s’s Reviews > The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World > Status Update

tl;dr "In Indochina, Washington's anti-Communist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results."

All I have ever learnt about Konfrontasi in my 10 years of ss/hist/i&a education was that Indonesian Communists bombed the MacDonald House so (Indonesian) Communists = Bad ❌❌. Unfortunately I never bothered to do any research on this. Thank you Mr Bevins the amount of US interference in other nation's affairs is truly appalling.

...a 1949 book designed to teach Indonesian to colonial officials and tourists—except it didn’t contain any words allowing conversation. It was mostly a list of orders, all punctuated with exclamation marks.
Gardener, sweep the garden!
That broom is broken! Make a new broom!
Here are the dirty clothes!
And then, in a section called “Hold the Thief”:
All the silver is gone
The drawers of the sideboard are empty

For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the "nation" was not based on race or language (it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs), but constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice.