Vincent Bevins

Vincent Bevins (born June 11, 1984) is an American journalist and writer.

Quotes

The Jakarta Method (2020)

New York: PublicAffairs

• The violence that took place in Brazil, and Indonesia, and twenty other countries around the world, was not accidental, or incidental to the main events of world history. The deaths were not "cold-blooded and meaningless," just tragic errors that didn't change anything. Precisely the opposite. The violence was effective, a fundamental part of a larger process. Without a full view of the Cold War and US goals worldwide, the events are unbelievable, unintelligible, or very difficult to process.
  • Introduction, p. 5
  • See: Cold War

• To say that the United States is a settler colony means that the land was overtaken by white Europeans over the course of several centuries in a way that differed from the way that most countries in Africa and Asia were conquered. The white settlers came to stay, and the native population was excluded, by definition, from the nation they built. In order for the new white and Christian country to take form, the indigenous had to get out of the way.
  • Ch. 1, p. 9

• The specific kind of anti-communism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgements: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was a widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated.
  • Ch. 1, pp. 15–16

• The gap between the First and Third World remain about as cavernous as it was after the Bandung Conference.
  • Ch. 11, p. 235
  • See: Social inequality

• [I]n the years 1945–1990, a loose network of US-backed anti-communist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least 22 countries. 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 as "collateral damage" in war.) The men carrying out purposeful executions of dissidents and unarmed civilians learned from each other. 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 eliminate real opponents of the global project led by the United States.
  • Ch. 11, p. 238
  • See: Foreign policy of the United States

• 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.
  • Ch. 11, pp. 240–1

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Vincent Bevins on Wikipedia