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Vincent Bevins Profile picture
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6 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
China is big, complicated, and very important. Its rise is a fact, whether you like it or not. For these reasons, we must think carefully, and speak honestly, about the country and its diverse characteristics. Reducing the entire nation to a strict good / bad binary is infantile
Imagine if someone said "US companies created the smartphone" and you replied "what about the Iraq War!?" Or if you said "the US has by far the world's largest prison population" and you said "the universities are very good!" Yet we routinely speak this stupidly about China.
Really I don't mind summaries, nor moral judgments. Fine if someone weighs everything up, and says "I think on balance their rise is good / bad." What really gets my goat is the tendency to interpret any given phenomenon in light of something very far away and totally unrelated
For example. The United States Postal Service is not guilty for the death of George Floyd. Some US citizens have decent politics, others are racist maniacs. It would be be quite good if we could treat nations outside the US and Western Europe as if they actually, fully exist

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Vincent Bevins Profile picture
13 Jan
So that piece was largely about US historical amnesia, and the false line between the "civilized" West and the rest, but I want to talk about this part here, since there is a lot of debate about the use of the word "coup"
If the Supreme Court had found a way to give the election to Trump, that's a "judicial coup" or lawfare. Flynn's martial law plan, if it re-engineered the election, would be a military coup. Congress denying the results would be "parliamentary" coup. And all would be "autogolpes"
It seems to me that very specifically, what happened on Wednesday Jan 6th is that Trump ordered his supporters to violently pressure Congress to carry out a "parliamentary coup" - which was never going to happen - but then they broke inside, and defiled the symbols of the state
Read 7 tweets
Vincent Bevins Profile picture
11 Jan
Vogue cover discourse is proof that there is no event monumental enough to stop social media from devolving into petty culture war bullshit. It is not even clear who runs the most powerful nation on Earth and everyone is quote-tweeting threads about whether lighting is violence
Apart from the fact that the cover is fine! There are two, and one simply seems to say "the next VP dresses like this, a casual Gen-X cool mom, isn't that an interesting and novel development?" Meanwhile a new nazi vanguard is hiding out in man caves throughout the Northeast
I want to edit my first tweet. It's not just "social media" - it's social media in our political epoch, in which to a large extent there is no real politics beyond culture war. Proper deference to the new girlboss is quite literally all you can ever ask for
Read 4 tweets
Vincent Bevins Profile picture
10 Oct 20
So: Ann Dunham definitely worked at the US Embassy, and Lolo definitely worked for the Indonesian Military, while the US-backed and blood-soaked Suharto dictatorship consolidated rule over Indonesia. But this tweet is probably not 100% right. Because many people asked, a thread:
First — there could be more. For The Jakarta Method (link in bio), I did not do special research into Ann or Lolo. But in "Dreams From My Father," (1995) Obama is clear that they were both surrounded by horrible people, and horrible things. His version could be wrong, of course.
But by just relying on Obama's own account, David Remnick's book, and other mainstream and very-public sources, you can insert that narrative into what we now know about 1965-1966 Indonesia, and the story is very striking, I think. That is how I tell it -
Read 13 tweets
Vincent Bevins Profile picture
1 Oct 20
So, I do believe we are seeing a kind of convergence between US and Latin American societies (a re-convergence? - most nations in the hemisphere are built on the same history) but you really should not do the "Good First World becoming like Bad Third World because Trump" trope
Many of the very bad things now "appearing" in rich North America were 1) already present in previous iterations of anglo North America 2) actually imposed on Central / South America by Washington. It's a back and forth. The hemisphere has been one big system for about a century
You do see the very beginnings of things like death squads in the US. But we had those before, and trained them elsewhere! You see re-convergence on oligarchy and its control of politics. But the whole thing, north and south, grew out of violent settler colonialism and exclusion
Read 5 tweets
Vincent Bevins Profile picture
10 Aug 20
Something like this happened to one of my best friends right after we graduated university. It's a story I always tell when trying to explain the insanity of the 🇺🇸 U.S. 🇺🇸 medical system:
My friend was like 22, and didn't have insurance. University coverage ends abruptly, and it's really common for people this age be themselves uncovered. While riding his bicycle home from his low-paid job one day, he was struck by a car in Oakland. He passed out in the street.
When he woke up, he found himself, in a daze, covered in blood. He looked up and saw that an ambulance was waiting for him. Knowing very well how these things work, he said "No! No! I'm fine. I am not going to the hospital." He knew that he could never afford the bill.
Read 8 tweets
Vincent Bevins Profile picture
5 Aug 20
I am very excited about this - next Thursday (August 13th) @SoeTjenMarching and I will discuss The Jakarta Method - not just the book, but the situation faced by survivors of the violence, and family members of the victims, to this day. Register here:
crowdcast.io/e/vincent-bevi…
The event is 6PM EST (1900 Brasília, 2300 London, 5am in Jakarta), hosted by @public_affairs and @powerHouseBooks. It will stay up after, so sign up even if you might be busy. I hope we can make clear that Indonesia 1965 is not in the past, but still affects of millions of people
To get a sense of the scale of the unresolved trauma unleashed by Indonesia 1965, you only have to look at the opening passage of @SoeTjenMarching's incredibly brave and important 2017 book, The End of Silence: ImageImage
Read 4 tweets

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