The Jakarta Method is a very good book, I think that's where I first heard this story
if you only ever read one book in your life, it should be this one, especially if you live outside of the us
I liked it when he talked about crony capitalism, Stalinism and also the lengthy Obama quotes.
it's a book for normies, they had to act "unbiased" and "neutral" and "objective"
and more importantly, I didn't read that book to learn their opinion about Stalin, I've read it to learn about american crimes against humanity
I like the book too comrade. I just don't know if it's a desert Island text you know? Bevins is a lib, and it shows in the text even though the book is generally good.
Instead of being "asians believed in superstitious stuff about vampires"(kinda racist), it easily could have been people being scared of getting picked up in the middle of the night by American and Phillipine soldiers and ending up dead.
Another example of how ghoulish the US military has been throughout history. I hope they all sincerely die a horrible death.
TBF, lots of people believed in superstitious stuff about vampires. Vampire belief in Europe caught fire in the 18th century, the so called Age of Enlightenment, and though the reports originated among illiterate peasants, government officials and doctors sent to investigate were unable to refute them, and spread the belief through official channels and scholarly publications.
That doesn't mean when a bunch of the guerillas they supported show up in their village, murdered, that they didn't think it was the US. The article doesn't actually interview a single person. All it does is repeat whatever the CIA said.
Well yeah, it happened. But the CIA perspective is of course "haha we did this thing where we spooked people with superstition" where what actually happened was "we murdered people and dumped their bodies in sympathetic villages and that terrified people and stopped them from supporting the rebels." Like why would "vampires" decrease support for rebels? I doubt people thought the Aswang or whatever just hated rebel guerillas. That's just the CIA psychopath explanation. Yeah turns out murdering people and marking people for death makes people's self-preservation kick in.
This is so unhinged it almost becomes cool. I do not have to hand it to them, however.
I've heard of other CIA stuff like this where they think doing some "superstition thing" will spook people more. But it's often just the CIA being hamfisted and ignorant about it. They're white supremacists so of course they think "ooh lets get 'em with fake vampire stuff". The article actually says:
Reports revealed that the townspeople who were once either indifferent or sympathetic to the Huk cause were undoubtedly terrified.
Yeah, that tends to happen when you murder a bunch of people and dump their bodies in the village...
the “eye of God,” which would be painted on a wall facing the house of suspected Huk sympathizers in the dead of night. “The mysterious presence of these malevolent eyes the next morning had a sharply sobering effect,”
Another thing that doesn't require "superstition" to be scared of, the CIA eventually did this type of marking for death elsewhere (i.e. Vietnam later) and it was probably clear what was going on.
The CIA operation played into the narrative of “Godless Communism” or perhaps it was just proof of enduring Filipino culture and folklore. Whatever the operation proved, it did show that even amid rebellions, wars, and political plots, Filipinos—past and present—are still scared shitless by aswang.
Not once did they even mention that literally murdering people and placing their bodies in villages is scary no matter what, and that this stuff was clearly evil. This is just typical CIA 'isolate guerillas and terrorize and murder their "sympathizers"' type stuff. The Wikipedia article for Landsdale says he was directly told to do the same thing in Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lansdale#Vietnam
It's funny, the "publicly admitted via a book on their website" thing is a reference to how william blum's book killing hope is on their website, but this is only because they published files that they found on bin laden's computer. So, uh, thank you? bin laden?
tbf I'd be freaked out if it looked like people around ,e with leftist views were taken out by what appeared to be a vampire.
Y’all are missing the point about the CIA thinking the locals were superstitious. They didn’t care whether anyone believed attacks were actually vampires. They just cared that they all had a cohesive narrative to ground discussion of the events in. Like I could have a discussion with a lib about Russian bots where we’re basically talking about the same phenomenon but with me not believing in the explanation they do. This entire website is skeptical of Russiagate and yet we still use “Russian bot” as a shorthand for blatant ops.
If you leave a dead body in the town square, it can send a million messages. If you leave a dead body drained of blood with bite marks on its neck in the town square it sends a single message: “don’t go into the forest”. It’s about leveraging limited knowledge of a culture. Think literal white supremacist Americans reading pamphlets about the Philippines like the ones you make in grade school and trying to wage psychological warfare on that basis. By latching into that shared cultural shorthand, you’re controlling the narrative in a way that even children can understand immediately
