The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ book

Today, it is easy to forget how “brutal and random” the 1970s could be, said Hugh Thomson in The Spectator. This was the first age of transnational terrorism, when radicals and revolutionaries deployed new, often deadly tactics in the hope of furthering their goals. They carried out plane hijackings, kidnappings and massacres – from the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 – and set off bombs around the globe, “from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore”.

In this “superb and monumental” book, Jason Burke details the main movements – including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and “our own IRA” – and offers “sharp vignettes of the principal combatants”, among them Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” (who helped hijack planes in 1969 and 1970), and the “extraordinary” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan terrorist-for-hire. Burke, a foreign correspondent for nearly 30 years, “brings a wealth of experience” to his tale, which is “epic”, lively and well written.

Many of the terrorists of the early 1970s were over-educated “countercultural types”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. “The German women of the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, to the chagrin of their Palestinian hosts.” Kozo Okamoto, of the Japanese Red Army, was an eccentric, cherry blossom-obsessed Marxist. But as Burke shows, a “marked shift” took place in the late 1970s, when such “secular, left-leaning” figures gave way to Islamist extremists, said Richard Vinen in Literary Review. The new terrorists who emerged “felt nothing in common with the European Left”, “placed little value on their own lives”, and embraced ever-more extreme tactics, including, eventually, suicide bombings.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The one flaw of this otherwise “magisterial” book is Burke’s failure to define precisely what “revolutionists” are, said Barney Horner in The New Statesman. “This becomes a problem with the chapters, fascinating though they are, on Israeli state terrorism”: Mossad’s “excursions across western Europe and North Africa” are hard to depict as the “labours of revolutionary struggle”. Burke could also have devoted more space to the “power plays within Palestinian factions”, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Times. Still, for the most part this book is a “fascinating chronicle of lethal Middle Eastern conspirators and absurd Western killers”. I found it “unputdownable”.