Paul Simons brings Middle East hope to Monterey.

In the conflagration of factions warring in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, a precarious experiment is unfolding: an anarchist revolution.

A few people attuned to the region had been hearing about the Rojava, an enclave of Kurds in northern Syria who’ve fought against the bordering Turkish government, against President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army, against ISIS (there known as Daesh).

And it’s not just that they’ve countered all these assaults on their home. It’s that they’ve done it not with a formally trained army but with a citizen militia, one that’s integrated with men and women fighting side-by-side.

The image of women Rojava fighters in camo with Kalishnakovs slung across their shoulders – or aiming giant anti-aircraft guns – is becoming as iconic in revolutionary politics as Rosie the Riveter was among women during World War II.

But these symbols of equality don’t end on the battlefield. Rojava is not a nation, but a Kurdish-majority area of three provinces taken from Syria’s Assad, who redirected troops away from there to fight elsewhere. And the Kurds have built a society on ideals passed on to them by their jailed spiritual leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

They tout worker co-ops, feminism, ecological stewardship, religious and ethnic pluralism, communal living. They reject authoritarianism, patriarchy, social hierarchies. There is no formal government or police force; communes ensure everyone has food, clothing, shelter, medical care. There is even a cultural arm that puts on plays and art workshops. It is the polar opposite of the repressive Islamic state that ISIS is trying to impose.

David Graeber in The Guardian called Rojava “one of few bright spots – albeit a very bright one – to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.”

It was intriguing enough of a phenomenon to lure writer Paul Z. Simons there, to see for himself, and to report what he saw in a series of dispatches for the ModernSlavery website. And he’s coming to Old Capitol Books on Monday to talk and show pictures of the longest anarchist revolution on record.

“We have revolutionary movement maturing, we can see how they’re responding to a situation of need, which is great,” he says. “It’s not just a zone of revolution, but a zone of war – some pretty terrible wars.”

It’s not democracy, per se. The Rojava Kurds, for instance, distrust voting, seeing it as a means for corruption to enter the system. The big message is that there are other ways to live, that we are limited only by the options of which we are aware.

“The purpose of mainstream media is to sell advertising,” Simons says. “ISIS is the way to do that. That’s not the story.”

Simons will tell that other story.

PAUL Z. SIMONS 7pm Monday at Old Capitol Books, 559 Tyler St., Monterey. Free to attend. 333-0383.