World won the Cold War, and more generally won twentieth-century history. This is the world that I was born into; I said in the introduction that history is usually written by the victors, and for better or worse, the same is true of this book. I was born and raised in the United States; it is probably no coincidence that it was someone with my background who was able to acquire the contacts and funding to tell this global story, rather than a woman from the Javanese countryside or resident of a Brazilian favela.
What about the Second World? Over tea with an aging member of the Vietnamese Communist Party recently, this question came up. He is very open about problems with the socialist system in his country, but said that the government in Vietnam, much like in China and the rest of what’s left of the socialist world, watched very carefully what happened to the Soviet Union and its satellites after 1989, and are desperate to avoid repeating those experiences.
Certainly, the leaders of the Communist Parties who ran the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries lost, and lost big. But what about their citizens, the regular, suffering peoples of the communist world? Did the triumph of global capitalism mean victory for them too? Were they rewarded with prosperity and democracy?
Economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost experts on global inequality, born and raised in communist Yugoslavia, asked those questions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. We can probably guess that no, they didn’t all get that. But it was certainly the idea back in 1991, and in many ways it was the promise that was made to the suffering peoples of the communist world, including to Milanovic himself. What happened instead was a devastating Great Depression.4 Milanovic, in a short essay titled “For Whom the Wall Fell?,” looked at postcommunist countries in 2014. Some countries still have smaller economies than they did in 1990. Some have grown slower than their Western European neighbors, meaning they are falling further and further behind even from the low point in 1990, when the collapse of their system cut down the size of their economies. He finds only five real capitalist success cases: Albania, Poland, Belarus, Armenia, and Estonia, which have been somehow catching up with the First World. Only three are democracies.
Which means, Milanovic calculates, that only 10 percent of the population of the former communist world in Eastern Europe got what they were promised when they tore the wall down. The Second World lost, and lost big. They lost the geopolitical power they had during the Cold War, their citizens often lost material wealth, and many did not even gain democratic freedoms to counterbalance that loss.5
And the Third World? Of course, the country I spent the most time on was Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, founder of the Third World movement (and still home to the Non-Aligned Movement, which has its offices in Jakarta).
Often, when I interviewed survivors of the violence in 1965, they assumed I would want to ask them about the torture. What it was like to be beaten, to be starved, to be called a witch or a devil, to lose all contact with your family. To be gang-raped and thrown into the corner of a cell afterward, as if you were nothing. This was not usually what I wanted to talk about. To the extent that journalists or academics have ever spent much time asking survivors to tell their stories, they have already asked them this. Too often exclusively this, with the underlying assumption that it was only the excesses of the repression that were the problem, that if they had just arrested two million people, then proved in a court of law that those people were really communists, and executed half of them, that would have been OK. Personally, I was happy to let the survivors just sketch the worst parts of their stories in quick terms, if it became clear that going through those moments again would retraumatize them.
Unfortunately, though, I did have to ask a question, in two parts, that often proved extremely difficult for them to answer. It took me a long time to perfect the wording of this query in Bahasa Indonesia, so as to make myself very, very clear. At least when talking to those who really had been leftists, I would always say, “Think back to 1963, 1964. In those years, what world did you believe that you were building? What did you believe the world would be like in the twenty-first century?” Then I’d ask, “Is that the world you live in now?”
Often, their eyes would light up when answering the first part. They knew the answer. They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice. The answer to the second question was so obvious that it felt cruel even to ask. It might have been one thing if their government had committed horrible atrocities, but recognized the mistake, and built a just, powerful society. This did not happen. They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.
If we read Sukarno’s opening speech at Bandung; if we look at left-leaning publications across the world from 1955 to 1965; if we read Afro-Asian Journalist, the spirit-of-Bandung, pro–Third World magazine that Francisca translated, or democratic socialist publications in Brazil and Chile, we can ask: Were they crazy? Were their expectations wildly unrealistic? Or could things have been different?
As we have seen, in the years 1945–1990, a loose network of US-backed anticommunist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least twenty-two countries (see Appendix Five). There was no central plan, no master control room where the whole thing was orchestrated, but I think that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War. (I am not including direct military engagements or even innocent people killed by “collateral damage” in war.) The men carrying out purposeful executions of dissidents and unarmed civilians learned from one another. They adopted methods that were developed in other countries. Sometimes, they even named their operations after other programs they sought to emulate. I found evidence indirectly linking the metaphor “Jakarta,” taken from the largest and most important of these programs, to at least eleven countries. But even the regimes that were never influenced by that specific language would have been able to see, very clearly, what the Indonesian military had done and the success and prestige it enjoyed in the West afterward. And though some of these programs were wildly misdirected, and also swept up bystanders who posed no threat whatsoever, they did e
liminate real opponents of the global project led by the United States. Indonesia is, again, the most important example. Without the mass murder of the PKI, the country would not have moved from Sukarno to Suharto. Even in countries where the fate of the government was not hanging in the balance, mass murders functioned as effective state terror, both within the countries and in the surrounding regions, signaling what could happen to you if you resisted.
I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradictions of Soviet Communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. I do want to claim that this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.
All this depends on what we think the Cold War actually was. The popular understanding in the English-speaking world, I think, is that the Cold War was a conflict between two countries, and although they didn’t go to war, they engaged in a number of indirect conflicts. This is not exactly wrong, but it’s based on the experiences of a small minority of people on earth, and the Cold War affected almost everyone.
I follow Harvard historian Odd Arne Westad in viewing the Cold War as something different. We can see the Cold War as the global circumstances under which the vast majority of the world’s countries moved from direct colonial rule to something else, to a new place in a new global system. If we view it this way, then there is not a simple winner/loser binary between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the Third World, there were many paths each country could take; more importantly, most of them are still on the specific path that was shaped and taken during the Cold War. Something similar is true for the entire structural relationship between the rich and poor countries—the relationship we now have was largely shaped by the way both those two powers behaved in the twentieth century.
None of the systems set up by the Soviet Union are still here. On the other hand, the countries that chose, or were forced onto, paths into the American-led global capitalist system have stayed on them. The countries that did not often fell onto similar paths in the past twenty-five years. Over that same time period, the world has undergone a process often called “globalization.” That term certainly caught on for a while. But for those who want to be truly accurate, a better word is “Americanization,” Westad says.6 For better or worse, almost all of us now live in the global economic system that Indonesia and Brazil entered in the mid-1960s, a worldwide capitalist order with the United States as its leading military power and center of cultural production. That may change soon—who knows. But we’re still here.
In this book, I spent less time discussing the real atrocities carried out by certain communist regimes in the twentieth century. That’s partly because they’re so well known already; it’s mostly because these crimes truly didn’t have much to do with the stories of the men and women whose lives we traced throughout the past one hundred years. But it’s also because we do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin’s purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. Even Mao’s Great Leap Forward was quickly abandoned and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party, though the party is still very much around. We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence.
The establishment of Americanization was helped along by the mass murder programs discussed in this book. In a way, they made it possible. They surely weren’t the only events that did so—we have not discussed all the nonviolent ways Washington forced regime change in the twentieth century, nor did we analyze the reasons US institutions made the country such a wealthy, dynamic, and powerful nation in the first place—but we can definitely imagine things going a different way without them.
Washington’s anticommunist crusade, with Indonesia as the apex of its murderous violence against civilians, deeply shaped the world we live in now, in five ways.
First, most simply, there is the trauma, which is mostly unresolved. Countries like Chile and Argentina did a fairly good job of coming together for national reconciliation. Brazil did a worse job. And Indonesia did absolutely nothing of the kind. But even in the best-case scenario, it’s obvious you cannot simply delete the scars of mass terror in a generation or two. The psychological effects of US covert action are felt everywhere, including in North America. More and more citizens there have connections to countries touched by recent US interventions, and even for white Americans, there are psychological effects. When people find out that some things, important things, have been hidden from them, they start to doubt things they shouldn’t, and embark on wild conspiracy theorizing.
Second, Washington’s violent anticommunist crusade destroyed a number of alternative possibilities for world development. The Third World movement fell apart partly because of its own internal failures. But it was also crushed. These countries were trying to do something very, very difficult. It doesn’t help when the most powerful government in history is trying to stop you.
It’s hard to say how they might have reshaped the world if they were truly free to experiment and build something different. Maybe, the countries of the developing world would have been able to come together and insist on changing the rules of global capitalism. Perhaps many of these countries would not be capitalist at all. I suppose it’s possible—though it seems unlikely to me, considering who the victims were, and considering the strength of the US—that without this violence, authoritarian socialists could have won the twentieth century. It’s not clear we even have the ability to imagine what could have been different. When it comes to pure economics, there’s increasingly robust agreement that the developing nations lost their chances to “catch up” economically with the First World around the early 1980s, when an explosion of debt, a turn to neoliberal structural adjustment, and “globalization” put them on their current path.7 Within the current structure, the only real examples of large Third World countries becoming as rich as those in the First World since 1945 are South Korea and Taiwan, and it’s very clear that these nations were given special exemptions from the rules of the world order because of their strategic importance in the Cold War.8
Third, the operations profoundly affected the nature of the regimes and economic systems set up in their wake. Indonesia and Brazil are two, perhaps the two crucial, examples.
It’s now probably broadly accurate to say that all of Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, consists of crony capitalist nations with powerful oligarchies. In Southeast Asia, the same is true for the majority of countries, and even the communist nations were integrated into ASEAN, which Indonesia and the Philippines set up as anticommunist in 1967. As The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis shows, Africa’s political economy remains dominated by weak states and violent extraction. If we wanted to try to stretch this analytical focus to its limits, we could even say that when the Second World collapsed, those countries were integrated into a global system that only had two basic structural types—Western advanced capitalist countries and resource-exporting crony capitalist societies shaped by anticommunism—and they slid right into the second category, becoming very much like Brazil.
In the introduction, I said that Brazil and Indonesia were probably the biggest “victories” of the Cold War. In a narrow sense, I figure that is true simply because by population, they are the largest countries that came into play, which seemed like they could go either way but then fell with a thud into the Western camp. In Brazil today, the idea that the João Goulart government was “communist” or that a turn toward the Soviet model was imminent is rightly ridiculed. But the conservatives do have a point. Something else was indeed possible, and the events of 1964 killed that possibility. But another reason that I think Brazil and Indonesia were such important elements of the process of Americanization that ultimately shaped most of the globe is that, after 1964 and 1965, so many of their neighbors landed on p
aths that were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the anticommunist regimes in the region’s largest countries.
As for the victors of the anticommunist crusade, it’s clear that as a nation-state, the United States has done enormously well since 1945. It is an extremely rich and powerful country. But if we look at individual Americans, or break down the analysis along class and race lines, it’s clear that the spoils of that global ascendance were shared extremely unequally. More and more of the flows coming in from other nations have accumulated at the very top, while some US citizens live in poverty comparable to life in the former Third World.
The fourth way that anticommunist extermination programs shaped the world is that they deformed the world socialist movement. Many of the global left-wing groups that did survive the twentieth century decided that they had to employ violence and jealously guard power or face annihilation. When they saw the mass murders taking place in these countries, it changed them. Maybe US citizens weren’t paying close attention to what happened in Guatemala, or Indonesia. But other leftists around the world definitely were watching. When the world’s largest Communist Party without an army or dictatorial control of a country was massacred, one by one, with no consequences for the murderers, many people around the world drew lessons from this, with serious consequences.
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