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

by Jason Burke

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE An epic, authoritative, gripping account of the years when a new wave of revolutionaries seized the skies and the streets to hold the world for ransom

In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C.

Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. From the deserts of Jordan and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, Burke invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents and top officials who sought to foil them. Charting, too, such shattering events as the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese civil war, he shows how, by the early 1980s, a campaign for radical change led by secular, leftist revolutionaries had given way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come.

Driven by an indelible cast of characters moving at a breakneck pace, full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is the definitive account of a dark and seismic decade.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Middle East, Biography, Crime, American History

768 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2025

About the author

Jason Burke (born 1970) is a British journalist and the author of several non-fiction books. A correspondent covering Africa for The Guardian, he is currently based in Johannesburg, having previously been based in New Delhi as the same paper's South Asia correspondent.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an informative book written by a journalist, not a historian, so it's full of panache in its storytelling but it's not analytical and, at times, it feels like the material rather gets away from the author. It's also not just about the 1970s as advertised in the title and tends not to define its terms: so 'revolutionists' is a baggy concept that stretches from the 1960s Marxist-Leninist groups who really did want a revolution in the West, to the Iranian Revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini who ushered in a theocratic regime that hated the West, the Soviets and any other believers of Islam who didn't share the Ayatollah's repressive and authoritarian views; to Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and the formation of Al-Qaeda which wasn't so much about revolution as the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic world through violence.

The thread that makes this book hang together is not really 'revolutionists' or the 1970s but a history of the Middle East, especially of Palestine and the project to establish a Palestinian state. Other activists during this period like the IRA or the ANC are not part of this book.

Even within the remit that the author has set himself, the book falls into two halves. The first traces the spate of sky-jackings of the period and the rescues as well as 'big' events such as the Munich Olympics massacre and Entebbe. The struggle between Israel and Middle Eastern states threads through this half as even western 'revolutionary' groups like Baader-Meinhof support Palestine and frequently train at PLO camps. The writing is frequently tense and exciting, almost like a non-fiction thriller.

The second half of the book moves more closely into the late twentieth century history of the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, the protracted civil war in Lebanon all take front-row space though the material doesn't follow wholly logically on from either the professed theme of the book or the first half. In some ways the world does change with a disillusion with Marxist theory and a backlash against 'revolutionary' violence - not least because while some of the earlier sky-jackings were careful to release hostages and ensure planes were empty before being blown up, there was a change is strategy that led to huge numbers of civilian deaths. Interspersed with the story of events are deep-dives into the main protagonists: sometimes these people are hard to keep clear, especially given the vast number of Arabic, Palestinian, Islamic groupings that emerge, merge, fall apart and fall out. Nevertheless, it's interesting to follow the careers of prominent people like Yasser Arafat, to get an insight into the early lives of the Ayatollah and Bin Laden, as well as glimpses of people like Saddam Hussein, the Assad dynasty and Benjamin Netanyahu back in the 1970s and 1980s.

So, while this book was quite different from what I had expected, I found it an informative read that fills in some the the events that I knew by name but had no idea what they meant: I never knew what had happened at Entebbe, for instance. The chapters on the civil war in Lebanon were also enlightening and Burke navigates through the complexities of Arab factions in a way that made them comprehensible - at least at the time of reading!

Despite some straining to tie back events, strategies and agendas to this stated idea of revolutionists and to also avoid pejorative terms like 'terrorist', this book may wander quite far from its stated aims but I found it filled in lots of historical knowledge for me about the Middle East that helps make sense of where we are today. I'll repeat that this is not analytical and not written by a historian or academic: but as a long-time Guardian journalist reporting from the Middle East, this is an on-the-ground look at a complex and complicated situation.

The text in my edition is just under 700 pages and the rest is notes, sources, photos and a massive 300 page index.

[Bethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly focuses on the far leftist and Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. hijacking planes, the Munich Olympics massacre but also wars between Israel and Palestine like Black September). It appears that a lot of far leftists focused on terrorism and joined the Palestine cause to bring about a Marxist revolution - a strange marriage to me.

I'm fascinated at how many of them were German 'anti-Nazis' (the Baader-Meinhof group, Wilfried Böse and so on) who out of all the possible causes in the world - and there are many of them - chose the anti-Israel cause. Something I see all the time even long before this new Israel-Gaza war - an obsession amongst the left with the Palestinian cause when saying nothing about so many other causes e.g. what China is doing to Uyghur Muslims. What makes me laugh even more - which this book does talk some about - is how the cause they are doing this for is often very socially conservative and religious while they themselves are liberal types with women frequently involved and all the rest of that. But somehow that incongruence misses these revolutionaries. It's why I think that there's a deep, deep and horrible strain of antisemitism driving this very specific obsession.

And the type of people? Psychopathic adventurers - 'Carlos the Jackal' who is extensively covered in the book is an example of that, contracting out his terrorism to the highest bidder to live the high life - and if not, stupid enough to think that some bombs and killings of civilians will somehow get the general population to sympathise with their cause, uprise and bring about a revolution. I think that Burke gives them far too much respect. He admires Gudrun Ensslin's effectiveness and 'intellect' for example but fails to quote their own words much. I looked up some of Ensslin's words, instantly recoiled and realised why: the opposite of sophisticated and intellectual thought e.g. "Violence is the only response to violence". (Yes, sometimes, but several times there are better solutions that avoids a never-ending cycle of constant violence against each other.)

It's not mentioned that Ensslin had given birth to a son just two or three months before meeting her partner Baader when many other abandoned children of these revolutionaries are mentioned in passing. Burke could have written more about the human cost of the activities of these revolutionaries - Ensslin's son Felix has written about the hurt and anger he has experienced because of this. To me Ensslin comes across as a sort of Ghislaine Maxwell or Myra Hindley type: abjectly amoral, crude and serves as an effective assistant to a horrible male partner she is enamoured of. I've only used her as one example of how awful a lot of these people are if you properly look at them as people. It would take too long to talk about all of them.

Later on in the book there are chapters about how far leftist revolutionaries failed in Iran and, therefore, the shift to radical and conservative Islam as instead the cleric Khomeini took over in 1979 after the Shah fell. That Islamism drives most terrorism we've been experiencing in recent decades, of course. And there's a chapter on Osama bin Laden's early history.

I'm a bit surprised that Burke quotes Ryszard Kapuściński who has been exposed as a fraud - I thought that kind of thing gets you cancelled by journalists. But of course, Kapuściński writes compellingly and beautifully, which Burke does not. Which leads to that this was a big downside of this book for me - I found it dry and boring; serviceably written. If you have an especial interest in the subject - which I don't have - you may find it gripping though.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jason Burke’s “The Revolutionists” arrives at an odd moment to feel old-fashioned: a serious work of history, uninterested in hot takes, allergic to the consolations of personality-driven narrative, and skeptical of the romance that so often clings to revolutionary myth. If the book has a polemical impulse, it is expressed through restraint. Burke does not ask us to be thrilled by political violence, nor to be reassured by the state’s eventual capacity to contain it. He asks instead for attention of a different sort: the patient kind that follows cause into consequence, tactic into countermeasure, rhetoric into ruin.

The story Burke tells is, of course, thrilling in the way reality can be when it is extreme: kidnappings, hijackings, prison hunger strikes, spectacular assaults calibrated for maximum public disruption. Yet “The Revolutionists” is not a catalogue of outrages. It is a study of how modern insurgent violence behaved once it entered the bloodstream of industrial democracies and their media systems, and what those systems did in response. Burke’s real subject is not the explosion but the echo: how shock reverberates through institutions, how states metabolize crisis, how movements mistake visibility for leverage, how ideology hardens into ritual.

Burke begins where he must: with grievance that is more than abstraction. The early sections insist that revolutionary violence does not emerge from theory alone. It is born from displacement, humiliation, and the slow education of the body into suspicion. Burke is attentive to the way people become symbols before they ever choose to be. A border, a police stop, an interrogation room, an exile’s precarious housing can function as curriculum. The book’s tone here is precise rather than sentimental. Burke refuses to turn suffering into an alibi; he also refuses to treat it as irrelevant scenery. The effect is to establish a moral baseline without granting the narrative a moral shortcut.

From that foundation, the book narrows into the mechanics of spectacle. Burke’s most bracing pages treat political violence not as pathology but as strategy: an attempt to communicate under conditions in which ordinary speech has been rendered powerless. The decision to abduct rather than assassinate, to hijack rather than bomb, to issue communiqués with a particular style and vocabulary is presented as tactical reasoning within a specific media environment. Burke is particularly sharp on the way spectacle is built. Targets are chosen not only for symbolic value but for their capacity to force attention, to create a dilemma, to produce a set of images that will travel. Violence becomes a message, and the message is designed for broadcast.

Here the book’s contemporary resonance announces itself without needing to declare “relevance.” Burke does not have to mention social media or algorithmic amplification for the reader to recognize the pattern. The attention economy did not begin with smartphones. “The Revolutionists” makes the case that, long before the feed, militants understood the primacy of the image, the bite, the scene. They relied on the machinery of publicity to complete the act. The television camera did not merely record the drama; it helped produce it.

Yet Burke’s most important insight is that attention is not the same thing as power – or at least not durable power. The book’s core drama is the gap between spectacular visibility and lasting leverage. Again and again, Burke shows how tactical “success” generates consequences no one fully controls: diplomatic fracture, opportunistic imitation, state overreaction, internal paranoia, escalating demands for proof of seriousness. In a sense, “The Revolutionists” is a book about feedback loops. The act produces the response, and the response becomes part of the act’s meaning, and the meaning becomes the movement’s fuel. No one remains free of the circuit, least of all the militants who believed they were forcing history to move.

A mid-book sequence on West Germany distills this logic with unnerving clarity. The abduction of the conservative candidate Peter Lorenz by the June 2 Movement is treated not as mere set piece but as a democratic stress test. Burke lays out the confusion of the initial response, the political calculations, the unprecedented nature of releasing domestic extremists in exchange for a captive. The state yields – reluctantly, gingerly, with the insistence that it is not establishing a precedent – while simultaneously understanding that it is. Burke then shows the price of that concession as the pattern proliferates. What is negotiated once becomes imaginable again, and imagination is a form of permission.

The subsequent assault on the West German embassy in Stockholm, carried out by militants styling themselves as a “commando,” becomes the brutal counterpoint: a dramatic escalation, a standoff, killings, and a premature detonation that engulfs the building in fire. Burke is attentive not only to the event but to the interpretations that spring up around it: the militants who claim death itself as a kind of victory, the imprisoned leaders who read the violence as proof of continuing legitimacy, the diplomats who draw the bleak conclusion that a small, committed group can “play havoc” with highly developed societies. Burke’s power as a historian is in his ability to let these voices coexist without turning the book into a courtroom. He shows how each actor sees the same episode and extracts a different lesson, then demonstrates what the system actually learns.

It is in this temperament that Burke distinguishes himself from the more breathless chroniclers of political radicalism. Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage” is exhilarating in its momentum, a true-crime epic of American unrest. Burke’s book is closer in moral temperature to Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence” and Albert Camus’s “The Rebel,” works that treat revolutionary rhetoric as a serious philosophical claim and then follow it to the place where seriousness curdles. Burke is not writing philosophy, but he shares their refusal to be seduced by rhetoric that confuses destruction with liberation. There is also something of Alistair Horne’s unsentimental rigor in “A Savage War of Peace”: the sense that ideology is never pure once it meets the machinery of the state, and that violence has a peculiar talent for becoming its own justification.

If “The Revolutionists” has a single guiding thesis, it is that modern political violence is inseparable from modern representation. Burke’s attention to propaganda, communiqués, and the aesthetic habits of militants – the way iconography is borrowed, slogans are refined, martyrs are pictured, enemies are dehumanized into a category – reads like a prehistory of today’s ideological content streams. Here the book is both chilling and oddly explanatory: language that once aimed to persuade begins to function as incantation, a closed circuit designed to confirm believers rather than win converts. The audience that matters becomes internal, and the movement begins to perform itself into existence.

Burke is careful not to reduce his subjects to cynics. Many are sincere. That sincerity, the book suggests, is part of the danger. “The Revolutionists” returns to a hard truth: sincerity does not scale. Conviction cannot substitute for organization, and intensity cannot substitute for legitimacy. The movements Burke follows repeatedly misread their own moral urgency as evidence of historical necessity. They mistake their willingness to sacrifice for proof that they embody the people. Burke’s narrative is a long demonstration of what happens when that illusion collides with reality.

One of Burke’s most persuasive arguments concerns the state’s advantage: not simply its capacity for force, but its capacity for patience. Institutions, he suggests, do not need to be morally inspired. They need only to endure. They learn slowly, but they do learn. Each spectacular assault produces procedural adaptations that outlast the militants’ fervor: new security architectures, new investigative practices, new laws that begin as emergency measures and end as normalized infrastructure. The book refuses to celebrate this. Burke is alert to the costs. The state’s endurance often comes with a hardening that lingers, and “The Revolutionists” is honest about the way crisis can become governance’s preferred mode.

That honesty is also why the book’s emotional register may strike some readers as austere. Burke is not a writer of lyrical intimacy, and “The Revolutionists” does not regularly pause to dwell on victims. Suffering is present, acknowledged, consequential – but rarely rendered in a way that offers catharsis. Burke’s chosen temperature is procedural: he is drawn to courtrooms, ministerial offices, prison wings, and the language in which states translate violence into cases. Some readers will want more grief, more human proximity, more moral emphasis on the irreducible wrongness of what is done to bodies. Burke’s restraint feels like an ethical choice: to refuse sentimentalization, to refuse the pornography of horror, to refuse the narrative pleasures that violence too easily supplies.

And yet in the book’s prison sequences, Burke allows the human cost to emerge with a devastating specificity. Ulrike Meinhof’s deterioration is traced not as melodrama but as an anatomy of isolation: the severed contact with her children, the self-criticism that turns her intelligence against itself, the spectacle of a public figure becoming, in the eyes of observers, less terrifying than pitiable. The hunger strikes, too, become a kind of grim ritual. Burke shows how protest can become theater, how theater can become leverage, and how leverage can slide into martyrdom. The death of Holger Meins is presented as both personal tragedy and political accelerant: an emaciated body transformed into a poster, a funeral turned into a mass pledge, a movement discovering that death can recruit.

The book’s most quietly theatrical scene is the meeting between Jean-Paul Sartre and Andreas Baader in Stammheim. Burke renders it with a novelist’s sense of awkwardness and drift: Sartre arriving as moral celebrity, invited in part because his name might function as a shield; Baader greeting him with a silence and a line that is almost farcical in its self-importance; the philosopher struggling to follow the younger man’s ideological jargon; the gaps in conversation widening into a kind of mutual incomprehension. It is one of the book’s finest moments because it stages, without sermonizing, the tragic comedy of revolutionary self-mythology. The philosopher comes to bestow legitimacy and finds, instead, that legitimacy is not what the militant wants. What he wants is not moral argument but recognition.

In these later chapters, “The Revolutionists” also converses with wider histories of Cold War geopolitics – the wide-angle analysis associated with Odd Arne Westad’s “The Cold War,” or, in a different register, Vincent Bevins’s “The Jakarta Method.” Burke is not attempting a comprehensive global history, but he is constantly aware of the ecosystem in which these movements operate: proxy conflicts, ideological trafficking, the temptation for states to sponsor disruption abroad while demanding stability at home, the way local grievances are magnetized by global struggle. The book shows how transnational solidarity can be both real and strangely hollow: an alliance of tactics more than an alliance of achievable politics.

What finally gives “The Revolutionists” its moral force is its insistence that history does not grant meaning on demand. The militants Burke chronicles often believe that urgency can force the future open. They believe that spectacular action obligates the world to respond, that intensity compels legitimacy, that being willing to die proves the justice of the cause. Burke’s story is the record of what happens when those beliefs collide with the banal endurance of modern systems. The future does not open. The world continues. Violence becomes archive: files, trials, security protocols, legends that shrink and harden as they are remembered. Revolutionary violence, Burke suggests, rarely ends in either triumph or repentance. It ends in administration.

There are many reasons to admire “The Revolutionists”: its breadth, its sobriety, its refusal of cliché, its ability to make a familiar era newly legible. Burke has written a book that will be cited more than it is loved, taught more than it is devoured – and that is not a criticism. It is the mark of a serious work, one that trusts the reader to endure complexity without the sugar of sentiment. My rating is 89 out of 100: a recognition of its intellectual power and its chosen severity, and of the way its cold clarity illuminates not only a past era of revolutionary violence, but the contemporary temptation to mistake attention for authority and spectacle for change.

[Francis Pellow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed and deep study of the evolution of international terrorism. Not a book i could read quickly but very rewarding.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Revolutionists by Jason Burke untangles the spectacularly tangled web that is International terrorism and how it spun wildly in the 1970's. Deeply researched, it's a very accessible read. Burke does a solid job of connecting the dots among the varied terrorist factions. His writing is erudite but not arch. It lays clear too the path that Osama bin Laden took. He also does this without demonizing Islam. This is a compelling read. Thanks to #Netgalley and #Knopf for the opportunity to preview this book.

[A B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been reviewed everywhere from here to Timbuktu, but here are my two cents:

The Revolutionists is less a history of 1970s extremism than an examination of how Middle Eastern conflicts became the crucible for modern terrorism. If you're expecting deep dives into ETA, the Red Brigades, the Aldo Moro case, or Irish Republicanism, you'll be disappointed. Burke's expertise and interest lie elsewhere—closer in fact to my own.

The book is an authoritative, meticulously researched chronicle of '70s violence, from secular leftist spectacle to religious fanaticism. The cast of characters and events are infamous: Carlos the Jackal, Leila Khaled with her grenade-ring jewelry, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Munich, the Iranian Revolution, Lebanon's descent into civil war, Sabra and Shatila, the rise of Wahhabism, and ultimately bin Laden's emergence from the Soviet-Afghan war.

The collation of all these chapters of history in a single tome has a powerful effect. Burke draws on sources in a dozen languages, declassified files, and original interviews, and shows not just the mechanics of terrorism, but its grotesque seductions. What on earth possessed intellectuals like Sartre to visit Meinhof in prison? Why did Foucault endorse Khomeini? The romantic pull of revolutionary violence, dressed in keffiyehs and berets, remains one of the era's most dangerous illusions.

I was most struck by what Burke allows to come to the surface without editorial moralizing: the Nazi parentage of so many Red Army Faction members, Carlos the Jackal's chilling early declaration that he was "in Lebanon learning how to kill Jews," the obsessive antisemitism threading through these movements. The conspiracy theories about global Zionist control pour off the pages. Burke doesn't depict these revolutionaries as tragic heroes; rather, he shows them for the deluded, often functionally illiterate, Jew-hating zealots they were.

Like Patrick Radden Keefe in Say Nothing, Burke achieves a deeply atmospheric reconstruction of a turbulent era told with unbiased clarity. He treats his subjects as complex human beings rather than caricatured monsters; but he never flinches from documenting the callousness of their violence. His prose is sober and scholarly. It is serious history that trusts readers to navigate moral complexity without sentiment.

The book's central argument is very compelling: the failure of secular leftist revolutionaries created a vacuum filled by something far more lethal—religious fanaticism. Burke shows how terrorism evolved from publicity-seeking hijackings (where passengers received cigarettes and sweets) to suicide bombings designed to maximize carnage. It's a transformation that also defines our current moment.

Burke writes with journalistic rigor rather than novelistic flair. Some might find the book a little dense. But for anyone trying to understand how we arrived at our present crisis of extremism, The Revolutionists offers cold clarity where romance once obscured reality.

Five stars for the sheer scope and rigor of this excellent work.

[Osama · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب تأريخي مكتوب باسلوب صحفي مشوق يغطي فترة السبعينات وما بعدها.

[David Steele]

I make a point of not leaving star numbers for any book I haven’t finished.
The trouble with buying kindle books is that you don’t always appreciate how stupidly long they’re going to be. At 768 pages, this book is twice the work I wanted to put in. So here’s the thing about the cost of books: the cover price (about £17) is only part of the story. There’s also the cost of time to read. I’m half way through at this point and my Kindle app tells me I’ve still got more than 24 hours to go.
That would be fine if I was swept away by a compelling narrative, but reading through these chapters just feels more like work. It’s not an easy thing to give up on a book that costs money to buy, but at this point I’d gladly pay the cover price to get 24 hours of my life back.
Thing is, I’m genuinely interested in communist revolutionary history (see my ‘reds’ shelf), perspectives on Islamism (see my ‘mauve’ shelf) and twentieth century history (see my ‘twenty’ shelf). If this book isn’t for me, who is it for?
As to the subject matter, this is a good book if you want to become an expert in the lives and times of the various subhuman psychopaths which make up the subject matter.
The book does a comprehensive job of demonstrating how Palestinian activists have been busy shitting in the well of the civilised world for the last fifty years. It also documents the unholy alliance between radical leftists and Wahhabist killers, in which the Marxists gravitate to their supposed allies for strategic gain, and the Islamists take their cash while holding their beliefs and behaviours in contempt.
This is a book that laboriously demonstrates the danger of a little learning being a bad thing. Midwit activists, believing they’re destined to lead the masses into Communist utopia, waving copies of books for which they’ve barely made it through the introduction.
It’s a story of psychopaths, incompetents, callous and sadistic killers, idealists, fantasists and narcissists. If you like your activists with a healthy dose of misogyny thrown in, there’s more than enough to go round.
Effectively, by page 360, I’ve had enough. This is a collection of people I’d gladly seal in concrete, and I really can’t be bothered to spend any more energy on their stories.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read. I felt the author’s contempt for many of the people he writes about really came through — I’m not sure whether that was intentional. The topic is very broad, and at times the links drawn between far-left terrorism, the Iranian Revolution, Osama bin Laden, and the mujahideen felt a bit weak.

The left-wing groups of the 1970s are covered very well, but the later sections dealing with Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan feel comparatively thin. The ending also comes across as quite abrupt. Overall, it felt like this could have been expanded into three separate books, given the author’s depth of knowledge and research on each subject.

[Bint Laden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing a book review can be a little like doing a staff performance review, when even if the individual has performed very strongly, you nevertheless devote 90% of the time to highlighting how they could do better and areas for development.
So, with this book, which is strong in many areas and which is an informative and entertaining read but which is skewed in so many obvious ways that these are impossible to ignore.
The first and most obvious is that, despite its considerable length, it does not come close to being a comprehensive account of the terrorists of the 1970’s, as its subtitle might suggest it represents. Many of the most active organisations or movements are merely mentioned in passing but largely ignored – the IRA, ETA, the Red Brigades – and others such as the Italian fascists and neo-Nazis (who killed dozens of people) are ignored altogether.
Instead, the book focuses on Palestinian resistance groups, in particular and disproportionality, the PFLP, the German far left (Red Army Faction), and, later, the rise of Islamic militants and Bin Laden. In addition, a very large part of the book is devoted to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez or Carlos the Jackel. This may be understandable, as he was not only the most colourful individual engaged in terrorist violence at this time but also the one who attracted the greatest media coverage, so there are very extensive sources to draw upon but the level of detail Burke provides, down to what he wore and ate on a particular day, is wholly out of proportion to his importance.
Burke’s almost obsessive interest in Carlos the Jackel is all the more strange when set against the cursory references to Sabri al-Banna or Abu Nidal who killed considerably more people than Sánchez. Burke doesn’t even mention the notion, which has existed for many years and for which there is some evidence, that Abu Nidal might have worked for or been controlled by the Israelis, at least at times, although he does note that he killed many senior PLO members, which you might think would at least raise the question. Whether it is true or not, it is surely worth exploring in a work devoted to this subject and time period.
There is also no mention of the fact that Israel provided financial, military and logistical support to the organisation which later became known as Hamas, in order to undermine the PLO and split the Palestinians. Given recent events in Gaza, this is an important point and one which illustrates some of the complexity in analysing these groups.
As I said at the start, the risk here is that I am making ‘The Revolutionists’ sound like a bad book, which it certainly is not. Rather, it is a good book but one in which the text is slanted one way or another, leaving some rather obvious gaps and omissions.

[Alex Levine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful. Comprehensive, vivid, and meticulous. A must read for any historian of mid-20th century Europe. Full of unbelievable anecdotes, sharp insight, and riveting writing. A lot of productive myth busting, such as arguing the Entebbe Operation was not particularly central to dissuading hijackings, but rather was part of a broader move after the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972 across the West to develop comprehensive emergency counter-terrorism capabilities; demonstrating how “Carlos the Jackal” was in many respects a media creation, entirely unreflective of his overwhelming incompetence and “bourgeois” habits (spending his organization’s funds on expensive suits, Cartier watches, expensive prostitutes and 5-star hotels). I appreciate Sydney Lumet’s Network even more - if this is even possible - after reading this.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

As people and governments around the globe are shaken by internal violence in their countries, it has remained the responsibility of these nations to define and deescalate these tensions. Neglecting both, politicians will instead label these hostilities with the ineffective and careless term they have been taught. Terrorism. A shadowy evil separate from place and time—an evil that must not be contextualized but crushed. The definition of terrorist does not come from science but from political motivations. It is difficult to witness cruel acts of terror, but to analyze the motivations behind these tragedies is necessary if a government truly means to confront this violence. Often it is much easier to point to this non-state violence as the work of monsters who must be hunted. An endless spectacle and narrative of terror removed from context only guarantees that this violence and its de-escalation remain separate.

The Revolutionists does not attempt to close this distance. Its extensive overview of various radical individuals and organizations does provide a historic yet glitzy account of the 1970s and its various extremists. It argues that there is a link between the radical violence of that era, and much of the radical violence being experienced in the present. With a lack of analysis on state-sanctioned violence in both of these eras, this narrative adds to the belief that terrorism appears without warning and can infect any individual at any time. The horrific loss of life chronicled in this book can not be justified, nor can it be simplified as mindless hatred. The concern that still exists half a century later is this—the definition of terrorism continues to expand. Civilians executed by state officials such as ICE are justified as a culling of terrorist ideology. Even peaceful opposition to state-sanctioned violence is considered a seedbed for the sin of disobeyed authority. As long as there is a commitment to present terrorism as a catch-all term for those who critique power, it should be no surprise that anyone who speaks on the suffering of their fellow citizens will be considered a threat to order and common sense.

[Donaldinho14 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book concentrating on the development of terrorism throughout the seventies - from leftist revolutionaries who want to change to world, to nihiilistic martyrs. Burke's research reveals countless details unknown to this me and creates a convincing narrative arc.

From this reader's point of view, I'd have liked to learn more about ETA and Brigate Rosse, but I appreciate that Burke's expertise is mainly in the Middle East.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big thanks to Knopf Publishers and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke. This book is incredibly detailed and researched, providing a comprehensive history and analysis of the various left-wing movements that arose in the 1960s and coalesced in the 1970s for different reasons, including political, celebrity and financial outcomes related to hijacking planes. Burke traces the history of the various movements around the globe including the Red Army Faction (Germany), The Japanese Red Army, and the various factions of the Fedayeen, as well as individual actors like Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal. I found Burke’s research and insight into these groups, detailing their backgrounds and formations, as well as the various actions they took against states to attain their goals to be well-researched, balanced, and critical. It’s interesting to consider how new technologies like satellite television, news reporting, and cheaper international flights with limited focus on security provided many of these groups with a platform and leverage to negotiate with states to release prisoners, extract money, or gain access to other countries that would be more receptive or sympathetic to their causes. Reading about these events in a post-9/11 world almost seems like a work of fiction; however, this was the reality of air travel and international terrorism in the 1970s. Burke notes that many of these hijackings aimed to limit casualties and harm to the captives. However, this changed with the 1972 Munich Olympics, which Burke details in the grisly and tragic results. The recently deployed satellites allowed ABC news to broadcast the unfolding drama to live audiences around the world, while Israel’s determination to not negotiate with terrorists further added complications to the attempts to rescue the remaining captive Israeli athletes. Some of the book focuses on the fallout of this event and Israel’s pursuit of vengeance to eliminate those suspected or tangentially involved in the attacks. It was interesting to learn more about those who were involved, especially “The Red Prince,” also known as Ali Hassan Salameh, who was involved in negotiating between the PLO and the CIA to establish a non-violent wing of the PLO advocating for statehood. Beyond providing insight into the history of these movements and groups, Burke’s book also helped me better understand the various groups that have been advocating for Palestinian statehood in both political and violent means for many years. I hadn’t realized the many different attempts to broker peace and Arafat’s movement towards politics after abandoning violence. It also helped me understand the involvement of other countries in the region, including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
The latter part of the book focuses on the 1980s, and we see the movement progress from political ideals to spiritual or religious beliefs and ideals, focusing on the Iranian Revolution that occurred in the late 70s, but actually had been simmering for many years as the Shah, an oppressive ruler who jailed and tortured political opponents, had been gradually losing power to the various factions fighting for more rights. It was interesting to see how communist and socialist student groups made the fateful decision to join with the religious clerics to oppose the Shah. I didn’t know much about the background of the revolution, except that the Shah was unpopular. Burke begins this section with a starting instance of violence committed on the Shah’s behalf, where theatergoers watching a popular, but controversial film, were trapped in the theater while it was set on fire. Burke later examines how the Ayatollah Khomeini condoned this kind of violence in the name of beliefs as a kind of divine punishment for transgressive behavior. Again, Burke notes how technology enabled clerics like Khomeini to reach illiterate and disaffected Iranian citizens with a message of hope, culture and identity that resonated with them. Khomeini used tape recordings to push out his sermons, sharing his anger and resentment towards the Shah, while calling for a new kind of revolution, using the language of politics that advocates for change. Interestingly, this revolution came on the heels of the Shah’s cancer diagnosis, which weakened him and caught America and much of the world off guard. I found this section of the book to be some of the most insightful and important to better understand the continued fractured relationships between the US and Israel and Iran. In addition to this section, Burke provides some insight into the roles that countries like Syria, Iraq, and Libya played in further destabilizing the region with violence through terrorism. The book ends examining how the Iranian revolution spread to other countries, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where more groups sought more fundamentalist and theocratic approaches in society, viewing western influences as ruinous and harmful. Burke examines the Grand Mosque seizure in Saudi Arabia, as well the factors that led to the attack. Burke provides an efficient and helpful background on the Saudi royal family and its attempts to modernize the kingdom. However, we also learn that this event, along with the call to fight in Afghanistan, deeply impacted a young Osama bin Laden. Similar crackdowns on religious zealotry in Egypt impacted a young doctor who would go on to infamy named Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the leaders of al-Qaeda.
Burke’s book is a fascinating look at how the nature and goals of terrorism changed over time, moving from methods that involved press and publicity and used threats or the potential for violence to attain goals involving prisoner release or escape to more sympathetic lands, to increasing violence and destruction. Accompanying this shift from property and symbolic violence of destruction of corporate property like planes, we see how groups shifted from communist or socialist ideas to more fundamental religious ideas and goals, starting with the Iranian Revolution, and ultimately leading to the attacks of September 11th. Burke’s history identifies the ideas of sacrifice and martyrdom, and how the war and violence in Beirut led to some of the most violent attacks on Americans in the 1980s. Burke not only provides a clear and detailed history of these groups and the events that shaped the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, but this book also helps readers better understand how these past events continue to reverberate and impact us today. Although Carlos features throughout the book, often collaborating with these various groups, Burke seems to place Carlos in a separate group that was more motivated by celebrity and money, seeking jobs to finance his expensive tastes in food, wine, cars, clothes, and women. It was interesting to see the contrast in how some of the groups often lived in harsh and impoverished conditions, readying themselves for battles, while Carlos and some other Europeans fought for different ideological motivations, often seeking more comfortable training stations. I really enjoyed this book and learned a great deal from it. The Revolutionists is a book that provides an incredibly detailed look at the various factions that shifted the nature of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, moving into more extreme actions to attain their goals. Highly recommended!

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy of this history about a time of violence, confusion, politics, hope and dread, a time where people thought taking to the streets in violence would change the world, which it did but not in ways that hoped or expected.

I was always an odd child. I liked the news, read newspapers early, and kept my ears open to adults. That is why I have no sense of nostalgia for the past. Many talk about how great things were when they were kids. I remember my Mom being worried about my Dad going out at night when the Son of Sam was on his shooting spree. I remember hearing about Carlos the Jackal, the terrorist boogeyman shooting up Europe maybe coming to America and filling our streets with blood. The bombing of the Marines in Lebanon. Police blowing up a neighborhood in Philadelphia to stop a terrorist group, or supposed-terrorist group. A president talking to People magazine about this being the generation that sees the Armageddon. So I have little nostalgia for the past. Yes the world has become worse, mainly because of the actions of many in this book. Not just freedom fighters, or terrorists, but politicians and thinkers who thought, they could control this rising violence, or wanted to use it for their own means. We are still living with these consequences. The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke is a history violence starting in the turbulent time of change in the early 70's up to the 2000's and the world changing events that destroyed so many lives, and led to the surveillance state we live in now.

The book begins with people thinking they are doing the right thing. Palestinians who were made stateless and sympathizers, thinkers who thought the world could be better, rich people who wanted change and some excitement. And a lot of psychopaths, who to quote a movie wanted to watch the world burn, but have Cartier watches, and people paying for 5 star hotels. Burke starts with hijackings, something that was almost common in the 60's, where the hijackers were looking for hostages to trade, but wanted to more make a message out of buring the million dollar planes to get their message out. Burke looks at the shadow world, where agents of governments would work with, sometimes trading information, letting people pass through borders, for various reasons. To discredit another government, to get information, or just to make sure nothing happened in their own countries. Slowly the violence starts to increase. Burning departments stores to protest capitalism move up to shooting up airports. As do the motivations. Left wing ideas of good for all change to right wing ideas of theology and control. Governments get involved, and soon areas become war zones, and people being dying in record numbers. Burke looks at many of the famous names, from the aforementioned Carlos the Jackal, to the PLO and even to the state sponsors of terrorism.

I knew a bit about a lot of this, but have never read a real examination of the whole era. Burke does a really good job of covering most of what was happening in the Middle East and Europe, with America showing up in both good and mostly bad ways. The book is filled with lots of information, and lots of things I thought I understood, but well, in many ways I believed the messenger and not the truth. Burke does a good job of letting the people talk, and yet many of them are either unapologetic or can't understand why they are considered the bad guy. Their are a lot of broken bodies in this book, but there are also a lot of broken families, children just passed off while their parents did revolution, parents ignored for years, yet approached for money.

A book that left me far more maudlin than I would have thought. One can see where things start to go wrong. Governments allowing this groups to go free, hoping that if we let them go, well we won't have problems here. Governments supplying this groups with arms and access, to destabilize others. Many of these groups had great PR people, Carlos especially. There is a lot to think about, a lot to get angry at, and a lot that explains why we are at the place we are as a world. Nostalgic for a time that never was, heading into a future that seems to be only getting darker. A really interesting book, and one I learned much from, and one that I highly recommend one read the notes at the end for.

[Ashley Cohoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5 stars)

The Revolutionists is one of those books that doesn’t try to entertain you so much as quietly insist that you pay attention. Jason Burke takes on the violent revolutionary movements of the 1970s and early ’80s and treats them not as mythic rebels or cinematic villains, but as people operating within very specific political, media, and historical conditions. It’s serious, measured, and often unsettling, and I mean that in a good way.

Rather than attempting an exhaustive catalog of every extremist group of the era, Burke focuses on how modern political violence evolved, particularly through the strange alliances between far-left European revolutionaries and Palestinian militant organizations. What emerges is a picture of ideology colliding with spectacle: hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations, and carefully staged acts of violence designed less to win hearts than to command attention. One of the most interesting threads in the book is how these groups mistook visibility for power, assuming that shocking the world would somehow force meaningful political change.

Burke is especially strong when examining how terrorism became a form of communication. Violence wasn’t just destruction- it was messaging, branding, and performance, long before social media ever existed. Reading this now, it’s hard not to see the echoes in today’s attention economy, where outrage travels faster than context and spectacle often replaces substance.

That said, this is not a fast or flashy read. Burke’s writing is clear and disciplined, but it’s also dense at times, and emotionally restrained. He doesn’t linger on victims or dwell in moral outrage; instead, he traces consequence- —how states adapted, how institutions hardened, and how revolutionary movements ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Some readers may wish for more emotional immediacy or broader coverage of other groups left largely in the background, but Burke’s narrower focus allows him to go deeper into the patterns he’s most interested in.

What I appreciated most was Burke’s refusal to romanticize. These revolutionaries are neither heroic nor cartoonishly evil. They’re shown as driven, sincere, and often disastrously wrong- people who believed urgency could bend history, only to discover that modern systems are far more patient than they are passionate.

The Revolutionists is thoughtful, unsettling, and very relevant, even though it’s rooted in the past. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a rewarding one, especially if you’re interested in understanding how political violence transformed from theatrical rebellion into the more lethal, ideologically rigid extremism we recognize today.

A big thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Bob Greenway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jason Burke's The Revolutionists is an encompassing look at Middle Eastern and European terrorism from the 1960s to the 1980s, offering an excellent history of the period and eerily reflecting the current political climate.

Burke educates the reader about the major groups and actors of the times. We're introduced to Carlos the Jackal, Ulrike Meinhof, Fusako Shigenbou, Wilfried Böse, and others. The groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Black September, and the Red Army Faction, are detailed.

The author aims to have us understand the worldview of these individuals and groups and why they chose violence to advance their agendas. Each section of the book takes us into the minds and lives of the actors and paints their tactics of bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and other attacks with a style that is part spy thriller and part history book.

Burke doesn't necessarily offer judgment of the actors and their actions, but he stresses that ignoring their motivations is unwise and dangerous. He lets the facts speak for the successes and failures of these radical individuals. Many of the attackers ended up dead or imprisoned, and their missions were often failures. Still, Burke notes, their acts have shaped the world we live in today. One only has to think of improved safety protocols at airports and public spaces to realize the impact.

The book does require commitment to read. There are so many individuals, locations, and groups that it takes effort to keep them straight. However, the deeper one delves into the book, the easier it becomes to follow Burke's style, as well as the scope and detail of these revolutionists and their activities.

One has to appreciate the research and scholarship Burke brings to this project. His in-depth exploration of 1960s–1980s extremism enhances our understanding of the past and encourages us to consider how these worldviews and actions shape the challenges we face today.

I received an advanced reading copy from NetGalley.com.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carlos the Jackhole

Most of what I knew about the RAF and Carlos came from the pop films from Assayas and Baader-Meinhof complex, the latter of which I came to know even a bit more from watching random German TV documentaries on the topic. However, never a deep dive until now, and I would have to agree with the majority of the observations and conclusions here. The pop image becomes quite muddy indeed when contrasted with the facts on the ground - that these were deeply flawed and selfish individuals causing terror in the general population for their own demented ideologies. Talk to Germans and you won't find much pop nostalgia for the RAF for those that lived through it. The author layers on the interplay mainly physically but not quite ideologically with the birth of modern Islamic terror from the opposite side of the spectrum (thus making a great case for horse-shoe theory), which somehow started off without mass violent aims but quickly devolved into the quagmire we've experienced since the time reported on.

I was hoping the author would end the story with the '91 Treuhandanstalt president assassination, but likely difficult to quickly summarize and was performed by a 4th gen RAF who had little if any affiliation with the original group besides in name. I found the book to be quite engrossing.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of eBook

Equal parts informative and terrifying, “The Revolutionists” is a look back to the 1970s and the all-too-common . . . and horrifying . . . airplane hijackings and taking of hostages. In an age often most-remembered for international terrorism and the ruthless revolutionists responsible for such despicable acts as the massacre of athletes at the Munich Olympics.

In a time when extremists seemingly lived only to create fear and chaos, various factions, espousing their own extreme views, held the world hostage as their violence against the innocent played out in horrific event after horrific event. Here, in this extensively-researched book, readers explore the history of political violence and ideological extremism as the author examines files, documents, and interviews with hijackers, victims, and others.

For readers interested in history, the Middle East, and in these politically-charged events, this disturbing look into terrorism provides decisive insights and captivating accounts of these horrific events.

Recommended.

I received a free copy of this eBook from Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor / Knopf and NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving this review.
#TheRevolutionists #NetGalley

[Richard Durrans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book - fascinating history and very well written, weaving the stories of the individuals with the events of the time. Reads like a spy thriller. The Palestinian question is front and centre and is a key catalyst for the modern day terrorism. Most of the early terrorists were from the refugee camps created after Israel evicted the Palestinians after the 1948 and 1967 war. The lack of security at airports and all across Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s was astonishing, as was the fact the the intelligence agencies and security forces had little idea about the forces at play. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel seemed unnecessary and n hindsight a major error. It left to the explusion of the PLO and a vaccuum in Lebanon and eventually Gaza/west bank that left the door open for more radical groups backed by Iran and Syria. The inept policies of the West in the middle east over the past 80 years are clear to see - most obviously leading to the 1979 Iranian revolution. Any understanding of the Middle East and the rise of terrorism needs to understand the Colonial past of this region and crucially the Palestinian issue. No surprise that these issues are still with us. We should not be surprised if terrorism continues.

[Perrin Larton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a teen in the early 1970's and remember talking about some of these incidents in Civics and History class. Then I was a young parent towards the end of the decade and it all seemed so far removed from my daily life. In the 80's I was parenting and some of the events, for me, were just background noise as I watched the news in the evening. Reading this book now, with the current climate in the US, I realize we haven't learned anything. We're still fighting pretty much the same issues. Will it ever end?

Well researched and well written...but it was so LONG! I finished it, but it wasn't a pleasure read. I did learn things that I'd either forgotten or never knew.

I had at first given this book 3 stars. I upped the star rating to 4 because I learned something and we need to remember what happened in order to not repeat it...or at least try not to repeat it! There is much information at the end of the book, after the epilogue. This kind of rounds out the stories that were discussed earlier.

[Ula Tardigrade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this one, as it didn’t fulfill my expectations, although I don't blame author for that, and the book is meticulously researched and well written.

While I have heard and read about different terrorists and hijacking’s of the 70., I was intrigued by the premise of this book: that it shows a broader political, social and cultural context of different appalling acts and infamous movements. Therefore I was disappointed that it was focused on only a few cases and mainly ignored others - so much space is devoted to the German RAF leaders while groups like the Italian Red Brigades, ETA, or the IRA are only mentioned. So it is important to be aware that the main focus of this book is not terrorism in general but the Palestinian one and its influence on some radical leftist groups.

Thanks to the publisher, Knopf, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Revolutionists takes you inside the terrifying and chaotic world of 1970s international terrorism, when hijacking planes became a weapon of choice and the world suddenly felt much smaller and more dangerous. What makes this book exceptional is the access to newly declassified documents and interviews with actual hijackers, agents, and survivors. The research is staggering, but Burke never lets the facts bog down the pace. The real strength is showing how this wasn't just random violence. it was a coordinated, international movement that governments were completely unprepared for. Burke traces the evolution from secular leftist revolutionaries to the religious extremism that would define terrorism in later decades, making clear connections to today's threats. This is gripping, authoritative, and surprisingly accessible despite its scope.

[Lara A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is compelling and rambling in equal measure. For all that it includes, there's a lot it leaves out. Little is mentioned of Italy, even the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro is not mentioned and the omission of any mention of the Lockerbie bombing seems baffling. The author's admission in the notes that Ulrike Meinhof was the most fascinating character in this book is a telling one. For all that Burke seems to know about the Middle East, he truly understands very little and the book loses its way when focusing on Islamism. Likewise, the slightly gushing tones that creep in when describing the various deeds of Mossad is unsettling. Would the actions of the Bureau of State Security/National Intelligence Service in pre-1995 South Africa be described in such glowing terms?

[Bradley Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A super detailed book about Middle East terrorism. The language and rhetoric hasn't changed. Nothing has changed at all. Watching the news about Gaza, and reading about the marches in capital cities is like any other chapter from the book.
Each chapter could be a book in their own right - a full story of each terrorist incident or war. The author's detail is amazing.
I suspect there will be a sequel to take us from the early 80s to now.

[Stuart Duffey · Rating 2 out of 5]

My days its a slog to read. I feel bad because the majority of the book is well researched maybe overly so it also does carry a narrative of bias ideology from the author you'd sort of hope would not be in a book like this. The detail as said is impressive but makes it a laborious read I think its more of a research project that could be pitched to make a documentary series.

[Andy Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously very well researched and written. I'll have to admit it was probably a bit too in-depth for me as someone with just a general interest, and especially in the later chapters got a bit over whelming trying to keep tabs on who everyone was. Not the fault of the book though.

[robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Audio. I gave up after 5%. I thought this would be a fascinating book about the Revolutionists. Instead I was buried in overtly long diatribes about the characters and their motivations. It was just too dry and seemed to favor their ideology.

[Steven Beckhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book about terrorism in the 1970s and early '80s. It goes from event to event weaving all the main actors together. E.g Carlos the Jackal, the Munich Olympics, etc.

I won't say I couldn't put it down but it was a fascinating book. Well written.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a spy novel. Puts a lot of stuff into context.