How art spread Maoism around the world, from China all the way to Peru

An excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F. Scott, explores the contradictions inherent in the global spread of China’s 20th century political doctrine
Manchester University Press Published: 1 Mar, 2020

“Contradiction is present in the process of development of all things; it permeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end.”Mao Zedong, ‘On Contradiction’, 1937

Art and images were and continue to be central channels for the transnation­al circulation and reception of Maoism. Though it is rarely acknowledged as such, the so-called Great Chinese Proletari­an Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was one the most extraordinary political upheavals of the 20th century. And similarly, no other post-war statesman has elicited more conflicted emotions than Mao.

Indeed, despite being responsible, by some controversial accounts, for tens of millions of deaths, the man known as the Great Helmsman is still widely revered both inside and outside China, and in the 21st century, the contested legacy of this powerful figure has only expanded.

A 1967 poster features an illustration of Mao Zedong above the phrase “Raise High the Great Red Flag of Mao Zedong Thought to Carry Out to the End the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Photo: Getty Images

Marking the 50-year anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, in both China and other countries, academic research produced pioneering studies of the Red Guards, the Shanghai People’s Commune, the “little red book” and seminal theoretical disputes (opposing, for instance, Mao to Deng Xiaoping). Some aspects of Maoism are being reasses­sed, partly because they speak to the present moment, such as Maoism’s critique of colonialism and racism.

If the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of anti-colonial struggles, and “an awakening sense of global possibility, of a different future”, this should also be ascribed to Maoism. Thus it comes as no surprise that Fredric Jameson viewed Maoism, rightly or wrongly, as “the richest of all the great new ideologies of the 1960s”, when the idea of “Maoist China” became a productive epistemological device to reimagine the world, to reinterpret its hierarchies and to act to change them.

Maoism preceded the Cultural Revolution, and can be traced to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, or even earlier. It was, however, only with the Sino-Soviet split and China’s experiments with nuclear weapons that it gained real momentum. Mao’s sustained criticism of the peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers, as well as his advocacy of armed struggles in the Third World, broke what many regarded as the theoretical and geopolitical impasse of Marxism.

Art and images were paramount in the dissemination and reception of Maoism’s revolutionary ambitions. Not only could they travel fast to distant places, but some visual conceits could also be easily adapted to specific contexts.

In recent years there has been a scholarly reappraisal of the art produced in China between 1966 and 1976. No longer stigmatised, this type of visual propaganda has been widely examined, helping to shed new light on the semantics, aesthetics and memories associated with Maoist plays, posters, photographs, paintings and artefacts of all sorts.


Gold drew the Chinese to Australia, why is their legacy largely forgotten?


The dynamics created by travelling objects (model works, “little red books”, posters, badges, pamphlets, journals, etc), people (intellectuals, party cadres, diplomats, activists, etc) and ideas associated with Maoism had an enormous impact. However, any effort to delineate the “standard Maoist position” on the arts is probably doomed to failure because of the long history, complex networks and diverse practices into which Maoism has crystallised. By the same token, searching for the putative “essence” of a Maoist aesthetic in Mao’s founding texts leads to an impasse.
The lecturer on modern Chinese history and literature
Julia Lovell has observed that the Cultural Revolution did not attract significant interest among students in the United States until 1968, when it began to resonate strongly with their own anti-establishment sentiment. She concludes that this identification is “far more informative about the preoccupations of these distant observers of Chinese politics than about Chinese politics itself”.

Students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing create political artworks. Photo: Getty Images


In his study of the anti-authoritarian Left in West Germany, the historian Timothy Scott Brown echoes Lovell’s remarks. He maintains that the reception of images associated with Maoism “served as a bridge between the global and the local”, and was driven “less by the meaning imputed to images or cultural products at their point of origin, than at the point of their reception”.

Yet scholarly literature has had little to say regarding the role played by art in global Maoism. The wealth of studies and exhibitions about the art of the Cultural Revolution has not been accompanied by comparable analyses of European, African, Asian and American artists who were heavily influenced and inspired by the events in China.

Nor has the recent interest in exploring the worldwide influence of Chinese communism in the 1960s and 1970s been met by a commitment to analysing the visual compo­nents of its reception. The omission is surprising, as for several years this global phenomenon shaped the work and thought of major artists as diverse as John Cage and Jörg Immendorff, to name just two.

For more than a decade, global Maoism permeated art production in a variety of ways that continue to be neglected by standard art-historical accounts of the post-war period. Caught between a cult of personality and libertarian impulses, thousands of artists, architects, designers and film directors appropriated or emulated the political ideals of the Cultural Revolution, translating them into a wide variety of visual propositions.

A Soviet communist poster. Photo: Getty Images

From the Californian campuses to the Peruvian campesinos, many attempted to integrate Mao’s principles and the Cultural Revolution’s material culture, iconography and slogans into their production and model of authorship, although in different, and at times highly incompatible, ways.

It is unlikely that the lack of scholarship on this topic is accidental. The widespread apprehension concerning the attribution of historical significance and intellectual sophistication to the Maoist phase of several American and European artists is directly related to the political implica­tions of espousing Mao Zedong Thought in the West. On the one hand, the predominant narratives of art history are still embedded in the Cold War dualistic conceptual frameworks, setting capitalism against communism.

Modern art and modernism were long ago constructed as the counterpoint to the propaganda of so-called totalitarian art, which brought durable discredit upon the latter. On the other hand, the current presence of Maoist guerillas makes the topic politically sensitive in several countries, pushing scholars to see Maoist artistic production as secondary over issues of state security. Moreover, claiming the political primacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution challenges the Eurocentrism of both the Left and the Right, which still, occasionally, thinks in terms of “oriental despotism”.

A further reason accounts for the scholarly reluctance to explore Maoist artists. The Red Guards’ “cultural” revolution represented a shocking rejoinder to the Western definition of “culture” as it had emerged since the Enlightenment. Denouncing ancestral traditions and wisdom not as a shared heritage that had to be preserved, but rather as an obstacle to the exigencies of communism, in the West the Red Guards were decried as vandals, destroying culture rather than renewing it

A poster created by communist trade unions celebrates May Day in Kolkata, India, on May 1, 2006. Photo: AFP


Maoism in India is still very much alive, and in several areas Maoist guerilla fighters continue to combat the Indian state. Sanjukta Sunderason’s chapter “Framing margins: Mao and visuality in 20th century India” maps the traces of Mao and Maoism in India’s long 20th century.

Drawing from the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s notion of visuality, Sunderason explores three key moments of Indian Maoism in relation to art: the iconography of resistance developed by the Communist Party of India in the 1940s, the Naxalites’ “statue-smashing” in Calcutta in the early 1970s and the afterlives of Maoism in Indian art from the mid-1970s to the present.

The early 1970s were a key period for Maoism in the US as well. Colette Gaiter’s chapter, “The Black Panther news­paper and revolutionary aesthetics”, looks at the work of the American artist Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, which at the time was subscribing to a political tendency known as “intercommunalism”.

More expansive than other strands of leftist thought, intercommunalism sought to unite countries of the world in resistance to global capitalism and imperialism. A wave of “Black Maoism” swept through black liberation movements at this time and came to visual life in Douglas’ work on The Black Panther newspaper.

An image in The Black Panther newspaper. Photo: Getty Images

The analysis then moves to the years of the Cultural Revolution, and to the two industrialised countries that were the first to see the emergence of a large Maoist movement: West Germany and France. Lauren Graber and Daniel Spaulding’s joint contribution, “The Red Flag: the art and politics of West German Maoism”, maps artistic Maoism in West Germany from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, tying it to both the student movement and the extra-parliamentary opposition. Looking at a broad sample of artists, the authors demonstrate how the image of Mao and the politics for which it stood became contested terrain where the complex dialectic of Pop and revolution was played out in perhaps its most spectacular form.

France is the European country where Maoism has had, perhaps, the most lasting and pervasive impact on society, with intellectuals – the most prominent being the philoso­pher Alain Badiou – continuing to eulogise Mao and the Cultural Revolution. This is especi­ally significant because of the role many French intellectu­als from this period had in the formulation and dissemi­nation of post­modernism.

Like their northern neighbours, southern European artists also appropriated the Cultural Revolu­tion’s political ideals and forms of authorship. “La Familia Lavapiés” as a collec­tive, collaborated but also argued with political leaders, mass organisations, political parties (especially the Communist Party), workers, students, neighbours and, of course, other artists.

Sympathetic to acracia (the suppression of any kind of authority, of domination, of power, of coercion) and Trotskyism, the members of La Familia Lavapiés saw art and Maoism as tools with which they unsuccessfully tried to challenge and transform the cultural and political milieu in which they carried out their activities.

Mao’s “little red book”. Photo: Getty Images

In several countries Maoism was so strongly refracted through the prism of the local specificities that it occasion­ally became a pretext and even a joke. Could one at once be a Maoist and poke fun at Mao’s cult? By 1976, some Italian militants were advocating a new form of Maoism that con­flated pop culture, autonomist Marxism, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophy and, last but not least, avant-garde art. They defined this trend as “Mao-Dadaism”.

In “Another red in the Portuguese diaspora: Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro’s Un autre livre rouge”, Ana Bigotte Vieira and André Silveira examine Un autre livre rouge, an artists’ book made by the Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro while they were living in Paris. The two-volume work alluded to Mao’s “little red book” and was entirely devoted to the contradictory meanings and psycho­logical associations that red conveyed.

The work was craft­ed mostly between 1973 and 1975 at a time of radical political change in Portugal. The Carnation Revolution and the PREC (Período Revolucionário Em Curso, Ongoing Revolutionary Period) informed Un autre livre rouge, which was, however, both less and more than a political book.

The significance of Maoism for global independence movements around the world is an important subject that merits further attention, particularly for countries in Africa, for example. In “Avenida Mao Tse Tung (or how artists navigated the Mozambican Revolution)”, Polly Savage examines Maoism in Mozambique. Drawing on interviews and archival records, the study focuses on the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (or FRELIMO).

A Peruvian Communist Party poster. Photo: Getty Images
Between 1970 and 1977 FRELIMO negotiated an artistic and cultural agenda combining, not without difficulties, leftist internationalism and local traditions. The analysis of works produced by the graphic designer “Mphumo” João Craveirinha Jnr offers insightful perspectives on how these tensions materialised in images. In the case of the artist Juan Carlos Castagnino, often considered to be the official painter of the Argentinian Communist Party, his relationship with China informed both his politics and his practice.

Peru was on the verge of becoming a Maoist state in 1990, set against the background of the civil war between the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), also known as Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), and the Peruvian state, a conflict that began in 1980 and lasted well into the 1990s.

Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published in 1950, is the world’s bestselling book in the field of art history. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, Gombrich wrote a scathing review of Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art. Criticising Hauser’s methodology, Gombrich argued that contradiction was an ontological trap that led to theoretical paralysis. But the notion of contradiction is an insightful one for describing and understanding the impact of Maoism on the visual arts.

Instead of eschewing the paradoxes that animate art history, one must expose them and reveal cultural contra­dictions for what they have always been: a powerful source of political, social and aesthetic transformation, for better or for worse.

Excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F. Scott. Published by Manchester University Press

Post Magazine / Books
Review | Forbidden Memory explores the role of Tibetan Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution

The starting point for Tsering Woeser’s book was a trunk of photographs taken by her father in Tibet in the 1960s

Based on more than 70 interviews, Woeser makes a powerful and nuanced argument against popular perceptions
Ajay Singh Published:  30 May, 2020

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The cover image from Forbidden Memory, Tibet During The Cultural Revolution, by Tsering Woeser. Photo: Handout
Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution
by Tsering Woeser
Potomac Books
4/5 stars

The Dalai Lama has called it “the most sacred temple” in Tibet. Located in the capital, Lhasa, and dating back to the seventh century, the Jokhang temple is a magnet for devout Tibetans who gather there every day to pray, prostrating themselves on the ground.

But among the worshippers who visit Jokhang these days, it would not be unusual to find former cadres of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary Red Guards – Tibetans who helped ransack the temple in the early years of China’s tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

That is the disquieting belief of Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan intellectual, blogger and critic of Beijing’s Tibet policies. In her latest book, Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing resident dives into one of the most traumatic chapters in Chinese history, during which cultural relics were destroyed and political enemies were targeted for public abuse and humiliation.

A rally at the People’s Stadium, in Lhasa, Tibet, on August 19, 1966. Photo: Tsering Dorje

The book is an updated English translation of Shajie, the title under which Woeser first published her work in Chinese, in Taiwan in 2006, the 40th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution\

Based on interviews with more than 70 people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, Forbidden Memory contains hundreds of photographs from the period taken by Woeser’s father, Tsering Dorje, a People’s Liberation Army officer born to a Chinese father and Tibetan mother

Woeser, who was born in 1966 just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning, inherited the photographs after her father died in 1991. But it wasn’t until 1999 that she thought of doing something with what she describes as “the most complete private record of these events yet to have come to light”. That year, she mailed the photographs to Wang Lixiong, a Chinese dissident whose book, Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet (1998), she had just read.

“I had never met him, but I thought that rather than leave father’s photographs sitting in the trunk, it might not be a bad idea to entrust them to a scholar willing to study Tibet in a balanced way,” Woeser writes.

Wang promptly returned the images. By letter, he explained they “belonged to the yet-to-be-rediscovered memory of Tibet”, as Woeser puts it. He said he would be willing to help –
Woeser and Wang eventually married – but as an outsider he was reluctant to take on the task alone.

The photographs in Woeser’s book depict everything from the destruction of religious relics, “struggle sessions” (a form of public humiliation and torture) and militia training to rallies, parades and manual labour. Just about every image captured by Woeser’s father is a precious historical resource: “until Woeser released this book there were no images of that period from Tibet in public circulation, either in Tibet or elsewhere in the world”, writes Robert Barnett, a British scholar of Tibetan performance art and media, in the book’s introduction.


Many of the photographs attest to the vandalism and violence of the revolution. When Red Guard cadres ransacked the Jokhang in 1966, for example, Woeser’s father photographed a young Tibetan woman hacking off the golden edging of the temple’s roof with a harrow.

The woman, like her compatriots, was following one of the revolution’s central tenets: denounce the “four olds” – old society, old culture, old traditions and old habits. Woeser wonders why the woman appeared to believe that “turning the past to ruins would give birth to a bright new world”. Her question, like many of the book’s 345 images, challenges readers “to try to understand the ideological constructions of the time that made such actions seem natural and even necessary to so many participants, both the rulers and the ruled”, writes Barnett.

In lucid, engaging prose interspersed with her own insights, Woeser highlights how the Cultural Revolution shaped the contours of Tibet’s negotiation with communist China. Her account is a powerful, nuanced argument against the popular perception that Tibetans strongly resisted Beijing’s secularisation and sinicising policies.

Woeser is intrigued by the possibility that many Tibetans became Red Guards, attracted to new ideas and revolutionary fervour. At the same time, she writes, “the atmosphere of red fear created by the authoritarian regime” probably left them no choice but to be “sucked against their will into the string ride of radicalism”.

Lhasa’s Jokhang temple, in 2012. Photo: Tsering Woeser

A close look at a photograph depicting the installation of a Mao portrait on the rooftop of the Jokhang illustrates the author’s viewpoint. The image captures crowds gathered to watch uniformed Red Guards place the portrait and a Chinese flag in a spot previously occupied by the Wheel of Dharma, a revered Buddhist symbol.

“Tibetans would not easily abandon their gods,” Woeser writes. But the occupation and the Dalai Lama’s 1959 exile, “seem to have shown that the new god was so powerful that the ancient gods of the land had been defeated”.

She adds: “Tibetans can be said to have been in shock, stunned by everything that was unfolding before their eyes, so that when the Cultural Revolution took place, they accepted the new reality.”



Ajay Singh is a Los Angeles-based journalist who worked as a staff correspondent for Asiaweek magazine in Hong Kong in the 1990s and in the New Delhi bureaus of The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Post Magazine / Books

Review | The Road: new book shines a light on Indonesia’s 50-year forgotten war in West Papua as it flares again

Australian journalist John Martinkus documents West Papuan indigenous tribes’ fight to recover ancestral lands annexed by Indonesia

Construction of a controversial highway sparked an escalation last year with Indonesia deploying troops and chemical weapons

Tom Fawthrop 6 Jun, 2020

Central Highlands villagers, shown here with the Morning Star flag in the West Papua capital, have been fighting to recover their ancestral lands for 50 years. Picture: Getty Images

The Road: Uprising in West Papua
by John Martinkus
Black Inc
3.5/5 stars

After 50 years of popular resistance to Indonesian rule in West Papua, this forgotten war is flaring up again. 

The indigenous movement, led by the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), has never lost hope of recovering ancestral lands dating back centuries before their annexation by Indonesia.
Military operations intensified in the Central Highlands region of Nduga last year as the uprising spread. Another 16,000 troops were dispatched to protect the construction of a controversial Trans-Papua Highway. Helicopters dropped bombs and strafed villages. About 45,000 refugees fled across the border into Papua New Guinea.

“It is the helicopters that are the worst. They are used as platforms to shoot or drop white phosphorous grenades or bomblets that inflict horrible injuries on the populace,” John Martinkus writes in his new book, The Road: Uprising in West Papua.


Martinkus depicts a dirty little war far removed from the glittering shopping malls of Jakarta, in a distant out­post of the vast Indonesian archipelago, hidden from the world. The Indonesian military denies it uses white phos­phorus, a banned agent of chemical warfare. But photos of the Papuan victims in the book display gruesome wounds consistent with this chemical.
The Australian journalist has risked his life many times bringing news from the front lines in East Timor and Aceh, and is now committed to lifting the veil of secrecy over West Papua. At least eight foreign journalists – including Australian, Dutch and Swiss – have died reporting from these Indonesian war zones.

Martinkus writes: “After seeing the violence and knowing people the Indonesian security forces have killed, tortured and jailed in East Timor, Aceh and Papua, I cannot, as a human being and a journalist, walk away from this story and let the lies, obfuscations and outright atrocities against the people of those three Indonesian conflicts go unreported.”

The Indonesian government has a different narrative. It says it wants to bring development to a remote province by building an ambitious road – the 4,300km Trans-Papua Highway, costing US$1.4 billion – through the jungle to bring “wealth, development and prosperity” to the isolated regions of West Papua.

But that is not how West Papuans see it, according to Martinkus. “The road would bring the death of their centuries-old way of life. The highway brings military occupation by Indonesian troops, exploitation by foreign companies, environmental destruction and colonisation by Indonesian transmigrants from other provinces.” This mineral-rich region hosts the world’s largest gold mine and second largest copper mine.

The Suharto-era transmigrasi policy involved organi­sing a massive migration of farmers from overpopulated Java to become settlers in West Papua. Many believe the highway will increase the number of settlers and the Melanesian tribes are convinced this will pave the way for their cultural extinction.

Author John Martinkus. Photo: Handout

When East Papua celebrated its independence, in 1975, as Papua New Guinea, the western part of the island was saddled with a shoddy United Nations-brokered deal (1969) awarding de facto sovereignty to Indonesia. Papuans passionately believe they were cheated.

While the book draws many parallels between the East Timor and West Papua conflicts, it does not give enough coverage to the major differences between the two liberation struggles. In the case of West Papua, Indonesia steadfastly claims the 1969 UN agreement granted it eternal sovereignty over West Papua.

Key Western governments – the United States, Britain and France on the UN Security Council, and Australia, Indonesia’s closest neighbour – all have substantial business investment, trade and military ties with Jakarta. They are only too happy to support Jakarta’s narrative that it is fighting a “separatist rebellion” and defending its sovereign territory.

By appointing a controversial general, Wiranto – who goes by one name – as the senior minister dealing with West Papua, Indonesian President Joko Widodo has tied himself to a militarist policy. Wiranto was indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor by a UN court in 2003, but Jakarta declined to hand him over.
Two decades later, Wiranto has rejected all Papuan demands to end the war by agreeing to a referendum with the words: “The door is closed to any referendum.”

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (second right) with his delegation to look at the Trans-Papua Highway. Photo: AFP
The big difference with East Timor was that the UN never recognised Jakarta’s annexation and, together with former colonial power Portugal, pushed for the referendum that delivered independence.

In 2019, after years of isolation, a diplomatic campaign by the ULMWP took off. The group was granted observer status at the Pacific Islands Forum and its call for a referen­dum was backed at the UN General Assembly by several Melanesian governments.

Last year, the exiled West Papuan leader and ULMWP chairman, Benny Wenda, delivered a historic petition with 1.8 million signatures to Michelle Bachelet, director of the UN Human Rights Council. It was smuggled out from the West Papua jungles on a long, perilous journey to her office in Geneva, Switzerland. Bachelet has expressed grave concern over the situation in West Papua but, predictably, Jakarta has denied her requests to allow a UN human rights mission access to the region.

With no referendum or international effort to restrain the Indonesian army, this book serves as grim reminder that another genocide could be in the making and, like the Rohingya in Myanmar, another outpouring of refugees.

Post Magazine / Books
Review | Sukarno, Suharto, and the US-backed mass murder of communists in Indonesia that set the template for Cold War regime change worldwide

Slaughter in Indonesia in 1965 set template for the systematic mass murder of civilians in the name of anticommunism, Vincent Bevins says in The Jakarta Method
‘This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union,’ he writes


Kit Gillet Published:  28 Jun, 2020

Indonesian president Sukarno (left), who handed over his presidential power to military strongman Suharto in February 1967, is shown with Suharto during an Independence Day Parade in Jakarta, in October 1966. Photo: AP

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, PublicAffairs. 3/5 stars

In 1965, the Indonesian military killed as many as one million of their own country­men, destroying the third-largest communist party in the world and taking with it pretty much anyone seen as having left-wing tendencies (as well as hundreds of thousands who had nothing to do with anything).


Not many people were killed in the streets or officially executed, but rather disappeared into the night.

On the island of Bali, at least 5 per cent of the population, about 80,000 people, were killed, but even today, the events of 1965 are little known outside Indonesia, or even within it.

“For more than 50 years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either,” writes journalist Vincent Bevins in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. The book attempts to lift the veil while also putting the bloody events in a global context and pointing an accusatory finger at the United States.


In many ways the violence was a result of actions by the American government and the CIA, which during the Cold War used any means possible to stop the spread of communism. This often involved installing friendly right-wing strongmen in countries around the world, even if it meant overturning democratic processes and being complicit in acts of brutality.

Indonesia in 1965 wasn’t the first time the US govern­ment got involved in overthrowing an elected government, or the last, but it would be highly consequential.

“This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programmes in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile,” writes Bevins.


Between 1945 and 1990, a loose network of US-backed anti-communist extermination programmes carried out mass murder in at least 22 countries, and these groups often learned from one another, adopting methods developed in other countries. Some used the term “Jakarta”, harking back to events in Indonesia.

America has come to terms with Indonesia’s past. Why can’t Indonesians?
29 Oct 2017


Like many countries during this period, Indonesia, a parliamentary democracy and the world’s fourth most-populous country, had tried to remain neutral, engaging and often receiving aid from both the US and the Soviet Union. However, under president Dwight D. Eisenhower, the US began to take a more aggressive approach to deciding if and when an independent nation had become insufficiently anti-communist, writes Bevins. Indonesia and its playboy president, Sukarno, increasingly came under the microscope.

Bevins, a Southeast Asia correspondent for The Washington Post and previously the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has created a powerful record of the often-muddled events in Indonesia following a botched coup on September 30, 1965, which was blamed on commu­nist forces.

The book covers the appearance and rise of military strongman General Suharto, who was considered friendly to US interests and would go on to rule the country until 1998.

“Everything Suharto did in October [1965] suggests that he was executing an anti-communist counter-attack plan that had been developed in advance, not simply reacting to events,” writes Bevins, who adds that Washington quickly began to supply communication equipment to the army and made it clear that direct assistance could resume if the local communist party was destroyed, the president removed, and attacks on US investments stopped

Most disturbing, the US embassy prepared lists of the names of thousands of communists and suspected commu­nists, “and handed them over to the army, so that these peo­ple could be murdered and ‘checked off’ the list”. One embassy worker reportedly said that he “probably has a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad”. Managers of US-owned plantations also furnished the names of “troublesome” communists and union organisers, who were subsequently killed

Meanwhile, American publications and journalists parroted the official line, even as rumours of widespread violence circulated and a further million citizens were herded into concentration camps.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it worked. “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for Cold War neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order,” historian John Roosa is quoted as saying.

“I came to the conclusion that the entire world, and especially the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America … has been reshaped by the waves emana­ting from Brazil and Indonesia in 1964 and 1965.”Vincent Bevins writes in The Jakarta Method

While Indonesia is a focus of the book, the narra­tive stretches far beyond the country’s borders, detailing CIA-backed regime changes across vast swathes of the world.

Bevins suggests the US-backed dictatorship in Brazil, which took power in a coup in 1964, played a crucial role in pushing the rest of South America into the anti-communist group of nations. “I came to the conclusion that the entire world, and especially the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, … has been reshaped by the waves emana­ting from Brazil and Indonesia in 1964 and 1965,” he writes. These two events “led to the creation of a monstrous inter­national network of extermination – that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians – across many more countries”.

Communist parties elsewhere could not fail to take note, with some adopting a more militant attitude perhaps in response to the right-wing threat.

The Jakarta Method offers an easily digestible chrono­logy of this bloody period of Indonesian and world history. While at times the narrative can be too systematic, and lacking in prose that would bring it more to life, the result is a powerful reminder that in many countries around the world, the Cold War was anything but cold, and those that suffered the most were often ordinary people.

In one of the most revealing passages of the book, Bevins describes how eyewitnesses and victims, all these years later, talk about that period in terms of weeks, specific dates, hours, even minutes. The trauma and suffering are still raw, made worse by a lack of public discussion and closure.

As much as the brutal methods were abhorrent, Bevins admits they were effective. “I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder,” he writes, but adds that the extermination programmes in countries such as Indonesia, “organised and justified by anti-communist principles”, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.


It is a sobering thought.

Read more

The Road: Indonesia’s 50-year forgotten war in West Papua

Here’s The Grisly Details On The Most Devastating And Deadly Plagues, Pandemics, and Epidemics in History
 April 26, 2020 By Paige Steinman

Flickr/Scanpix

As the World Economic Forum notes: “Throughout history, as humans spread across the world, infectious diseases have been a constant companion.” While some of these diseases come and go, others have left the world in turmoil and tens of millions dead. Here’s a grisly in-depth look at some of the deadliest, most devastating epidemics and pandemics of all time, how they spread, and the havoc they wreaked.

1. Antonine Plague (165-180)

When the Roman army returned from their siege of ancient Mesopotamia in 165, they may have achieved a military win. But that victory came with a lot of losses in the aftermath, thanks to the germs the soldiers brought back with them. In total, five million people died during the Antonine Plague not only in the Roman Empire, but across the Mediterranean region.


Nicholas Poussin/Wikimedia Commons

While no one is exactly sure what the disease itself was, many historians guess it was a strain of measles or smallpox. When the plague began, the Roman Empire was at the height of their power. By the end, the unknown disease had killed millions of Romans, and the ranks of the once-mighty Roman military had been decimated.





2. Plague of Justinian (541-542)

To imagine the Plague of Justinian happening today would be like picturing the apocalypse happening right in front of our eyes. An astounding 25 million people (at minimum) died from this early pandemic, killing 10 percent of the entire world’s population and one-fourth of the total population living in the Eastern Mediterranean region.


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The plague’s epicenter was in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire at the time, and was named for the Byzantine emperor himself, who managed to survive the disease. At its peak, the Plague of Justinian is believed to have killed 5,000 people in the city every single day. There was no infrastructure to support this amount of death, so corpses would sometimes be placed in the streets or in empty buildings.





3. Black Death (1347-1351)

There’s a reason the Black Death, otherwise known as the Great Bubonic Plague, remains so infamous. With jaw-dropping speed and fatality, it claimed the lives of up to 200 million people over just four years. Entire populations of towns were completely obliterated, and the dead often had to be tossed into mass graves.



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While the Black Death hit Europe the hardest, this strain of plague is thought to have originated in Asia. The disease reportedly spread because merchants often traveled back and forth between the continents. Unbeknownst to them, as they carried with them on board goods to sell, hitching a ride were the flea-infested rats responsible for transmitting the illness.





4. New World Smallpox Outbreak (1520-1902)

While Europeans had generations to build up a natural immunity, when European explorers entered the “New World” of the Americas, the smallpox they brought with them was absolutely catastrophic to communities living there. For example, by the time the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, it’s estimated that 90% of local peoples had already died of smallpox germs that had traveled north from Spanish colonies. By then, nearly the entire native population of Central and South America had succumbed.



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In total, over 56 million people across the Americas died as a result of smallpox. Mexico’s population crashed from around 11 million before European arrival to just one million. As it spread south, the disease was credited with weakening the Aztec and Inca Empires even before Spanish conquest. Smallpox is ancient, as evidenced from signs on 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies, and eventually was the first pandemic to be eradicated via vaccination.





5. Italian Plague (1629-1631)

Long after the Black Death had ended, the same viral strain popped up again after troops returned home to Italy from the Thirty Years’ War. And this time, Italy would lose about 1 million of its residents. This deadly pandemic in Italy caused those who were infected to have to stay in sick houses and burn all of their possessions out of fear.



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This period also gave rise to the now-iconic plague doctors, who were paid by the city to treat everyone regardless of their wealth. These doctors famously wore a black overcoat, along with a bizarre, macabre mask featuring glass eye openings and a beak-like nose. Unfortunately, many of these doctors had little to no training, and more often than not, their patients would die.





6. Great Plague of London (1665-1666)

In the centuries following the Black Death, the bubonic plague sprang up a few more times throughout Europe, but the capital of England was the hardest hit during the Great Plague of London in 1665. During that time, 100,000 Londoners died in just seven short months. Throughout London, one of Europe’s largest cities even then, every resident was quarantined and public events were banned.



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As the wealthy fled their London homes for the countryside, the poor were left to suffer the losses. All homes where a family member was sick had to be marked with a red cross painted on their doors. As animals beyond just rats were rumored to have carried the disease, many families had to put down their livestock and pets during this tragic time.


7. Yellow Fever (1793)

In 1793, Philadelphia was the capital of the United States, and it was facing a major health crisis. In a short period of time, 5,000 people in just that city alone had died, and thousands had met a similar fate across the Eastern United States due to yellow fever.



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Researchers at the time knew that this outbreak had been caused primarily by mosquitoes. Because of this, they also believed that slaves who had been sent over from Africa had an immunity to this illness. Female slaves were sent to work in hospitals. In total, 100,000 to 150,000 people died of the disease during the hot summer of 1793. The epidemic only ended when the winter months killed off the mosquitoes.





8. Cholera Pandemics 1-6 (1817-1923)

In the 19th and 20th centuries, six different waves of cholera pandemics surged across the globe. They wreaked havoc throughout Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa, and cost the lives of over 1 million people worldwide. The disease’s cause, now widely-known to be caused by contaminated and unsafe food and drinking water, managed to stump researchers for a long time.



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That was until the English doctor John Snow began studying the infections throughout mid-19th century England. Dr. Snow traced 500 fatal cases to one area surrounding the Broad Street water pump in London’s West End, where much of the city got its drinking water. Once a piece was removed, cases in that area cleared up, and scientists began to realize that contaminated water was a vector. However, it would be nearly a century before cholera pandemics ceased spreading.





9. Third Plague (1855)

Over time, the Plague of Justinian became known as the First Plague and the Black Death was often referred to as the Second Plague. But in 1855, a new pandemic sweeping across the world killed 12 to 15 million people, landing itself a place in notoriety with its name, the Third Plague.



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This pandemic originated in Yunnan Province in southern China and ravaged both China and India, but quickly spread to every inhabited continent in the world. The disease was thought to have been caused by fleas found on rats, and just as the Black Death had traveled, it spread as these rats stowed away on cargo ships from one country to the next. That theory was later proven in 1894.


10. Russian Flu (1889-1890)

For many of the plagues and flues that came before, the world’s population was relatively safe because travel was not very easy. When these viruses spread in the past, it was largely because of cargo ships. That all changed with the arrival of the late-19th century pandemic called the Russian flu or the Asiatic flu.


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This virus includes Russia in its name because at that time the Russian Empire had significantly built up its railroads, causing the disease to spread rapidly within a matter of days as people traveled. By the time it ended, it had killed approximately 1 million people, and became known as the last major pandemic of the 19th century.





11. Spanish Flu (1918-1920)

The First World War had devastated a generation — and then, even before it had ended, along came the Spanish flu. In total, an estimated 500 million people became infected. About one-fifth of those infected, about 40 to 50 million people, died due to the illness. But while it holds the name Spanish flu, this deadly strain of influenza did not start in Spain at all.



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During World War I, Spain was one of the few neutral nations, and therefore had a free press that did not censor its news. As the flu spread throughout the country, infecting even the king, the Spanish press was one of the few outlets able to freely publish its startling death tolls. This led many in the world to think that the epicenter was in Spain, though in reality, this flu had spread all over the world.





12. Asian Flu (1957-1958)

The pandemic now known as the Asian flu was an influenza strain that the world had not yet seen before. The H2N2 subtype of influenza A spread quickly. Its first outbreak was traced back to the Guizhou Province in China, and the disease had spread to Singapore by February of 1957.



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By April that same year, Hong Kong was experiencing an outbreak, and by the summer of 1957, the Asian flu had reached the shores of the United States. Estimated death tolls vary, but are usually said to be between 1.1 and 2 million, with over 69,000 deaths occurring in the United States alone.





13. Hong Kong Flu (1968-1970)

The Hong Kong flu began, as the name would show, in Hong Kong, but this dangerous strain of H3N2 influenza A traveled quickly. The first case ever reported was recorded on July 13, 1968. Just 17 short days later, there were outbreaks popping up elsewhere in East Asia, in countries such as Singapore and Vietnam.



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From there, the virus continued to spread throughout the Philippines, as well as infecting populations in India, Australia, Europe, and parts of the United States. Over the following few years, 1 million people died as a result, including about 500,000 people in Hong Kong, which accounted for about 15 percent of Hong Kong’s total population.





14. HIV/AIDS (1981-present)

The first official case of HIV/AIDS was identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976. From there, this truly devastating pandemic has gone on to claim the lives of an estimated 35 million people worldwide. In 1980s and 1990s, the disease had reached a peak in the United States, disproportionately affecting the country’s gay and black communities.



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As there was no cure for decades, along with much governmental failure to adequately respond, the epidemic wiped out nearly an entire generation of gay men. While a “drug cocktail” was finally developed and brought the mortality rate down, there are still an estimated 31 to 35 million people living with HIV, most of whom reside in Sub-Saharan Africa.





15. SARS (2002-2003)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome, otherwise known as SARS, was first identified in November 2002 in China. The first “super-spreader” of SARS is believed to have been a Chinese fisherman who spread the disease to 30 nurses and doctors. And from this group, the virus quickly spread to Hong Kong, Vietnam, Canada, Taiwan, Singapore, and other parts of the world.



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At the time of the outbreak, China was criticized not only for its slow response to SARS, but also for not being very forthcoming with information related to deaths and infections. By the time the outbreak was finally contained, it had infected 8,000 people and killed nearly 800.





16. Swine Flu (2009-2010)

Swine flu was given its name because this particular strain of influenza had genetic features very similar to the type that affects pigs. Never before witnessed affecting humans, in 2000 the virus began to emerge in Mexico, causing devastation in its wake as it spread across the planet.



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In just one year, an estimated 200,000 people died due to swine flu, and as many as 1.4 billion people became infected. Unlike many other flu strains, this particular flu affected young people much more frequently than those over the age of 65. After this breakout, a vaccine was developed that is now regularly administered.





17. Ebola (2014-2016)

Ebola was one of the first, if not the first, epidemic to have played out during a 24-hour news cycle. Because of this, as the story spread almost as fast as the disease itself, millions of people watched the devastating effects of ebola from their TV screens, while those living in West Africa had to watch it unfold first hand.




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Ebola was not a new phenomenon. But during this particular ebola outbreak, the deadliest in history, 11,315 people died in six West African countries just 21 months after the epidemic was declared. The virus killed about 66 percent of the people it infected, turning a diagnosis into somewhat of a death sentence. In the years since, the World Health Organization has declared the region ebola-free, only for new cases to pop up almost immediately.





18. MERS (2015-Present)

Middle East respiratory syndrome, also known as MERS, was first discovered in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, giving this particular virus its name. But it took years before this strange new virus began to spread. But its travel path, although not as large as other epidemics, was deadly. For every 50 people infected with MERS, about 17 died.



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The virus, which was thought to have been passed on through infected camels, was most common in Saudi Arabia. In that country alone, 1,030 people were infected and 453 died, a roughly 44 percent fatality rate. The second most-affected country was far away in South Korea, which saw 182 cases. In total, 850 people passed away from MERS during the outbreak.





19. Zika Virus (2015-2016)

What made Zika virus so terrifying was that it did not seem to affect adults or children as much as it affected infants who were still in the womb, the most defenseless. The virus, linked to infected mosquitoes, caused thousands of babies across South and Central America to be born with underdeveloped brains, neurological problems, and small misshapen heads.



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The outbreak became so horrifying and was spreading so rapidly that women in places like Brazil were warned to delay any pregnancies. Women across the world who were pregnant or hoped to soon be pregnant were advised not to visit affected countries.





20. COVID-19 (2019-Present)

COVID-19, also referred to as Coronavirus, first began in Wuhan Province in China, but before long the entire world was feeling its crippling effects. What first started as a lockdown in Wuhan quickly turned the world into one continuous ghost town, with nearly every town and city in the world shut down for business as the virus spread.



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Entire countries closed down for business and people were told not to leave their homes beyond absolute necessities, let alone without face masks. The number of cases and the death toll continued to climb with numbers nearly rivaling the Spanish flu. Chinese wet markets were once said to be the cause of COVID-19, though other research has disputed those claims leaving this global pandemic somewhat of a mystery.

Sources: World Economic Forum, CNN, CDC