The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

"Jason Burke has done an impressive job with many different sources, crossing the whole of Europe and the Middle East. The book is about the links between Palestinian and Western European terrorism. So you get the Red Army Faction playing a role. But the real focus, I think, is on the various off-shoots of the PLO, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It’s looking at these groups, trying to understand their motivations and what they were doing. Do you remember when 9/11 happened, there was talk of the attack being ‘spectacular’ because Osama bin Laden had done this really attention-grabbing work of terrorism by flying two planes into the Twin Towers? It was these Palestinian terrorists and their sympathizers in the West who started that. The very fact that getting on an airplane now involves what seems like an hour of going through detectors is down to these people, who came up with the idea that seizing airliners was a spectacular and eye-grabbing way of getting attention. So there’s a lot about airlines…I mean, I wouldn’t read this book on a plane, because it will only unnerve you. There are some very interesting characters along the way. For instance, Carlos the Jackal, who became a gun for hire. He was from a rich Venezuelan background, a very left-wing family, but by the end, he’d been corrupted by the violence and was doing it for money. So the East Germans, the Bulgarians, and the like might have hired him to do freelance terrorism jobs. These terrorists were some kind of idealists, but there’s a story of corruption there as well, which was interesting. There’s a bit of nuance. Yes, and then by the end—this is not a plot spoil, because it’s history—it’s the changing of the guard. We come across Hezbollah’s first actions in Lebanon. This is when you get the religious-inspired terrorism, because the generation that Jason Burke is looking at seems to be quite secular and mainly motivated by Marxism. Weirdly enough, there’s a certain amount of humour in the book. Obviously, it’s very serious, looking at some terrible outrages, but you have the culture clash between the young, Western student Marxists who are going to the Yemen or the Lebanon to training camps, and the women want to sunbathe naked and such like. One bit that grabbed my attention was about the Western Marxist groups and the countercultural liberalism attached to them. So there were all sorts of rules about what you could do sexually. For example, oral sex was regarded as bourgeois and to be avoided. The thing to aim for was simultaneous orgasm, to show you’re a proper feminist. So there’s stuff like that. He’s done a wonderful job of recreating this strange, violent world."