![]() ![]() Other leftwing or “realist” scholars looked at the slaughter of a half million civilians in a rather different light. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. Something very bad happened in the messy aftermath, but it was a victory for the anticommunist cause defending freedom around the world. Since the US was apparently taken by surprise at the specific date of the rightwing uprising, the Agency could not possibly have been at fault. The scholarly rationalizers of the 1965 coup in Venezuela added something else, more characteristic of CIA logic. ![]() It was surely unfortunate, but in the first place, “we” had to support them or the dictators would take aid from the Russians, and in the second place, without our guidance, the campaigns against civilians would be less orderly and even worse. ![]() Fifty years ago, notable liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., late of the Kennedy White House, would explain to critics of US foreign policy that Americans were at times compelled to support dictators, supplying them weapons and military training that resulted, sometimes, in the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians or even more. ![]()
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