THE REVOLUTIONISTS

Terrorism and its long tail.

Burke’s expansive history of leftist and Islamist political violence in Europe and the Middle East from the late 1960s to the early 1980s combines journalistic rigor with spy novel–esque skullduggery. The Guardian reporter divides the period roughly in half. Exploiting technological advances in mainstream media, far-left militants staged dramatic crimes that “hundreds of millions” saw on TV. Within one week in 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three planes, emptied them of passengers, and destroyed them. As this multinational spasm of primarily secular radicalism exhausted itself in the late ’70s, Islamist fundamentalist violence “flourished.” Among the perpetrators were small cadres and religious regimes targeting purported apostates. When a fundamentalist cleric took over the government in Iran, “entire families were hanged, including teenagers and grandmothers.” The two strains of terrorism sometimes overlapped. Both secular and religious militants trained at Yasser Arafat’s camps in Jordan. Burke excels at limning the varieties of extremism, which reached many illiterate devotees via cassette tapes of speeches by clerics who characterized piety as the “single, obvious solution” to all problems. The durable influence of such ideas was most infamously embodied by Osama bin Laden. “Communism and socialism offered social justice but ignored identity,” Burke writes. “Political Islam, and its violent fringe, offered both.” Unlike earlier secular leftist attacks, which “rarely caused many deaths,” some Islamist terrorists “sought to maximise loss of life.” Along with horrific carnage, there’s plentiful intrigue in these pages. A well-known hijacker gets plastic surgery and commandeers another plane. A terrorist’s death may be attributable to poisoned chocolate. Though some readers may quibble about Burke’s geographical focus, which largely excludes concurrent revolutionary violence in Northern Ireland and Latin America, this is an intelligent and enlightening book.

An authoritative epic about era-defining extremism.