What those within the core imperialist countries should keep in mind while reading this article is that just because they’re in a wealthier and safer part of the world than the Global South, doesn’t mean they’re immune from any of the dangers I’m about to describe. The Jakarta Method, the model for exterminating affiliated or suspected communists that was carried out by the U.S.-installed military dictatorship in Indonesia, had precedent within the core imperialist countries of Germany, Italy, and Spain during their fascist eras.
Under the Third Reich, the rate of communists who were killed was almost a hundred percent. Should the United States, the United Kingdom, or any other imperialist power undergo a process parallel to the rise of Nazi Germany—which seems increasingly likely as capitalist reaction intensifies—we’ll be met with the same kinds of threats that those within the Global South more urgently face. Which is why it’s crucial for us to pay attention to Jakarta’s lessons.
1: Communists will be vulnerable to mass extermination if they don’t take the routes of building a workers state, and of militantly preparing to defend against counterrevolutionary violence. At the end of The Jakarta Method, the investigative account of the extermination campaign written by the journalist Vincent Bevins, the survivors of the Indonesian regime’s torture centers articulated this idea. Bevins asked them how they viewed the revolutionary approach of Mao and Che—that being armed struggle, the overthrow of the capitalist state, and the construction of a new proletarian state—compared to the electoral and peaceful approach that Indonesia’s communist party was taking in the leadup to the military’s takeover.
Bevins described them as having acknowledged that Mao and Che’s Marxist-Leninist approach is better for carrying social movements to victory, and for preemptively stopping the horrors they experienced at the hands of a victorious counterrevolution. The country’s communist leadership declined to arm their members out of desire for peace, and this left these members far less able to escape the atrocities that followed.
This lesson is so important because there are those trying to obfuscate it. The U.S. Marxist polemicist Caleb Maupin has proclaimed that “Leftists talking about ‘people’s war’ or ‘guerilla warfare’ on social media should be held with extreme suspicion. This rhetoric is irresponsible, childish, & extremely dangerous. Genuine socialists have always advocated a peaceful democratic transition away from capitalism.” Here he’s not merely expressing concern about how reckless language can bring upon the wrath of the security state, which would be reasonable. His wording shows he’s pushing the narrative that a revolution based in militancy—in other words in the overthrow of the capitalist state—would somehow not be “democratic.”
These kinds of positions stem from the revisionist strains of “communism” that imperialism has cultivated. Maupin and his camp of revisionists—who incidentally also take the stance that patriotism for the U.S. settler state should be upheld by communists—share the strategic view of the Euro Communists. Eurocommunism seeks to build upon the “democratic” institutions of the bourgeoisie, with this rationale developing out of Nikita Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” doctrine for how communists should relate to capitalism. Unsurprisingly, it was this doctrine that led to the Soviet Union’s downfall by eroding the USSR’s commitment to class struggle.
Concepts like “peace” and “democracy” can’t be allowed to get weaponized towards blunting revolution. Communists have engaged in this pitfall before, and it’s brought upon either the dissolution of existing revolutions or brutal triumphs for counterrevolution. If and when the bourgeoisie refuse to allow us peace or democracy, we must respond with the practical steps needed to survive and win. Not shout down any movements towards militancy out of fear that this isn’t “peaceful” or “democratic” in the view of bourgeois ideology.
2: When faced with Jakarta, communists will need to flee or go into hiding to avoid being killed, or at least to avoid being tortured and incarcerated. When Indonesia’s military regime took over, and the purge started, the authorities would try their best to make things outwardly appear normal. They would come to the doors of suspected communists with statements like “we need to take in someone for questioning,” as if it was a friendly detective procedure where the targeted person could very well be released soon. Then they either killed the detainee, or put them into a concentration camp, or simply left them to languish within the catacombs of the carceral system out of purposeful negligence towards their wellbeing. These were the lucky ones; those they executed had their bodies discretely disposed of, the dictatorship then erasing the record of their murder.
When the regime identified someone as a threat, which could happen as easily as them getting found out to be involved in a union or a feminist group, there was no escaping Jakarta. If Jakarta wanted you gone, it could deploy not just the state’s forces, but the civilian reactionaries who the regime had whipped up into an anti-communist frenzy through inflammatory propaganda. The entire population became a weapon in the repression, because incentive was provided for anyone who informed upon potential communists in their midst. In this environment, the only ways to safety were to flee the country, or remain within the country while making oneself inaccessible to the fascists.
Such a nightmare scenario sounds overwhelming to be the target of, especially should it happen under an advanced modern digital surveillance state. The government would be able to track us down through mobile devices, as well as facial recognition street cameras, surveillance drones, satellites, and towers that can monitor everyone outdoors within a radius of several miles. These towers, designed by the Israeli apartheid enforcers, are getting built within growing sections of the continental United States, starting at the southern border. Eventually they’ll encompass the northern border, as well as the coastal centers where immigrants can potentially find their way into the country. Should Jakarta happen here, they’ll be used to track down dissidents. And if such a purge starts, the tower network could then be expanded into every internal crevasse of the country that the government can manage to construct them in.
However, the imperialists have their limits, and we could exploit these limits to survive should we not manage to flee our countries before a purge starts where we are. Under the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, the communists were able to not just avoid capture, but establish sovereignty within localities, through use of the guerrilla warfare strategies that Che wrote a guide to. And in places like Yemen, where the imperialists use modern drone technology to scour the land for anti-imperialist Houthi rebels, the rebels can sustain a game of cat and mouse. As military analyst Michael Horton has written about how the Houthis stay alive, they’ve embraced a philosophy of “move or die”:
Force mobility has been—and remains—fundamental to the Houthis’ success in battling elements of the Saudi and Emirati militaries as well as those forces they support. These forces include Yemen’s internationally recognized government-in-exile, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which is allied with Saudi Arabia, and a panoply of militias and armed groups supported by the UAE. The Houthis understand and readily apply what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley explained in 2016, “on the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or three hours, you will be dead.” General Milley made his comments in light of the widespread use of drones and other rapidly developing battlefield technologies.
Getting prepared to put these survival strategies into practice is a far larger topic. What’s crucial for me to mention about it for now is that it’s all dependent on tact and timing. Wait too long to prepare, and you’ll be as vulnerable as the unarmed Indonesian dissidents were.
3) Communists must study the past times when Jakarta was employed so that by the moment it strikes where they are, they’ll have already escaped it. In other words, we need to know the red flags when we see them, then act accordingly. Many Indonesians were easily able to notice these warning signs during the leadup to the coup; they saw suspicious happenings that reflected how the CIA had previously sabotaged anti-imperialist movements. But when the moment came, it felt like a wild twist, because the fascists had struck from the (outwardly perceived) position of vulnerability. Indonesia’s armed forces had just assassinated several right-wing generals in an attempt to preemptively stop a CIA coup—or so the narrative went. In fact, the operation was designed as a way to create narrative precedent for the military to take over, under the guise that they were defending Indonesia from a communist subversion plot. It was a false flag.
In the U.S., we’ve been seeing parallels to this fascist trickery. The MAGA movement’s narrative that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him has been used to justify the January 6th attack on the Capitol, as well as a new wave of Republican voter suppression. Lately, it’s also been used as propaganda fodder for the activities of the Patriot Front, the neo-Nazi organization that orchestrated an additional march on the Capitol in December. Their calls during the march to “reclaim America” are being heeded by growing amounts of the GOP’s extremist faction, which has undergone a boost during the last couple years with the rise of the QAnon movement’s influence among Republican lawmakers. According to notes from an investigation by the Arizona Mirror, one Patriot Front interviewee recently stated that “From what he can tell the nationalist movement is doing as good as it can. Some senators like Paul Gosar have joined the movement.”
Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, groups like the Patriot Front would be repressed into nonexistence before they could make any of these inroads. In the USSR, their racist rhetoric alone would make them enemies of the state. The Soviets proclaimed in their UN human rights proposal that “freedom of speech and the press should not be used for the purposes of propagating fascism, aggression and for provoking hatred as between nations.” But under a capitalist state, fascists are free to run wild, even after they’ve just carried out their version of the Nazi Beer Hall Putzch.
Until we build a workers state, the threat of fascist violence will keep bearing down upon us ever more. With last year’s precedent in favor of white supremacist vigilantism with the “not guilty” Rittenhouse verdict, the fascists have a license to kill anyone they claim to feel “threatened” by. Ultimately they may well become deputized to hunt down and kill those deemed to be threats to the state. With Biden’s post-January 6th counterterrorism model, which is primarily designed to target social movements, the country has gotten a step closer to this scenario where law enforcement gives the militias a green light for terror. This is the connection between liberal elites, and the neo-Nazis that have been carrying out secretive paramilitary training around the country in recent years; both serve capital, so both will eventually come together to put down the liberation struggle.
We can’t wait until the precise equivalent to Indonesia’s coup runup emerges before we all decide to enact our personal protocols for escaping the purge. The purge could take the form of a smaller repressive campaign, like the mass arrests and deportations of communists that occurred during the Palmer Raids of the U.S. Red Scare. Or it could be a state-sanctioned paramilitary effort to assassinate thousands of communists over the course of years, like is the norm in Colombia. We can’t know when the purge will start, or how severe it will be. But we can become a step ahead of the fascists by building our organizations, training our cadre members, and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to protect ourselves and our communities from fascism.
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