Thank you very much to Athena Bryan, and Clive Priddle, and Anupama Roy-Chaudhury at PublicAffairs. To Clive for giving the project the green light and guiding it to the end, to Athena for spotting the biggest errors in the first draft and pushing me in the right direction, and to Anu for helping me in every way imaginable. I’m grateful to Pete Garceau for the cover design and for being open to my input, to Brynn Warriner and Mark Sorkin for the copyediting, to Brooke Parsons and Miguel Cervantes for their book world expertise, and of course to Rob McQuilkin for finding a place for my idea in the first place.
My cousin Paige Evans, and my good friends Juliana Cunha and Niken Anjar Wulan (who is also in the book), provided much-needed advice and encouragement on the project as a whole, and I owe all three of them big time.
And though it might seem silly, I’d like to thank everyone that (still, for some reason) follows me on social media. For better or worse, they are likely part of the reason I was allowed to write a book. So if I get too annoying on there, please mute, don’t unfollow. I’m also grateful to the many people I have learned from online, especially dedicated young people around the world.
I would have been lost without the support of the institutions, public or private, that allowed me to further my research: Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, Arquivo Nacional do Brasil, the National Security Archive, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, the British Library, the New York Public Library, the University of Malaya Library, Cornell University Library (especially Ekarina Winarto and Astara Light), the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and its CPDOC Center, the Hoover Institution, SOAS University of London, University of São Paulo, Los Archivos Del Terror in Paraguay (with special thanks to Rosa Palau), the Museum Konferensi Asia Afrika in Bandung, and the National Library of Vietnam.
My deepest thanks to everyone above, and my apologies—and even deeper thanks—to anyone I have forgotten.
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Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London.
Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, Folha de S.Paulo, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, The Awl, The Baffler, and New York magazine. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Jakarta.
Appendixes
Appendix 1
The World in 1960: The 25 Most Populous Countries
*
All data (including population ranking) from the World Bank Data Bank (databank.worldbank.org) unless otherwise stated.
* This is derived from the US government estimate of the size of the Soviet economy as 38.1% of that of the United States (See “A Comparison of Soviet and US Gross National Products, 1960–1983,” accessible via the CIA FOIA Reading Room, www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498181.pdf) and Soviet census data from 1959 (208,800,000, see www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1959-07-01/soviet-population-today) as well as US GDP data from the World Bank.
** Penn World Tables 9.1 (PWT91) (www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/)—output side, Year 1961
*** PWT91, 1960
**** These Vietnamese figures are drawn from contemporary CIA analysis: Economic Intelligence Report, A Comparison of the Economies of North and South Vietnam, December 1961, accessible via the CIA FOIA Reading Room, www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R01141A002200070001-8.pdf.
***** Data provided by Branko Milanovic, who relied on World Bank World Development Indicators, and adjusted using PWT91 Price Index.
Appendix 2
The World Today: The 25 Most Populous Countries (plus South Korea) in 2018
*
All data (including population ranking) is from the World Bank Data Bank, databank.worldbank.org.
South Korea is included because it is the rare exception of a large country moving from the Third World to First-World levels of wealth. See Robert Wade, “Escaping the periphery: the East Asian ‘mystery’ solved,” United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, September 2018, for discussion of the exceptional treatment South Korea and Taiwan were given by Washington due to their strategic importance in the Cold War.
* 2017
Appendix 3
Global Inequality Between Countries, 1960–2017
The measure of inequality used here is the GINI coefficient. Purely for reference, inequality within the United States is around 41.5 (World Bank estimate). Some of the most equal societies on Earth, often in Northern Europe, hit lows of around 25, and South Africa, one of the world’s most unequal nations, has a GINI index of 65.
Data for the graph was provided by economist Branko Milanovic. The dotted line (weighted by country population) more clearly shows the effects of Chinese growth. For more on his methods, see Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality.
Appendix 4
Global Inequality, 1960–2017
This graph is reproduced with permission from Jason Hickel, The Divide (William Heinemann, 2017).
Appendix 5
Anticommunist Extermination Programs, 1945–2000
The map above illustrates intentional mass murder carried out to eliminate leftists or accused leftists, and does not include deaths from regular war, collateral damage from military engagements, or unintentional deaths (starvation, disease) caused by anticommunist governments.
Notes for the figures begin here.
* Operation Condor itself was concerned with cross-border operations, which killed 400–500. This graphic includes all violence employed domestically by states that were part of the anticommunist alliance undergirding Condor.
** Please note that in this one case, the violence was carried out by a geopolitical rival of the United States.
Notes
Introduction
1. Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 5. Simpson notes here that “until the mid-1960s most officials still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.” As we will see later, newspaper reports in 1965 confirm this balance of priorities.
2. Vincent Bevins, “The Politicians Voting to Impeach Brazil’s President Are Accused of More Corruption Than She Is,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2016.
3. Jonathan Watts, “Dilma Rousseff Taunt Opens Old Wounds of Dictatorship Era’s Torture in Brazil,” The Guardian, April 19, 2016.
4. Vincent Bevins, “Brazil Is in Turmoil, an Impeachment Trial Looms, and Still, Dilma Rousseff Laughs,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2016.
5. The memorable phrase I’m referencing here is from Hegel: “Death that achieves nothing.… It is thus the most cold-blooded and meaningless death of all, with no more significance than cleaving a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of water.” In Phenomenology of Spirit, “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” Section 590.
6. I am in great debt to Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for his meticulously researched affirmation that the Cold War was as much about shaping life in the Third World as it was a conflict between superpowers. I wish I already knew his arguments well before I started this project, but I confess I only read his work after I wrote my proposal, which relied upon a similar thesis. Perhaps my decade working in the “developing world” led me to the same conclusions as hi
s scholarly research.
Chapter 1. A New American Age
1. For the Puritans in New England, their ideological commitment to the colonies, extremism in relation to England, and their conclusion that God “providentially cleared the land of its inhabitants to accommodate His people,” see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “New England in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 193–96.
2. Alexander Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quarternary Science Reviews 207 (March 2019), www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261#!.
3. Adam Serwer, “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots,” The Atlantic, April 2019. The affirmation that the systematic segregation amounted to “apartheid” in the contemporary usage of that term is mine, not Serwer’s. On the fact that soldiers were segregated in World War II and the consequences of racialized justice in the military at the time, see, for example, Francis X. Clines, “When Black Soldiers Were Hanged: A War’s Footnote,” New York Times, February 7, 1993.
4. Alden Whitman, “‘The Lightning’ Strikes in War,” New York Times, December 27, 1972, www.nytimes.com/1972/12/27/archives/harry-s-truman-decisive-president-the-lightning-strikes-in-war.html.
5. The official estimate is 27 million. Some claim the number is significantly higher. See Leonid Bershidsky, “A Message to Putin from 42 Million Dead,” Bloomberg, May 10, 2017.
6. See Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chap. 3, “Socialism and Civil War,” and Part III: Stalinism.
7. Westad, The Global Cold War, 10, 30.
8. Elizabeth Brainerd, “Uncounted Costs of World War II: The Effects of Changing Sex Ratios on Marriage and Fertility of Russian Women,” 1–3. National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2007_820-4g_Brainerd1.pdf.
9. The Louisiana Purchase (1803); the territories ceded by Mexico (1848) and the annexation of Texas (1845); as well as the acquisition of Florida (1819) all resulted from war or the threat of war. In The Global Cold War, Westad calls Manifest Destiny a “rather concrete imperialist program.” See the first pages of Chapter 1 for this discussion.
10. Westad, The Global Cold War, 15.
11. The original coinage is from Alfred Sauvy, “Trois Mondes, Une Planété,” L’Observateur no. 118, August 14, 1952. Cited and discussed in Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 6–11.
12. The figure is 68 percent for “developing countries.” See “Urbanization: Facts and Figures,” United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, 2001.
13. Westad, The Global Cold War, 83. For the discussion of whether or not Wilson’s performance at Versailles directly caused Ho Chi Minh to take this position, see Brett Reilly, “The Myth of the Wilsonian Moment,” Woodrow Wilson Center, www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/the-myth-the-wilsonian-moment. Whatever his motivations, it was right after the conference ended that he began lecturing on “Bolshevism in Asia” and urging French Socialists to join the Third International.
14. “Declaration of Independence,” Socialist Republic of Vietnam Government Portal, www.chinhphu.vn/portal/page/portal/English/TheSocialistRepublicOfVietnam/AboutVietnam/.
15. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Penguin, 1994), 235. Hobsbawm says “Americanism” can be “virtually defined as the polar opposite of communism.”
16. Westad, The Global Cold War, 20–21.
17. In the 1945 French legislative election, the PCF (French Communist Party) came in first place, and in the 1946 Italian general election, combined votes for the Communists (PCI) and Socialists outnumbered those for the Christian Democratic Party. Under leader Pietro Nenni, the Italian Socialist Party was in close coalition with the PCI. See Alessando Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 95–102.
18. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 92–95.
19. Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002), 27.
20. Stalin called the Greek rebellion “foolishness” because the British and Americans would never tolerate a “red” Greece. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khruschev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 56–57.
21. Tito wrote to Stalin: “Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle…” Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin (London: Tauris, 2003), 62.
22. On Stalin’s goals and attitudes at the time, see Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 28–50; on his “surprise and alarm” at Western confrontation, see ibid., 75, as well as Bert Cochran, The War System (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 42–43.
23. Brogi, Confronting America, 112–13. On both the left and the right in France and Italy, there was opposition to the American “productivist,” mass-consumption model of capitalism that Washington was pushing.
24. A. James McAdams, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), Chaps. 1–6.
25. On the uneasy alliance, see Patricia Stranahan, Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival 1927–1937 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 7–11; for the broader overview, see also Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 24–25.
26. Ruth McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca: Cornell Press, 1965; reprinted in Jakarta by Equinox, 2006), 76–81.
27. Karl, Mao Zedong and China, 25–33.
28. Ibid., 71.
29. On the US in relation to the expulsions in Italy and France, see Brogi, Confronting America, 82–87.
30. Ibid., 96; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004), chap. 2.
31. For a summary of Togliatti’s 1947 remarks, see Brogi, Confronting America, 1. For the “Sinews of Peace” speech, which popularized a term that already existed, see Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’),” March 5, 1946, International Churchill Society, at winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/.
32. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 53.
33. Karl, Mao Zedong and China, 77.
34. See Schrecker and Deery, The Age of McCarthyism.
35. Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 28.
36. J. Edgar Hoover, Testimony before HUAC, March 26, 1947, printed in Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 127–33.
37. Westad, The Cold War, 120; Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 101; Owen Lattimore, “Far East Scholar Accused by McCarthy, Dies at 88,” New York Times, June 1, 1989.
38. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Em Guarda Contra o Perigo Vermelho: O anticomunismo no Brasil 1917–1964 (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2002), 2.
39. For an overview of the Madiun Affair, especially in relation to the Soviet Union and events in Yugoslavia, see Ruth McVey, The Soviet View of the Indonesian Revolution: A Study in the Russian Attitude towards Asian Nationalism (Singapore: Equinox, 1959), 63–87.
40. Westad, The Global Cold War, 119.
41. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917–1963 (New York: Little Brown, 2003), 175.
42. Ibid., 130.
43. Ibid., 132.
44. David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 33, 490.
45. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 165.
46. Papers of John F. Kennedy: Pre-Presidential Papers, House of Repr
esentative Files, Speeches, 1947–1952, Boston Office Speech Files, 1946–1952, Trip to Middle and Far East, November 14, 1951, JFKREP-0095-037, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 165–66. Kennedy’s impression of Jakarta from this trip are recorded in a separate folder relating to this trip. See Papers of John F. Kennedy: Personal Papers, Boston Office, 1940–1956: Political Miscellany, 1945–1956, Asian trip, 1951.
47. Ibid.
48. Shashi Tharoor, “In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer,” Washington Post, March 10, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.a162f746f9ab. See also Shashi Tharoor, “The Ugly Briton,” Time, November 29, 2010, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html.
49. This episode is recounted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (London: Andre Deutsch, 1978), 91.
50. Family testimony is drawn from author interviews with Frank Wisner Jr. in 2018 and 2019. For Wisner in Romania, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 11–12; Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 19–22; George Cristian Maior, America’s First Spy: The Tragic Heroism of Frank Wisner (London, Washington DC: Academia Press, 2018), chaps. 1–12.
51. Author interview, Frank Wisner Jr., 2018.
52. Maior, America’s First Spy, 190–91.
53. For details on Wisner’s early life, see the first chapter of Thomas, The Very Best Men, and Maior, America’s First Spy, chaps. 1–8.
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