User Profile

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 Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (Page 240)

There are heated debates as to whether China has grown because it embraced capitalism or because it had Communist reforms and still remains under the control of a technocratic single party. But what is clear is that China is absolutely not an anticommunist regime created by US intervention in the Cold War

— The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (Page 235)

The thing about destabilizing a country is you don't need surgical precision. A pretty big hammer works.

— The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (Page 196)

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that mass murder is occurring, the human instinct is to hold out hope that your son, or your daughter, might be saved. This freezes people, and makes populations much more quiescent — easier to exterminate and easier to control.

— The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (Page 145)

He recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: 'We just don't understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?'

— The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (Page 74 - 75)