THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke 

Another idea newly influential in analytic circles at this time originated with Brian Jenkins, an expert at the Rand Corporation in California, who had studied art history and was steeped in the radical artistic production of the 1960s. He argued that the use of violence in terrorism was not ‘mindless’ but carefully designed to communicate a message to specific audiences: terrorism as theatre.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS is an immense, deeply researched and sourced work about extremists. The sort of people we now call “terrorists,” but Burke has a position on that, and uses “extremists” for reasons. His view of the phenomenon starts post-war, gets going in the 1960s, and ends in the mid-Eighties with the radicalization of Osama bin Laden. It is exhaustive, whipping from squats in Germany to tape cassettes of Ayatollah Khomeini circulating rural Iran as audio samizdat, from the “snow murders” in Japan to a Swedish spy almost getting wiped out by Israeli jets. And, over and over again, a chubby-faced Venezuelan failson and borderline incompetent by the name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez who loved money, sex and killing people, soon to be known as Carlos the Jackal.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine codenamed him Carlos. The Guardian, of all newspapers, called him The Jackal. The press during the period were about as helpful as the London newspapers during Jack the Ripper’s run.

All tended to portray Ramírez as possessed of near-superhuman powers. Many of the Western accounts should have stretched credulity. Journalists, politicians and other commentators routinely claimed that ‘Carlos the Jackal’ had participated in more or less every terrorist attack that had occurred in the previous decade, including the Munich Olympics attack of 1972, the hijacking that led to the Entebbe raid and the wave of violence in the summer of 1977. Ramírez was supposed to have masterminded the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, organised the fatal shooting of Nicaragua’s former dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay a year later and led a team of Libyan assassins from Mexico across the Rio Grande into the US. An Italian magazine reported that Ramírez had links variously to the Italian Red Brigades, ‘neo-Fascists’, the Palestinians and a network of Freemasons. In one of the more spectacularly irresponsible reports of this sort, the weekly magazine New York, recently bought by the up-and-coming Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch, described in detail what might happen if ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ used a small nuclear bomb against an American city. Meanwhile, a series of cinematic blockbusters depicted an often thinly disguised version of Ramírez as an omnipotent mastermind of violence, as did books with names like The Carlos Complex or Brothers in Blood. Some accounts declared Ramírez dead; others said he was a master of disguise and very much alive. All placed him at the heart of an international terrorist network.

Which he really wasn’t.

For another example: the Baader-Meinhof Gang or just Baader-Meinhof were actually called the Red Army Faction, and the most effective member was not the idiot Andreas Baader nor the brilliant but slightly mad Ulrike Meinhof (who opted to join the group a good while after they started operating, and whom the group later turned on), but Gudrun Ensslin. Baader-Meinhof just sounded better to the media.

‘Ulrike Meinhof speaks, turning her sharp mind mercilessly against herself,’ one wrote. ‘A self-made martyr, a self-elected Joan of Arc of proletarian internationalism, with no army behind her but the people who call themselves the RAF, a spectral image in her poor clever head.’

I found this whole book compulsively readable, and relatively easy to keep track of during all the location changes and shifts in focus. Of which there are a lot, because this is a global book. I could go on, but I won’t: it’s a fantastic piece of history writing, detailed without being overwhelming, sharp and clever and unsparing.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)