Book Review: Vincent Bevins, If We Burn

The Mass Protest Decade And The Missing Revolution reviewed by George Katsiaficas

Vincent Bevins is a journalist of considerable talent. His first book, The Jakarta Method, provided long overdue insight into the United States manipulation of Indonesian army and Islamic officials. US agents provided names and addresses of ‘suspected communists’ and other ‘undesirables.’ In 1965, Americans were the driving force behind the massive purge that killed as many as one million people, perhaps even more. As Bevins points out, Indonesia was a much bigger prize for the United States empire than Vietnam, which cost more than 58,000 American lives and billions of dollars, only to end in absolute failure.

The subtitle of If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade And The Missing Revolution, reveals the central problem of his analysis. There was no single ‘mass protest decade.’ Beginning in the 1960s, waves of massive mobilizations have swept over every decade. From the disarmament movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the concurrent anti-nuclear plant movement in the United States and Germany, the Gwangju People’s Uprising of 1980, which helped usher in the wave of Asian uprisings from 1986 to 1992—the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1987), Burma (1988), Tibet and China (1989), Nepal and Bangladesh (1990) and Thailand (1992)—the overthrow of Eastern European Soviet regimes, the alter-globalization insurgency from the Zapatistas (1994) to Seattle (1999) and beyond, the massive anti-war mobilization of February 15, 2003 when up to 30 million people self-mobilized against the second Iraq war even before it began. All these insurgencies prepared the ground for the 2011 Arab spring, which however disastrously it may have ended, helped to ignite Occupy Wall Street in more than 900 cities around the world, as well as Movements of the Squares in Spain and Greece. The continual renewal of rebellions, revolts and revolutions culminates today with Gen Z revolts that have already occurred in more than 17 countries and smashed 3 regimes (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal). This latest episode of the Eros Effect reached a crescendo in September, 2025 when insurgents took to the streets in at least 11 countries. These instances of the Eros Effect occur as revolts nourish and inspire each other, increasingly resulting in simultaneous uprisings. 

The activation of the Eros Effect is one of the features of the continuing movements since the 1960s. During these magical moments, long-held values (patriotism, hierarchy, patriarchy) suddenly are superseded by emergent values such as cooperation instead of competition, human solidarity in place of nationalism, horizontal forms of decision-making not elite power, and attempts to overcome normally unquestioned dimensions of everyday life such as ethnic prejudice and patriarchal authority. Bevins understands the transcendental experiences of street actions, but only in individual terms. As he discovered, one female participant in Tahrir Square arrived in a state of depression and departed as if a “different universe” had transformed her, something that was “profoundly, unimaginably, beautiful.” An insurgent struck hit in the head by a tear gas canister went to the hospital where he fixed his eyes on a nearby wounded man, unfamiliar to him, “but in that moment, they were brothers, the feeling was transcendent, and far more powerful than the pain in the back of his skull.” Bevins understands the erotic cathexis in the streets, but only in terms of individuals, not in terms of the crystallization of emergent group identities, of new inspiration for future movements.


Bevins is not alone in his failure to comprehend these uprisings’ connections to each other. Much of contemporary history and media similarly understand them as separate and discrete events unrelated to each other. Seldom does anyone connect the dots. Bevins’ book is not a macro-history. Using his journalistic credentials, he delves into activist circles that congealed after Occupy Wall Street (which he curiously omits) in ten places, including Brazil, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Chile.

Bevin‘ s narrative in both of his books is to identify a few individuals whom he believes are key “leaders” of movements. Because they fail to realize their own dreams, he believes the movements are failures, that the ‘missing revolution’ never happened. Yet looking at today’s Gen Z uprisings, we cannot fail to note their continuity with past movements in their spontaneous outbreaks, joyful eruptions autonomous of existing political parties, and international solidarity. These continually-regenerating insurgencies in dozens of countries are part of a long-term process, one which will hopefully yet birth a world-historical revolution.

Bevins idea of ‘instant coffee’ revolution leads him to lament “the missing revolution.” His cynicism is quite evident in his dismissal of one of the great outcomes of the Indonesian revolution, the birth of the Third World non-aligned movement. To this day, the conservative government there adheres strictly to an anti-war stance in international relations (although tragically not for domestic aspirations for independence). In a 2025 article, he recalls that the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference occurred as “Countries across Asia and Africa threw off the colonial yoke, pushed for a transformation of the global economy and inspired civil rights movements in the US and South Africa. ‘But it all came to nothing of course,’” he says quoting a conservative observer. “By 1965, the pioneers of the Afro-Asian movement had all been cleared out of the way. Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Lumumba in Congo, all deposed or even murdered.” Again, individual leaders were murdered and marginalized, so does that mean “it all came to nothing.” Pardon me, “nothing”?

Bevins has proven himself capable of detailed research, of accurately portraying events, yet he also allows himself the luxury of speaking authoritatively without doing the necessary research. By creating individual narrators through whom he enunciates his own analysis, he projects onto them his beliefs without having to take responsibility. He quotes one activist who believes the 1960s SDS (Students for a Democratic Society in the US) was created from the media spotlight, that it “didn’t actually exist outside the media.” I beg to differ. For years, SDS built itself from the grassroots. When SDS dissolved itself in 1969 due to internecine differences, it had between 30,000 and 50,000 members, possibly as many as 100,000. When the central office in Chicago was closed down, it had file cabinets stuffed with unopened letters. Local chapters abounded, sometimes more than one even in small cities. The mass media was a factor, but not the primary one.

The jacket of Bevins’ book claims that “From 2010 to 2020 more people participated in protest than at any point in human history.” He selected the Arab spring, Turkey’s Taksim Park, Ukraine’s (Victoria Ruland-directed uprising, sometimes called) Euromaiden, and movements in Chile and Hong Kong. He devotes a scant four mentions to Occupy Wall Street, despite the participation of hundreds of thousands of people in over 900 cities in 82 countries. Except for one brief mention, he omits the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which involved more than 15 million people (a minimal estimate). He fails to deal with Rojava, arguably one of the most strategic initiatives of the decade he considers, and all but ignores the Zapatistas. He correctly notes international synchronicity and connections. After Michael Brown’s 2014 murder in Ferguson Missouri, activists across the USA held up both arms chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” Soon Hong Kong protesters made the same gesture.
 
In his own words, he understands that “Protest, after all, are communicative events aimed at existing elites.” His misunderstanding of protests as being aimed at elites explains why he does not understand how protests influence each other, how uprisings take off from the successes and failures of previous ones. I pointed out many instances in my book, Asia‘ s Unknown Uprisings. To give just one example, the savagery of the Korean War interrupted the unification movement in South Korea that had been so robust in 1961 that a US-backed coup d’etat was enacted to stop it. As soon as the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was overthrown years later, the reunification movement immediately massively reignited.

Elsewhere Bevins claims that “the decision to take to the streets and pour huge numbers of people into highly visible public spaces, which can be seen primarily as a media action.” It is incomprehensible to him that protests, rebellions, and uprisings transforms the participants themselves and affect others who are witness to these events. These are some of the primary impacts and effects, not their influence on billionaires and their media, unless that is your focus as a professional journalist who worked as Bevins did for several mass media outlets like London’s Financial Times, the LA Times, and Washington Post.

By helicoptering into several locations at a certain point in time, Bevins concludes that he has uncovered a missing ingredient for revolution: centralized leadership. Sadly, he done not pause to consider the outcome of the Bolshevik revolution, of their suppression of the popular movement for the benefit of rule by the Party. More importantly, he seems unaware that in order for people to live in a free society, we must first free ourselves from ingrained patterns of domination and passive acquiescence to power. Indeed, as Marcuse pointed out, we must liberate ourselves even from instinctual needs before a genuine revolution is possible. Ongoing uprisings are an important means to free ourselves. The transformation of human beings involved in insurgencies is one of their most significant outcomes. The self-formation of the human species proceeds through labor and art, yet uprisings are also an important dimension of this process. 


Bevins’ role as an outsider, a professional journalist making his living by writing about movements, is evident when he concludes that the movements he studied were “strange events of the decade.” Strange? Or beautiful? For sometime now, journalists, celebrities, and academics have sought to influence movements according to their own outsider understandings. Nearly all such celebrities condemn militant street actions as counterproductive or even harmful. Perhaps the most extreme of these critics is Chris Hedges, whose outbursts are another topic. As recent Gen Z uprisings have shown, militant tactics have accomplished more in days than many movements have achieved in decades. So long we allow our insurgencies to influenced by celebrity outsiders, their cynical judgments will negatively impact our resistance.