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

This sweeping account from journalist Burke (The New Threat) charts the emergence of “a new kind of transnational terrorism” in the late 1960s, when loose networks of radicals, including the Baader-Meinhof gang and Carlos the Jackal, committed brazen acts of political violence on an unprecedented scale, from airplane hijackings to kidnappings and bombings. Their numbers were small—Burke recounts attacks in two dozen countries committed by roughly 100 perpetrators, among them “young women and old men... penniless refugees and scions of wealthy families.” Drawing on dozens of interviews, Burke offers sober but humanizing profiles of these revolutionaries and their victims, along the way exploring how this “secular, often left-leaning revolutionary” movement born of anticolonial struggle evolved, by the end of the 1970s, into one dominated by “Islamic extremism.” Across the decade, many of the political gains of decolonizing movements were reversed by the U.S. and its allies in the name of fighting communism, leading many radicals to see leftist politics as a failure and seek answers elsewhere. Meanwhile, right-wing extremist groups committed attacks in Europe and the Americas throughout the ’70s, but “received far less political or media attention” than the “transnational” left. Thus, right-wing extremism, particularly Islamism, bubbled up powerfully but unlooked for, most spectacularly during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when the success of a rebellion organized by “radical clerics,” rather than left-wing intellectuals, blindsided nearly everyone. Readers will find this a stunning and in-depth look at a tumultuous sea change in the global political order. (Jan.)