Lawfare Daily: Ideology, Action, and Terrorism in the 1970s

[Intro]

Jason Burke: How do broader movements generate this kind of fringe violence? And why does it carry on often, much longer than the movement that spawned these groups? You know, has any energy, and this certainly was the case. The 68 movement was kind of over by the 70, 71, whereas the violence carried on through much of the decade.

Michael Feinberg: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Michael Feinberg, senior editor with Lawfare here today with Jason Burke, a journalist with the Guardian.

Jason Burke: 10 years later, you are moving to a very different conception of terrorism, a much more right wing conception of terrorism. This is partly due to the Reagan administration coming in. It's due to lots of other things going on, but one that blames all terrorism around the world, on the Soviet Union, and on people who are bad, mad, or misled.

Michael Feinberg: Today we're talking about his new book, “The Revolutionists,” which covers the milieu of 1970s terrorism in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

[Main Podcast]

I just wanted to start out, Jason, with asking a really basic question, how and why did you come to write about this particular subject?

Jason Burke: It is really the prequel to a lot of what I've been writing about for many years, decades actually. So I, I started really thinking about doing the book when I'd been commissioned to do a book about ISIS in the mid 20 teens. And as I kind of tried to construct that as a project and think about what I could write, I wrote a draft, which was basically a kind of potted history of Islamic militancy up to that point. And it wasn't terribly good, didn't really work as a book, so I dumped it and wrote another one.

But it, it did take me to a really interesting place and that place was the mid to late sixties, and in a sense that surprised me because everything we've been told, everything I've been reading. About the roots of Al-Qaeda about the roots of ISIS itself, kind of took us back to the eighties and the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets and, and the emergence of radical Islamism in the Maghreb and elsewhere in the Middle East in that period.

And suddenly I found myself 15 years further back. Looking at the execution of Sayyid Qutb, the great Sunni Jihadist ideologue eventually, and other really seminal events back then. And one of the things I saw, which really struck me was that how that moment was not just a moment of ferment among Islamists, obviously, but it was a global moment of revolutionary activism energy.

And of course most of that was leftist, secular nationalist across the world. And I suddenly thought, how interesting it is that that happened at the same time. You know, Che Guevara, the great icon of the left, was killed in 67. Qutb dies in 66. I mean, it's virtually contemporaneous and it comes right before 68, which is this great global moment of protest.

And it takes us into the seventies where you see the great wave of transnational terrorism that was so spectacular and so well known, and I thought, now this is something that is worth digging into. And I looked at it, I found lots of events that I thought were ripe for revision when new sources and new accounts: Munich Olympics at 72, the Entebbe raid ‘76, much else.

And I also found these characters that are almost mythic now, people like Carlos the Jackal, who's an icon of the Palestinian nationalist cause, others, and thought it would be really interesting to look at them all again in a new historical context and in parallel with other forms of radical violent extremism that were emerging during that period.

Michael Feinberg: And what's interesting that your book really highlights is between the sort of leftist ideologues, largely in Western and Eastern Europe, and the groups that would at least, I don't wanna say they gave rise to the Islamist wave of terrorism that came later, but there's a Venn diagram with a large common area. The two groups actually interacted quite a bit during the time that you cover.

Jason Burke: Yes and no. I mean, the, what you get is the Venn diagram kind of maps from Middle Eastern and to the kinda western activism, particularly with the Palestinians. But the Palestinians at the time, those that had adopted the armed struggle, as they called it, were nationalist secular with certain qualifications and on the whole leftist, some dogmatic Marxists, others kind of leftist leaning. So they were compatible in a sense with the broader internationalist leftist radical world.

At the same time you had. Islamists emerging who would become much stronger later on, but were certainly building in influence and in power and in popularity in the Middle East through that period.

What interested me was that they had, were very much influenced by the ambient environment that radicalism that was being pioneered was being put into being realized by the leftists and, and the nationalists and I, I mean, it's, it's, it's not that one kind of became the other or that there were particularly close links, but they were definitely, the Islamists were definitely influenced by the, the leftists.

And most importantly they were also proposing a revolutionary project, and that's really key because in the Middle East, once the left fails and is repressed. The leftist project does not succeed during the seventies, there's a vacuum, and that vacuum is what provides this great opportunity to the radical Islamists in the late seventies and into the eighties. So the, the, the relationship is, is a complex one, but, but one that's really illuminating to understand the, the, the roots of modern Islamism.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah. And it's one of the things that struck me as so interesting in the answer you just gave is there's definitely a series of social mores shared by the more conservative Islamists that you chronicle, particularly towards the end of the book, both on the Shia side in Iran, and also sort of the Sunni side.

As we get into the emergence of bin Laden and those social mores are really at odds with the sort of lifestyle and personal habits that we would see in the European groups that contributed to that febrile environment. It's very difficult for me to say the least, to imagine Andreas Baader and somebody who would join the IRGC is having a whole lot in common in terms of how they live their lives.

Jason Burke: Certainly in terms of how they live their lives, but not in terms of their enemies in, in many ways. And, and that's what's key. So obviously they're huge divergences in terms of, you know, social conservatism of gender, of much else, morality and so forth. And, and of course the Islamists see themselves as fundamentally opposed. In fact, you could argue that it's central to their project are fundamentally opposed to western decadence, moral decadence of that nature, which would in fact be kind of symbolized epitomized by someone like Andreas Baader and these kind of German leftists, west German leftists in the late sixties and seventies.

But what really struck me is the enemies are often very similar, so primarily imperialism and its agents. So that would include Israel, capitalism very often are there nuances there within Islamism, but on the whole Zionism, as I say. And, and this revolutionary project, this idea that, you know, through violence you can achieve transformative change that will usher in an era of social justice is common, common to both.

And there are words, particular words that was, was taken from leftist thinking, anti-colonial thinking, and were brought into Islamist discourse and you can trace them quite clearly. There are some within the radical world in, in Iran, for example, who try very hard to reconcile Shia Islam and its traditions and parables and values with Marxist Leninism, socialism, and they try and create new languages.

So yes, absolutely there's a very significant divergence when it comes to the gender roles and other kind of conservative on one side and very much more progressive on the other in terms of the, the social behavior. But in terms of much else there, there's significant areas where much is shared and, and that I thought was really interesting.

As I say, a lot of it's the vocabulary. A lot of it, the idea is the targets, the, the sense of what is wrong with the world. Anti-Americanism being another one that is shared. You know, if you did put someone from the IRGC and and Baader together in a, in a room, Baader is actually dead before the IRGC was founded.

But theoretically, they would absolutely bond on the evils wrought by the U.S. across the world. They wouldn't have much else to to, to in common. It's true, but that would definitely unite them.

Michael Feinberg: So let me pull on something you just raised, you made reference to the sort of idea shared by both leftists and Islamists that there is an almost regenerative benefit for oppressed people that can come about through the use of violence. It's a theory that I think is most famously articulated by Fanon.

Jason Burke: Yeah.

Michael Feinberg: And Sartre writes the introduction to “The Wretched of the Earth.” And there's actually a point in your book in sort of a famous point in history, where Sartre goes to Stammheim Prison to visit the incarcerated members of the Baader Meinhof gang.

Jason Burke: He has a meeting with Baader. He sits down and has this kind of bizarre conversation, and they disagree over violence actually.

Michael Feinberg: Right. It doesn't quite go as I think Baader would've hoped in terms of read out.

Jason Burke: Yeah. He comes out with this brilliant phrase, he says, I thought they were sending me a friend, but they have sent me a judge.

And, and so it's just the most, I mean, there's some very good transcripts of it that have been found now that German authorities recorded that I was reading. And it, it's absolutely clear that Baader is committed to this idea that through violence they can awaken the otherwise false consciousness of the working classes in Germany, west, West Germany, and in the capitalist world more, more generally.

And through this, they can expose also through violence, rather they can expose the supposed fascist nature of the West German state and much else. And Sartre is listening to him and just saying, well, you know, what are you talking about? I mean, this is, this is complete madness. You ha, you could, you, you, you have to, you know, move at the pace of the mobilization of the people you can't use violence to, to jump start it.

And that goes to this really interesting tactical and strategic question, which the left were wrestling with through that period. And it speaks a lot to what people like Baader and others were trying to do. And that is the so-called foco, the foco school of Guevara, who argued that a small group of committed activists militants through violence could create the objective conditions for revolution. Inverted and the kind of classic Marxist approach, which is, you know, you have to wait for the dialectic Marxist dialectic history to progress and evolve. And, you know, eventually the working class will become sufficiently mobilized and you know, you have to work with 'em to make them understand what's going on, da, da, da.

And it takes decades, if not centuries. Obviously young men, like Baader, young men around the world, were not interested in waiting. So the, the foco-ist view had a considerable attraction at the time. And one of the things that interests me is that you see that in Western Europe. You see it in parts of the Middle East as well.

So in Iran you have groups emerging in the seventies, like the Fadaiyan-e-Khalq who are leftist, who are trying to put that into practice. It fails actually, they try it and it fails, but you also have Islamists who are trying to do it too. And, you know, I can't prove that there was, that, that the Islamists, all of them had read thinkers like Guevara or Marighella, Carlos Marighella, who's also very influential among the leftist.

But some had, I know I spoke to some of them who had read and they were saying, we, we read all this stuff, you know, we watched what the Algerians were doing. We watched what the Vietcong were doing. We watched what Guevara had done. And we thought we could do it too, but in a, in a different context and with a different project.

Michael Feinberg: So let me ask you a question. I'm gonna put you unfairly on the spot for a moment as we, as we talk about this, 'cause we're sort of getting into the theory behind the actions almost in like a sort of 50,000 foot philosophical view. And, you know, regardless of what one thinks about Sartre’s existentialism or his, I would argue, at least later, transformation into something else.

When he writes search for a method, you can't deny that he's a serious thinker. He wrote, arguably the most influential treatise of 20th century philosophy at one point. Should we take someone like Baader as a serious, like both the fact that both of us are smiling betrays our answer.

Jason Burke: Yeah, I No, the idea, listen, listen. I mean, if you wanna look, it's quite interesting, good, good point. I mean, let's, if you drill down into the supposed Baader–Meinhof gang, I mean actually they called themselves, the Red Army faction led three main leaders. So there was Andreas Baader, there was his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, who's a much more impressive figure.

And there was Ulrike Meinhof who was a bit older. She was in her mid thirties. The others were in their mid to late twenties, and she was a radical journalist, very well known, highly intelligent, articulate, prominent on late night talk shows, smoking lots of cigarettes, and arguing with usually much older men about what was wrong with West Germany at the time.

Ensslin was a English literature PhD, fiercely intelligent. Two very capable woman who is really the driving force behind the Red Army faction in many ways, and certainly the, the person who put the logistics together and had the authority at Baader. As one of associates later described me was a, a loud mouth bore, who, who, you know, didn't think anything through was really in, in it for, if not calling it the fun is probably wrong.

But, you know, there was an ideological kind of veneer over what he was doing, but he, he was, it was more, he was in it because it was something that gratified him. And he, he was absolutely not an intellectual. He wasn't very interested in the intellectual arguments that Ensslin and others would have.

He was a simplistic thinker, a reductivist thinker, as many of them were naive in some ways. That's being generous. I mean, pretty unpleasant in many others, and responsible for a great deal of human suffering. So I mean, Andreas Baader who's seen in some circles is almost sort of sexy to use a word from the time to me was a pretty loathsome individual. And certainly, I mean, yeah, no comparison with somebody of the intellectual stature of Sartre.

And there's a brilliant moment in their conversation when Baarder is explaining his strategy, which is based on Mao, to Sartre, and he explains it. And Sartre comes back and says I'm not sure I completely understand, you know, Mr. Baader. And Baader, kind of impatiently has to describe it all over again. I mean, this is, as you say, you know, one of the greatest intellects of the 20th century, and he's, you know, I mean, very, very different.

That said, I mean, Sartre mob was pretty misled on a lot of politics in that period too, so, you know, the, in the, the, the straight intellectual, but a, a lot of the people we're talking about, you know, not just the Red Army faction, but others, they were educated. Okay. You know, they're young, educated, middle class on the whole, they are the violent fringe of the much broader movement of the late sixties.

And that really interested me and I think thought it was very useful to dig into in the book, not. As you say from 50,000 feet, but, but through these individuals, how do broader movements generate this kind of fringe violence, and why does it carry on often, much longer than the movement that spawned these groups? You know, has any energy, and this certainly was the case, the 68 movement was kind of over by 70, 71, whereas the violence carried on through much of the decade.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, it's funny, I'm gonna make a weird analogy and it may fall flat, but Baader, Meinhof and, and his ilk in general reminds me of no one so much as the protagonist from a Louis Malle film called Lacombe, Lucien, in which a young man goes to try and join the French resistance during World War II and being turned down is not being mature enough, ends up joining the Gestapo that is stationed in his part of occupied France.

And I think somebody like Baader would've been drawn to whatever, offer the most transgressive excitement possible at whatever moment he happened to be living in. I don't think that's true of Meinhof. I don't think that's true. Of a lot of the thinkers in the Middle East,

Jason Burke: It, it would be true, perhaps of Carlos the Jackal, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, as he is.

Michael Feinberg: Yes.

Jason Burke: His real name is who really the, the ideology was very much secondary to his own personal gratification.

Throughout his career, but particularly in this period, and that is something I was quite keen to emphasize in the book as well as I tell his story that, you know, he's really not interested in Marxism, he's interested in the mayhem and what it brings him in the way of kind of luxury hotels and women and cars and money and guns and excitement and he is.

If not, not mercenary in the sense that he's fighting, fighting or doing what he's doing for money as a true mercenary word, but he's doing it not for ideological reasons. He's doing it 'cause, 'cause it brings him things that he likes.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I think it's weird. Carlos had a lot of unpaid public relations personnel, whether it's journalists who contemporaneously, were looking for a very sexy story or whether it is.

I think it's fair to call Robert Ludlum, middling novelist, who used Carlos' reputation to bolster some spy fiction, but the reality of what he did and what sort of person he was, you look at some of the operations in which he was involved, that you recount, and a lot of them are almost a comedy of errors.

Jason Burke: Oh yeah, he wasn't very good at them. This is, Carlos was a pretty poor terrorist in that most of his operations went badly wrong. I mean, they, they're quite difficult to do. They're pretty ambitious quite often, particularly the OPEC raid of 1975, which involved, you know, seizing about 60 hostages, including the oil ministers of 20 countries roughly.

And then flying them around the Middle East. So he was trying to do some quite spectacular things, but nonetheless, most of them go wrong. And some of them, as you say, I mean, it's just, it is really kind of black comedy. You know, the one incident that comes to mind is Paris where they try to fire a rocket into a plane.

The first time they try and do it, they haven't got a rocket. It's RPG, rocket propelled grenade. They haven't got propelled grenade. They haven't got one sufficient range. And then they, they fire, they mess up firing it. So they miss anyway, it, it's another plane, not a plane that they were aiming for.

Next time they try again, they hide a better rocket launcher in a toilet in an airport and they do that in the middle of the week. And then when they go back to do the actual operation, they do it a weekend and they have forgotten that the viewing platform where they've hidden this device in the toilets is gonna be very crowded 'cause it's the weekend and people are going off and looking at planes, which is what people used to do in the seventies.

And the queue for the toilet is really long. So they, they, they miss the plane. So they can, they get it out. It's too late. They get caught by the john. I mean, you know, it's, it's farcical. It is kind of keystone cop stuff. It's ridiculous.

Other times, obviously he's very lethal. I mean many shoots, three French policemen coming to of them and then killed one of his own PFLP, supposed comrades all in the space for about 10 seconds in Paris. He does that. That's on the spur of the moment though. But on the whole, I'd say yes, absolutely. And you know, he, he messes up an awful lot, but he gets away with it for two main reasons. He has two really important talents and one is relational.

He's just very good at manipulating people, convincing people, persuading them to do what he wants, building relationships and so forth. He was even sort of trying to charm me in this weird correspondence that we had. And then the other thing he's great at is he understands celebrity and he understands the power of celebrity and how to manipulate mass public opinion and what the new media in the seventies can do for him.

And he uses that really effectively, both to, on some occasions to save his own life, but on other occasions to scare regimes in Eastern Europe, for example, into giving him safe havens and other protection. And also to convince people like Gaddafi and the Assad regime in Syria that he can be useful to them and that they should pay him very large sums of money to perform terrorist acts and assassinations and such, like on their behalf. So for, for, for that, yeah. He's a pretty poor terrorist as such, but he is very good at other things and that's what allows him to continue operating right the way through the period I look at.

Michael Feinberg: Okay, so in the remainder of our time, there's three areas I sort of want to drill down on now that we've covered, generally speaking, what these movements were about and what made them generally interesting. And the first thing I want to talk about is the governmental response to these various groups and their actions. And I'm gonna start the conversation by making an overly sweeping generalization. Feel free to pick it apart. I know it's far from perfect, but it's a way to spur the dialogue.

And what I'm gonna say is this: we see a lot of the western European governments react to acts of terrorism in a manner that is not just non-confrontational, but almost ameliorative there. There is a belief that if we give these organizations some of what they want, or at least come to an agreement where we will let them live and operate in our countries so long as they do not harm our own people, maybe they'll go away.

And in the Middle East, we have a lot of governments that react quite the opposite. I'm thinking particularly of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where they engage almost at times in these large scale executions, if not outright mini genocides at times, and they really come down with an almost disproportionately violent response to what the groups are doing. And what's interesting is neither approach really seems to work. What is unfair about that characterization and like, what's a better one?

Jason Burke: No, no, no. I think, no, I think that you're making good points. The, the both of both of those things objectively are true. I, what I'd say is that the Western Europeans are dealing with a very different form of radical violence in the, the Western European governments are mainly confronting it's something that's been produced by the Israel-Palestinian conflict rather than Islamism.  At least until the Iranians start to do one or two operations. And that's pretty minimal in the late, you know, the early eighties that, that's in pretty minimal I, I'm talking about in Western Europe.

So they're took, they're looking at a threat which is rooted in a particular conflict, which doesn't actually threaten them. I mean, you know, the, the, the PFLP or the DFLP or or Black September, or any of the Palestinian armed groups are not actually waging war.

Michael Feinberg: I have to interject just 'cause.

Jason Burke: Yeah.

Michael Feinberg: There was one point where I was reading your book. You've just gone through a litany of rival groups.

Jason Burke: Yeah.

Michael Feinberg: Working for this cause it's basically for those who have seen Monty Python's Life of Brian, this is like the debate between the People's, Judean Front and the Judea.

Jason Burke: Absolutely. And there's a reference to that in the book actually, because interestingly, that sketch was recorded right at the end of the period. I'm looking at, and it would've been inconceivable for it to have been recorded 10 or fifteen years earlier 'cause then they were genuinely scary. But much later on, you know, you can get away with a bit of humor. It's a very funny scene actually that anyone interested in terrorism or violent extremism of any sort should, should watch.

But so, so yeah. So I, I mean, I could go on, I mean, there are another, I can just go through another sort of 30 acronyms, but, but the, the point being that what the Western Europeans are doing was something that was a, a, a quite short period actually, where Palestinian groups to make a point were launching these attacks into Europe. And yes, not all of them, but quite a lot of them, tried to find some way of, you know, mitigating the threat by, as you say, concluding these deals.

This was particularly in the early period because they didn't have anything, any other policy options, basically. And one of the things that's interesting is how, through the period, with the Israelis pioneering it actually, but others picking it up very quickly, Western governments develop the capability to intervene militarily if there is a hostage crisis or a hijacking or similarly so, you know.

The Israelis do it in ’72. In Israel, what was soon to become Ben Gurion Airport, is then Lod Airport. They do it obviously spectacularly in ‘76 in Entebbe. The Germans do it in ‘77 in Mogadishu and take over an entire plane kill three out of four hijackers wound. The last one, rescue all their people with a newly formed group. The French former group, which goes into action too and is successful the British UCSAS, military special forces and, and, and are successful in ‘81 in, in London.

So by the end of the period they've actually got something they, they don't have to capitulate otherwise, you know, what do they do? There's confusion over what they're facing. I mean, what is this threat? They don't even have a word for it. You know, they skyjack us, air pirates, you know, nobody knows there isn't any legislation.

They can't, there's no kind of offense of hijacking a plane that, you know, Leila Khaled when she ends up in London having attempted to hijack a plane, nearly killing a steward or her accomplice did. He is then shot by an Israeli security marsh. All of this goes on. She's held on the only thing they, she's not charged at all, but the only thing they've got on her is an immigration offense 'cause she's landed at Heathrow without a visa.

So there's just, you know, there's nothing there. The, the, the final point about that period is, and through the whole of the seventies, and this is really important for what comes later, is that this terrorism as such is quite, you know, it, it's, the definitions are still very fluid. It's still very much being debated famously at the UN in ‘72 in this period.

But there, there's this general consensus that it's a political problem. And it comes outta a poli you know, other political problems. And if you manage to sort out the political situation, circumstances that generated that violence, the violence will end or subside 10 years later, you are moving to a very different conception of terrorism, a much more right wing conception of terrorism.

This is partly due to the Reagan administration coming in. It's due to lots of other things going on, but one that blames all terrorism around the world, on the Soviet Union and on people who are bad, mad, or misled, basically, and that the only way to deal with them is to kill them or otherwise eradicate their groups and anything else is moral cowardice. So all of these things combine in the west to see a big change.

Your other point though, is absolutely right in, in, in the Middle East, the, by the end of the decade, you're seeing a lot of Islamist related violence. And the response is absolutely, you know, you, you, you mass executions, you destroy cities, you do whatever you need, huge numbers of arrests, massive prisons, torture, et cetera, et cetera. And, and as you say, that doesn't actually work. You just get, it carries on.

One thing I think the important thing in in the West, and this goes to the US as well, or Japan and so forth, is you have this wave of protest in the sixties, you have a extremist fringe that is generated as a result of that comes outta that and it lasts through the early seventies, and then it kind of fades.

And yes, there's lots of terrorism. There's ethno, separatist, terrorism, there's Etta, there's Puerto Rican stuff going on. There's the IRA particularly Irish Republican terrorism. But this kind of leftist, internationalist, revolutionary terrorism, there's looking for a massive transformation, a complete wholesale transformation of national and international culture, everything kind of over the demands of that protest movement in the late sixties was met or were met.

You know, you had much better reproductive or legislation guaranteeing reproductive right for women. You had much more funding going into further education. You had lower voting ages. You had a number of kind of politicians and sporting individuals and so forth who are now much younger and were much more prominent and had influenced the hierarchies that had the post second World War period had be, had been seriously degraded.

And it was, you know, a lot of what had been demanded by young people in the late sixties was kind of coming through and was there and, and that meant that the energy that had gone into that violence was now being diverted into environmentalism and identity politics and sexual politics and much else.

Michael Feinberg: Alright, so you raise a really interesting points, and I wanna go a little bit beyond the scope of your book to discuss it. A lot of the more ideological demands, as you just stated, were met. And interestingly, a lot of the individuals who are part of the 1970s European leftist milieu, not on the terroristic side, but on the more sort of, let's call it the university based side. The discussion groups, the protests, the the tracked writing, the advocacy, a lot of them, I don't mean this phrase to be disparaging, but they grow up and go into government themselves. I'm thinking particularly about a couple of German politicians and some French ones, and they're in power decades later.

When, as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States, and then the attacks in your own country on the Tube system, and then the attacks on the Spanish trains, they're running the go. Or if they're not running the governments, they certainly have input into them. That's, that's less true in the United States.

But in the United States, you still have people who had exposure to this era. You know, George W. Bush is George HW Bush's son, and George HW Bush at the time was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Ambassador of the United Nations. But it really seems to me, I say this is somebody who spent most of his career as part of what is derisively referred to as the national security state in the United States. So I'm sympathetic to a lot of what the government did after 9/11 and in the years after.

But it seems to me that in Europe and in the United States, there's almost this effort to view terrorism, not effort. There's a mistake. Terrorism is viewed as this new phenomenon by the governments. Why didn't so many Western governments look back to the seventies and try and extrapolate what lessons they could? So when Al-Qaeda and ISIS come back on the scenes, they don't have to reinvent the wheel, or am I being unfair to them?

Jason Burke: I I, I think that the point you made that there were, I think you're referring Joschka Fischer actually particularly.

Michael Feinberg: That's who I am thinking of.

Jason Burke: Yeah, the Germans. But yeah, I mean there are a lot of the are smattering, there are a few of those kind of old leftists who are now in government, very senior position,

Michael Feinberg: I think Dominique de Villepin in France is roughly.

Jason Burke: Yeah, but there are some, but I think actually one of the things that struck me when I was writing the book and, and I spoke to a lot of people from that period, one of the things I did was track down as many as I could and do these long interviews. And one of the things that really struck me is that, yeah, absolutely there are lots of people who, who are coming through as young, you know, diplomats or soldiers or spies or just, or, or activists who come out of either the late sixties and the early seventies or that ear that, that, that, that second period, the, the eighties.

I mean, there's one, Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, who career really took off. I mean, he, he, well, he was famously pushed into politics by the death of his brother Yonatan at the Entebbe raid in ’76. But whose career really starts to move in the early eighties. You know, a lot of these people were formed by that period and you can't understand now without looking at, at what happened then. So yes, I was coming across references to to Bush elder. Conferences organized by Netanyahu, actually in Jerusalem in 81 and thereabouts.

He, in fact, Bush elder was, it was very much involved in that big debate in the UN about the definition of terrorism, which was a kind of absolutely archetypal, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, which actually isn't true.

But anyway, that was the discussion at the time and, and so you, I think what happened in after 9/11 aas, you saw in many ways the replay of a lot of those debates and a lot in Europe. A lot of those, a lot of it was framed in the way it would've been framed in the seventies and in the U.S. it was framed very much as it would've been framed in the early eighties when people like George Schultz were actually talking about a war on terror in as many words.

And, and the US was sustaining for the first time, like really serious casualties through major terrorist a, a attacks in the Middle East. And I think you, you, you saw a reversion then to these earlier patterns. You know, for example, the, the response of people like wolf of its and others Rumsfeld a lesser extent.

But the idea that you had to have a state sponsor for 9/11, I mean, that, that is a pure, early eighties view of terrorism. You know, the USSR is gone, doesn't matter. It must be someone else. If the USSR isn't, they all have to be Iraq. So that was kind of on the right, on the left. You had exactly the same kind of knee jerk response of going back to those instincts of the seventies. Oh, well, you know, there must be a political reason here. If we can find somewhere, let's bring democracy to the Middle East. Or let's find, and maybe it's economics, which it usually isn't, but you know, that kind of root cause argument.

And you saw in, in the los, this argument between, in a sense Europe and the us. On this, you know, do we go for the seventies ar analysis of terrorism? Do we go for the eighties analysis of terrorism?

Michael Feinberg: And it's quite possible that, I don't know if I'd say neither is right, but obviously I think we can agree neither is exclusively right.

Jason Burke: I, I think, I think elements of both you know, there, there, there's, the terrorism is not, doesn't create itself in a vacuum. I mean, clearly there are political reasons for terrorism, social reasons, cultural reasons, all sorts of other factors that, that, you know, you need to understand if you wanna comprehend what makes a group radicalize, what makes individuals radicalize, what is attractive about violence at any one time.

But at the same time, that doesn't mean that you know, straight coercion. For example, use of force has no place in in, in the armory of any state in trying to defend its citizens against terrorism. That would seem to me to be completely nonsensical as was proved in 76, 77, so on and so forth. I mean, it may be short term as a solution, but hey, you need a solution.

Well, I think what you do need. And both of the kind of ideological camps we are talking about are not always very good at this is, you know, intellectual honesty and, and looking at the problem as it is, not as you want it to be because it fits your preconceived worldview.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I think that's very fair. And I think, at least in the United States, and I realize we have a bit of a different system than the UK to say the least, but I think that's why. You often from the intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies get a considerably more nuanced analysis of any given situation involving terrorism than you do from the political appointees who are charged with publicizing that analysis as one of the absolutely. People who was in the former group. It was a constant source of frustration for us.

Jason Burke: I'm, I'm sure, I mean, you know, you, you, you know from the inside, but I, from the outside, I spent a lot of time doing the research reading. A lot of the CIA analysis of terrorist groups of the PFLP, of the PLP, of the, of the PLO, whoever, but also of Iran, and also much later of these big questions.

I mean, there's the famous national intelligence estimate of 81, where, which is do the Soviet sponsor global terrorism and you know, the, the, the, the senior officials who are all part of the Reagan administration are all saying yes. And a lot of people around them in the kinda right wing, echo chamber saying absolutely.

The CIA is saying, well actually, you know, the USSR isn't often very keen on terrorism because it can't control it. It supports so-called liberation movements, some of which involve or use terrorism from time to time. So there's a connection there, but it's all a bit, so, yeah, abs and it's actually, you know, they're really on the money with that.

So, yeah, and, and you know, we are in that classic tension between the guys who really know and spend their lives looking at it. And then the politicians who have to make a decision or sell it to the public.

Michael Feinberg: Alright, so we've only really got time for one more question and I wanna make it an almost more cultural question.

Before we began recording, I mentioned to you how much I've always sort of intellectually been enthralled to the study of this era, and that was largely because of a lot of media. I consumed when I was younger and this is an era that Hollywood or what have you keeps going back. Maybe Hollywood's the wrong example 'cause I'm about to cite a bunch of international productions that have nothing to do with Hollywood, but the film industry we saw say, is six and a half hour mini series or two and a half hour film depending on where you were.

We saw the film adaptation of the Baader Meinhof gang book. There was a film from the early eighties called Germany in Autumn, which was a mix of documentary and fictional portrayals of how people reacted to a number of events in Germany. And you know, you really can't get through a year without some film on the Munich Olympics or the raid Entebbe, or you know, European terrorism. Why does this era still have such a potent cultural draw for audiences?

Jason Burke: It's a really interesting question. Look I mean, I, we grew up on a lot of those as well. So I think one of the reasons I read the book was that I really wanted to kind of drill down and understand what was behind it all.

I think the answer to an extent of the characters, and particularly with say, the West Germans, there's this sense that they're relatable. You know, they're young people, they wanna change the world, and they, they're wearing, you know, flared jeans, cowboy boots and or stacked shoe heels, boots, and, you know, leather jackets driving BMWs and they're good looking.

I mean, what's not to like? The violence is not to like, but that seems to often be obscured somewhat in the portrayal there. I think the, the events are quite a seismic. I mean, Munich, even people are much younger than me or you still know about. It was a period where a lot of our modern world came together.

It was end of the post second World War era and a lot of stuff that we talk about now, globalization, computerization, travel was all in its infancy, but rapidly gathering pace. But above all, I think now particularly. It was a time when young people particularly, but others felt they could change the world.

They genuinely felt that through their own actions, whether it was marching and waving a placard in a protest, or whether it was blowing something up or hijacking a plane, they genuinely felt they could make of not just a difference, but be part of something that would transform the planet forever. And that was the last time anybody thought that.

And it, and it went quite fast. By the early eighties, you know, nobody was going on about revolution that idealism had gone and we'd never recaptured it for good or ill. And I think that in this moment, the idea that you as an individual can act and have that kind of impact at a deep level. Is really attractive because we all feel so kind of powerless and and cynical.

So I think that's it. It may be for me, and there's the music obviously.

Michael Feinberg: Yes. For those who haven't seen Carlos, it has easily one of the best soundtracks of any film I've ever seen. Now, I admittedly have a predilection for post-punk, so anything that has, you know,

Jason Burke: We all our crosses to bear. I, I, my publishers shout out to Knopp for allowing me to do a Spotify playlist of the to go along with the book and then just, you know, sending it out through their various social media channels to however many hundreds of thousands of people.

Michael Feinberg: And and we will end on a much lighter note than we otherwise would've. What is your favorite song on that set list?

Jason Burke: You know, I, it's very difficult to choose, but the one, I'll tell you what it is, it's the Clash 1982 Rock The Casper. But it's a good tune, but, and a great band. But it's also just full of these really quite amusing, in retrospect, kind of geopolitical references that are kind of absent from most similar music today. So I, I, I think I'd probably go with that.

Michael Feinberg: Fair enough. Perhaps this is a good place to leave it. Jason Burke, thank you again for joining us. I will unhesitatingly recommend your book “The Revolutionists” to anyone in our audience who is interested in learning more about this fascinating era.

Jason Burke: Thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. Thank you, Michael.

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