A review of Jason Burke, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (London: Penguin, 2026).
There is a tendency among leftists who sympathize with militant politics to dismiss any account of them not explicitly sharing this sentiment as deceitful, propagandist, and counterrevolutionary. I think that’s too simple. It is perfectly possible to portray people and their actions fairly even if one doesn’t share their political beliefs or condone the means they employ.
There are no ill intentions apparent in Jason Burke’s 740-pages book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Burke seems to have taken on this substantial task based on a genuine interest in the subject matter and the desire to make sense of an exciting and confusing era.
Burke chronicles the activities of armed political groups centered in the Middle East from 1967 to 1983. There are excursions into Europe and Iran but the Arab world remains the anchor. Unsurprisingly, the Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as “Carlos“, is the non-Arab protagonist receiving most attention.
The book starts with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and ends with al-Qaeda. Burke – obviously – does not only look at leftist groups embracing armed struggle. Indeed, it is the gimmick of the book’s narrative to tie armed struggle on the left and the right together. In the prologue of the book, Burke writes: “Through the stories of the individuals involved, it tells the story of both movements – the leftist and the Islamist – showing how the former influenced the latter, and indeed how the failure of the first contributed to the emergence of the second, as well as how both were part of a broader revolutionary moment.“ He explains further: „A ‘revolutionary’ project, at least in these pages, is one that seeks to achieve radical and irrevocable social, political and economic transformation of a society or societies. A ‘revolutionist’ is therefore someone who works towards this goal.“
I don’t think Burke delivers on his promise. I don’t see a convincing case for suggesting an inherent connection between the armed struggle of progressive Marxists and reactionary Islamists, other than both of them rejecting the current political order and trying to overthrow it by militant means. I also don’t see any cohesive transition from one tradition (leftist) to another (rightist), other than different political ideologies competing for hegemony.
The suggestion that there is a deeper connection between armed struggle on the left and on the right, can easily be exploited by in-vogue “extremism studies”, which claim a shared feature among people who turn to radical action, no matter their political persuasion. But this is not true. Political radicals of different persuasions have nothing in common apart from trying to change the current political order by militant means. That commonality is formal, not substantial. There are hundreds of thousands of people traveling to Barcelona every summer. They all have something in common: choosing the Catalan capital as a travel destination during the summer months. But how deep does this commonality reach? Once you look at these people more closely, you will find a crowd so diverse that any attempt to squeeze them into one and the same box will appear ridiculous.
I assume that Burke did not set out to feed the presumptions of extremism studies, but his book will be read that way by people who have that intention. They happily lump together anyone questioning the political status quo, becoming “extremists of the center” in the process. By seeing all political opponents first and foremost as enemies of what they want to retain, they neglect fundamental political differences and simplify the analysis.
Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for the Guardian. The Revolutionists is directed at a mass audience. The style fits the purpose, with descriptions so vivid that one wonders how the author could possibly know all the details, but it’s the name of the game: “She was the other half, pretty and petite in in a navy-blue miniskirt, fitted jacket and matching shoes.” Perhaps not everyone’s thing, but it does work for a lot of readers. To be fair, Burke never descends into plain sensationalism.
A lot of research has gone into The Revolutionists, which the author accounts for on 100 pages of notes and bibliographical references. (There’s high-quality stuff in there, for example Turning Money into Rebellion!) The problem is that by covering an area as broad as Burke does, it becomes impossible to check all sources critically. You will largely rely on people who for some reason – and not always the right ones – have decided to make accounts of their political exploits accessible to the public. In the best case, you will get a subjective version of the truth; in the worst case, you will get a version of the truth that they consider most convenient for their personal interest. For example, it is not the wisest of ideas to base your representation of the German urban guerrilla groups of the 1970s on the memoirs of Hans-Joachim Klein or Magdalena Kopp. They contain much that is questionable. Can Burke know? Perhaps not. But it doesn’t make the sources more reliable. In the same vein, I’m not sure if it’s a good choice to grant figures such as the Swedish spy cop Gunnar Ekberg a prominent role. Clearly, everything he has to say will be biased. Someone willing to talk more than others is not a good enough reason to listen.
As many authors who have taken on the the armed struggle of the 1970s, Burke seems intrigued by international networks. Sometimes, perhaps a little too much. Obviously, there were international connections. But to overstate them or to construe some when there were none, can veer into the conspiratorial. The problem is not huge in The Revolutionists but it isn’t entirely absent either.
When it comes to portraying different groups of the era, Burke tries to be precise. Still, things can go awry. For example, there seems to be an unfortunate convolution of Germany’s Revolutionary Cells with its – relatively marginal – “international wing”. When Burke writes that the Revolutionary Cells, after the failed hijacking of Entebbe, “had suffered a blow from which it would never fully recover,” this is only true of the latter. The dominant social-revolutionary wing in Germany remained highly active. Yet there comes another misunderstanding. Burke ridicules social-revolutionary actions of the Revolutionary Cells by declaring that, after Entebbe, the “most notable revolutionary achievements … had been to sprinkle weedkiller on the gardens of industrialists and push stink bombs through their doors”. Apart from the fact that the Revolutionary Cells did conduct much more high-profile actions after Entebbe than that, Burke’s assessment misses the point. It is not like the Revolutionary Cells started with oh so revolutionary hijackings and then descended into meaningless pranks. The different kinds of actions we see were based on different strategic assumptions: spectacular, but primarily symbolic actions by revolutionary elites vs. simple actions by ordinary folks that could easily be replicated by others in order to build a revolutionary movement by the people. These are important questions that disappear when the core of an armed group’s politics is misinterpreted.
Is it worth reading The Revolutionists? It probably depends. Maybe not for people well-versed in the history being told (although, with all the ground covered, everyone will find bits they have not yet read or heard about), but for someone who likes to get a comprehensive overview of the era in a true-crime thriller framework? Sure. Will the book turn them into counterrevolutionaries? Probably not. The Revolutionists fulfills a purpose.
Gabriel Kuhn
(June 30, 2026)