After 17 years of formal schooling, I donned a cap and gown and walked out of my university with a feeling that I had been cheated. Growing up, the difference between myself and the adults around me were that they seemed to understand the world. They seemed rarely surprised, sure in their opinions, and unwavering in their beliefs. And yet when I walked out of higher education, finally an adult myself, I felt unready. The world made little sense, and the tools I had been given felt not just inadequate, but wholly useless.
So over the past few years, I've been picking away at my worldview. One load-bearing assumption was, basically, that the West was righteous. That the United States of America really was the leader of the free world. That they were committed to spreading freedom and democracy to poverty-stricken third-world nations.
Of course, this couldn't be further from the truth. In "The Jakarta Method," Vincent Bevins outlines in cold detail US meddling in the global south. The Cold War is often thought of as relatively bloodless, but the true death count numbers in the tens of millions when we consider proxy wars, CIA-backed coups, and consequences from economic warfare. The United States had its tendrils everywhere, knipping fledgling revolutions in the bud, running propaganda mills against established socialist governments, and funding (and sometimes directly training) right-wing terror groups to slaughter communists and leftists. The land of the free was unwilling to permit freedom anywhere else.
The bulk of the book is about Indonesia, who, under President Sukarno, became increasingly anti-imperialist until a military coup in 1965. Although the origins of the coup are still somewhat fuzzy (there are several competing theories), there is little doubt that Washington supported the subsequent anti-communist purges, writing the playbook (the titular 'Jakarta Method') for red scare violence across the world. The growing power of the United States was won through imperialist violence and subjugation, because their power depended on the entire world sharing a capitalist system with Washington at the helm. While there were many ideologues in DC who were just anticommunist zealots, the true justification for these conflicts was capitalist control. In a system that relies on unequal exchange, having whole nations of potential producers and consumers disappear from the market was tantamount to a death sentence for capitalism. Even now, holdouts such as Cuba, China, and North Korea are constantly vilified, because they offer quiet alternatives to the unfettered growth of the West.
The above is missing from most accounts of the various conflicts in the 20th century. Whenone studies the Vietnam War, the generally accepted justification of US involvement is 'Domino Theory' or 'Contagion Theory'; the idea that if one country 'falls' to communism, it would spread to neighbouring nations, and so on. What was never described was why this was a problem. To most, I suppose it was self evident: communism was evil, and the 'leader of the free world' had a responsibility to stop it in its tracks. But even then, the theory fell apart as soon as one looked at it closely. Why would neighbouring countries magically 'fall' to communism? And if communism is destined to fail (as is so often repeated), why not just let it fall apart by itself?
It's the same logic that we see in fascist discourse. The enemy is both strong and weak. Communism is both doomed to fail and must be stopped swiftly and decisively. And, unlike the developed West, the East cannot be trusted with their own futures. There is a racist paternalism at the heart of many justifications for US intervention in the 20th and 21st century.
The book also touches on other CIA escapades such as the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the backing of the anticommunist Contras against the Marxist Sandanistas in Nicaragua, the 1953 coup of democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddegh, the war against the Soviet-backed North Koreans, the mass-murder of Brazilian communists in 1964, and the purging of communists at home from all levels of government.
This wanton violence was generally against unarmed leftists. The nets were cast wide, such that even the slightest sympathy could get one thrown out of a helicopter, or put in a death camp, or thrown in prison and tortured. Of course, the US rarely did the dirty work themselves, relying instead on right-wing death squads and militaries in the home countries. But the funds, the equipment, and the training all came from the CIA.
Really, the Cold War was fought in three spheres: the ideological; the physical; and the economic. This book largely covers the physical violence that subdued communist movements across the global south, though some mention of the economic is made through reference to sanctions on Indonesia that strangled the economy, as well as Nixon's directive to "make the economy scream" (refering to Allende's socialist government in Chile). But the ideological sphere is where the Cold War was truly won. Somehow, terrible violence by right-wing regimes has been remembered as 'left-wing extremism,' poverty and hardship incurred by extreme sanctions (such as those still in place today on Cuba) has become equated with socialist economic policy, and when these various nations collapsed after unimaginable pressure from the West, this becomes a failure of socialism (the 'natural end'), rather than the consequence of extreme physical, ideological, and economic violence that any nation, regardless of economic system, would eventually succumb to.
I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.
I believe, however, that the tide is turning. For the average person under capitalism, life seems to be getting harder. Inequality is increasing, fascism is knocking at the door (or in the case of the United States, is actively abducting people off the street), the techno-optimism of the noughties is fading as it becomes clear that Silicon Valley has been building a global surveillance network with our labour. Many are turning to the reactionary right; blaming some mix of globalism, immigrants, 'the woke left,' and academics. But many are also turning the other way. In the United States (the very center of anticommunist fervor), socialism is experiencing a wave of popularity.[1] People are looking for answers, and liberalism can't provide them. The work of unpicking decades of propaganda is not easy, and yet more and more people are willing to educate themselves. As material conditions worsen for the average person, there is a great opportunity for change.
And this time, we'll know what to expect.
Footnotes
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Jeyaretnam, M. (2026, September 25). Surveys Show Socialism Growing in Popularity. Time. https://time.com/article/2026/09/25/socialism-is-more-popular-than-ever-in-the-u-s-according-to-polls/ ↩