The Jakarta Method mostly interviews SocDems and DemSocs, the people who tried to organize more horizontally and believing in the capacity of nonviolent institutional work to bring about their political aims. The communists organized and tried to get these groups to arm, and they did not, and over a million people were murdered because of it, mostly those on the left. Spreading idealism can itself be dangerous to us and ours, it does not prepare us or our neighbors for the fight, it gets people on lists for no reason, it gets them jailed or injured for no reason, etc etc. The default is a tyranny of leaderlessness and disorganization, it must be combatted.

Bevins’ follow-up book, If We Burn, is a much mnore scathing review of Western horizontalism, which I won’t even call anarchism (I respect anarchists!), since it is really not very principled and has no interest in education or organization, instead embracing the antithesis to arrive at personal self-soothing. In a way it is just Bevins’ reflecting on his own personal growth as well, since the Jakarta Method is actually pretty idealist and naive on its attempt to understand the topic and the history before and around it, whereas If We Burn is almost a rediscovery of the basic methods of organizing lost to decades of red scare anticommunism (which works like those posted up top end up trying to affirm).