Modern Terrorism Was Born in the 1970s

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We're still working on this second season of Breaking History, which we'll tell you about soon.

But tune in because this episode, we've got our producer Poppy Damon who sat down with Jason Burke, who's the author of a great new book about terrorism in the 1970s. ♪ What happened once happens again ♪

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and once something that's rugged, timeless, and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to verawatches, that's VAER watches.com, and support American craftsmanship. I'm Jason Burke, and my book is the revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. The Palestinian gorilla is at 113 more people over their bag of pasta just a day,

and increased their diplomatic pressure on Britain by hijacking that BOAC liner flying from Bombay, India to London.

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Now, you have worked as a security correspondent for many years, and now currently at the Guardian. Thank you for being on breaking history. Your book really opens with this spectacular coordinated hijacking in September 1970. Can you tell us about what happened and why you started the story there?

So, the revolutionary airport operation, which is what it was called, in September 1970,

is the most extraordinary event in many ways. There's nothing like it before a sense until you get perhaps to 9/11, 2001. It's a coordinated hijacking of four planes is the plan. It doesn't go according to plan, so they end up hijacking more planes or trying to. And the idea is to fly all these planes, full of passengers to a makeshift air strip in Jordan and the desert in Jordan, so smack in the middle of the Middle East. And then demand the release

of hundreds of prisoners from Israeli jails and from other jails around Western Europe and

liberation of Palestine, which has been formed only a couple of years earlier, but has decided to launch

“this very new strategy of international terrorist attacks. And as I said, the idea is to gain”

some tactical advantages or the release of some of their members and their people are in prison, but really it's publicity. And that's the age-old story of terrorism. This is about an absolutely spectacular attack, which will get them on all the TV bulletins, all the front pages and really

launch their court and their grievances into a global consciousness. And it comes at this critical

moment of kind of revolutionary ferment around the world. It's 1970s, just at the very end of the 60s. Vietnam is still raging as a conflict. You've had just had all these big protests in Western Europe. There's violence in the U.S. There's violence in Latin America and people are shouting revolution and they're saying it with no irony. I mean, they believe it. They want a revolution.

“And so I started there because it seemed like the explosive moment at the beginning of the decade”

1970s and a really great place to launch the story I wanted to tell.

And I guess the big question is why the 1970s, what did you think it could reveal about our

present moment? Well, I've got to go back to the 1970s, it was in some ways really strange experience because it's so different from today. I mean, it's not even pre-intinent, pre-self-own, pre- kind of all the technology that we have today. I mean, people thought differently acted differently, access to politicians was completely different for example. I was reading accounts of journalists who were spent four or five hours with a head of state talking to them. As an interview,

with no PR people, I don't know, no flags, no kind of operation. You could disappear, people in my

book just they go underground. They burn their passports and they just disappear in the middle of

cities in Western Europe and stay disappeared for months, even years. In fact, some of them are still disappeared and they're still somewhere around here. They haven't found you. And I mean, that would just be inconceivable today. There was lots and lots quite apart from the music and the clothes. That was very, very different. But I then started saying quite a lot, there was quite similar. You're talking about a period where there are a lot of people of very angry.

A lot of people who want radical change, particularly young people, and almost all the people in their 20s or even younger actually, a few are a bit older, but not very many. It's a period of great economic distress, often an incredibly instability. There are conflicts in the Middle East. There's great power, conflicts. We're now talking about a new Cold War, that was the old Cold War. And you have massive technological disruption as well. You have these new media technologies

that are coming through, that are causing huge change in huge instability. So, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme as the old adage goes. And here you could, I can really see people wrestling with problems that we're wrestling with today. And again, hoping for some kind of solution. And some of those people, then, as now, hoped to reach that solution through violence. One thing that really struck me as a difference, though, was that the ideology was so

cohesive, whether it was Marxism or other philosophers. It was a kind of collective action with really clear targets. If you look at Luigi Mangione accused of taking out a United Health care official, it's a lot less clear. What the goal was, what it's asking for. And I sort of really noticed that it was a much more collective action. Was that something that struck you as

“well in terms of who the profile of these individuals? Yeah, I think that's a really good point.”

It's all framed within this kind of leftist ideology. And that ideology is fairly well defined. I mean, we know who the enemy are. If you like, the people who are doing these actions, knew who the enemy were. And they were the imperilists. They were the capitalists. It was the global system of imperilism, capitalism. And Israel was seen as an enemy because it was part of that system. And there these common words, common slogans, common clothes,

common icons, like Che Guevara, who died in '67 actually, is like the big martyr. And he's the iconic

rugged and romantic. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. Completely obscures who he was and what he did

“in some of the nastier things about him. But he was a huge icon. And you get him on”

posters. I found him all the way through my research. He kept cropping up like on a poster in a

bedset where one of the bottom line half gang get arrested. He's on the t-shirt that are worn by

Palestinian attackers in '77. He's, you know, being waved of flags by guerrillas later on. I mean, he's everywhere. And so you have that kind of shed idea and shed image and shed project, which is this revolution. And as I say, people talk about it. Everybody talks about it. The shark of Iran talks about it at one point. I mean, it's mad. But I mean, you know, everybody thinks about revolution. There's going to be a revolution. How do we make a revolution? And by that,

they mean a kind of massive radical transformation of the entire planet. I mean, looking at it from where we are now. It just seems insane that anybody would try it. But they believe it. But there's

“one thing that you do start saying, which is, yeah, there's all this shared vocabulary and, you know,”

culture, if you like. But when you actually drill down, they're massive differences. So, you know, the German leftists and the Italian leftists, you think would get on quite well. Actually, you know, they're really big differences. And there's another point where you have a bunch of radicals who come, again, some from Germany, some from Holland. And they end up in a camp, a training camp in Yemen and you all part of the same group. But you think they kind of all get along.

They don't. They really detest each other. The Germans think that Dutch are amateurs. The Dutch think that Germans are all really anal and kind of, you know, overly controlling. And then all this

history about the Second World War comes out and they start having arguments. So, actually,

within the this broad movement, when you get down to the kind of individual level, people are people and people are very different. Yeah. And actually, maybe even particularly different, like, you know, for all their talk of solidarity, it seems like they do quibble over differences, rather than reaching for maybe the things they have in common. I want to pick up on that hijacking that we talked about at the beginning. What was the response to it? And, you know, distinctly,

they would using a hijacking rather than actually executing people. So, just say a little bit more about how that unfold and how sympathetic people were to that. Yeah. So, the hijacking is super complicated because they go for four planes. They get three of them. One ends up being flown to Egypt and destroyed two end up in Jordan. They don't think they need another plane because they haven't got enough British hostages and they want to free Leila Halid actually, the famous Palestinian

minute and they want to get out of a prison in the UK. So, they go and get another British plane and they hijack that as well. So, they end up with three planes in the desert in Jordan and there's this standoff. And it's happening in a very agitated local context as well because the Palestinian groups are kind of semi-at war with the Jordanian monarchy, right in the middle of Jordan. So, there's that going on. But, the Western governments are all looking at this with hundreds of

their citizens now sitting in a desert controlled by the popular front for the liberation of Palestine

“in this makeshift airport. They've called Revolution Airport. And, honestly, they don't know what to do.”

I was reading the minutes of conversations in the White House and kissing Jewish discussion, discussing it with Nixon and they're coming up with all these ideas like they're going to drop in special forces or they're going to bomb various bits of the PFLP, the hijackers infrastructure. They can't do any of it. They don't know where it is. They haven't got the intelligence. They haven't really got the means to do it either. So, they're a bit stuck. And there's this big argument,

among all these various Western powers about what to do. The Americans want to take quite a

hard line. The Europeans basically want to cave. The British should sort of try and negotiate

something in the middle and being a bit wishy-washy. And, the Israelis don't want to give anything away and make any concessions whatsoever. And, basically, this goes on for a couple of weeks. Until the hijackers basically started, realized they've now got something of a problem, not least because civil war is breaking out and Jordan are there in the middle of it. And they decide they're going to blow up the planes. Now, and this is speaks to your excellent point.

but they make sure everybody's off the planes and they blow them up just to make a point,

“just for this spectacular image. And it is spectacular. And because of the modern technology at the time,”

the film of the exploding planes gets onto the evening news in the UK and then in the US,

eventually. And it has quite a big impact. And a whole series of things happens that basically

means that the the hostages are eventually released. That's the civil war breaks out in Jordan. And the Western powers kind of all breathe a bit of a sigh of relief. I mean, there's one point where they kind of are worried about Soviet aircraft carriers and so forth intervening. I mean, they don't. But there's this cold war aspect as well. So by the time it's the whole thing's over, there's this kind of sigh of relief. But a realisation that they're in a completely new world now.

You know, no one has done anything like this before. And this is a new era. And it was that era that really interested me. And I took years later, you get the attack on the Munich Olympics, which really makes that point that this is something you're dealing with something completely different than any of this happened before. Did you find in your research aside from what the government's response was? What was the general public saying? Because as I say, it's strange to fantasize about a time

when terrorists would rob her plane and not the individuals. Obviously, there were casualties. But

the goal was never just to murder for the sake of murder. And you know, your book kind of ends with the

beginning of the religious terror that we live in today. So I just wonder whether people sort of writing op-eds and things saying, well, they wanted to get their point across or, you know, any kind of sympathy for them. It's really interesting. It's basically, there's a big political split as you'd expect. So some of them will left wing newspapers and in some of them more left-leaning countries,

“you get the response that this is really bad, but you have to understand the background and”

their reasons for this and let's talk about the problems in the Middle East that have motivated this violence and they won't go away until we deal with them, which is a very reasonable argument. And then you have another response, which is, we must hand against this. We can't release anybody what are they going to ask for next? Are they going to demand, there's one British parliamentarian who writes angry letters saying, you know, what are they going to demand next that we're

going to, you know, add, drop them boxes of gold in the desert or nuclear weapons? You know, I mean, it's this sort of thing. I mean, it's quite hysterical. But it's a real cleavage point. I mean, it splits people and all through the decade you see people being spit. But one thing that

is quite funny is there is the whole question of airport security that comes up because basically the

“hijackers have they fail in one instance and that is because they try and take it and it's really”

plain and there's an armed air marshal on the plane. The other hijackers just basically they walk onto the planes with weapons. I mean, it's madness. And you could. I mean, at the time, the planes were in the airport. So with the security more or less like a train station, I mean, very, very light at security. And so there are all these discussions about what could be done. And this is played out in the kind of public arena and there are lots of letters coming into newspapers.

One of them I read said, well, there's some suggestion that, you know, everybody getting on to a plane could take all their luggage out of their bags or put their bags on a conveyor belt or something and someone could check it. And the response is like, oh, come on, you ridiculous, you know, like nobody is going to accept that. That's madness. I mean, so you're seeing these kind of debates playing out and basically from everybody from the man in the street through to Prime Minister's

and presidents, they just don't know what to do. They don't even know what to call it. They call them air pirates and sky jackers. I mean, they haven't got vocabulary. Ten years later, it's all changed. And that's an that's really interesting. As you point out at the beginning, you're talking about as one commentator said, the terrorists want a lot of people looking and not a lot of people did. So they want to make the point, but they don't really want to kill anybody. At the end,

at the decade, we're in a different world. Certainly 15 years later, by the mid-80s. You mentioned them Munich. So I would love to jump two years ahead after this hijacking two Munich. Give us a little bit of the story. I mean, people may be familiar, but remind us what

again, a Palestinian group called Black September, which attacks the Munich Olympics in 1972.

“Targeting the Israeli delegation and takes a whole bunch of coaches and athletes,”

hostage in their accommodation in Munich, in the Olympic village. And it all plays out over a day, and it's extremely dramatic, and it's meant to be extremely dramatic, because the reason they've targeted the Olympics is politics, they can, because the security is very, very light. But also, because they know it's going to have just so many people watching. Yeah, the world is watching the Olympics,

and there is actually a really interesting moment where for the first time you have kind of life

feeds from other parts, side of the world of continuous shots of the house where these hostages are being held. And it really is this epic, you know, medial event, which is what it's meant to be.

“It was not meant to end up with a death of 11 hostages, which is what happens.”

And what you see is how the German authorities try to find some kind of resolution, they're trying to negotiate, and then they start planning an assault, and then they that doesn't work, and then they come up with this really complicated plan where they're going to try and fool the attackers into thinking that they've provided the plane, and then when they try and board the plane with the hostages to fly to a undisclosed third country in the Middle East, they're going

to try and shoot them with snipers, it's very complicated, it doesn't work basically, and all hostages and a policeman, and all the three of the attackers actually are killed. I mean, it's an absolutely awful event, and a genuine tragedy at the end of this sort of appalling the dramatic day. And it's what those size make events that anybody who's alive at a time

“able to remember in a live at the time has strong impressions about, and speaking to people who”

I've spoken to people with involved in the investigations, people who were at the Olympics at the time, and they're really affected by people in Israel who at relatives and so forth, and

you read the accounts, it's a really powerful moment, and then it leads to a least of all sorts of

major changes from the security perspective, but it also leads to this Israeli effort, famous, Israeli effort, there's lots of Hollywood films to be made about it all, particularly Spielberg Munich film, you know, there's lots of books about this Israeli assassination campaign basically over the next year or so, which targeted those supposedly purportedly involved in the attack, although actually most of those targeted. Well, I mean, this is one of the things I found

is that lots of misconceptions about both Munich and what happened afterwards, I found in my research, so one of the iconic moments during the attack in Munich is meant to be when the Germans are planning in assaults, and then there's all this TV coverage, this was all in an excellent film recently, I said number the fifth, but yeah, well, I mean sadly, for the filmmakers and for the historical record, the film shows how as the Germans are planning the assault and moving into position to attack

the house where the hostages are being held, the actual hostage takers can see them doing it on a TV inside the house, and that's just a fantastic image of modern media and violence and terrorism, and it's just great, it says so much, sadly it didn't happen, and I got hold of like the reports and the investigations on into the, done by the Germans afterwards, and they went through that house

in critical critical detail, they were noting down Apple calls in terms of what was in there,

there was no TV, there wasn't even a plug for a TV, I mean there's no way anyone could watch it on TV,

really important, but it's not true, so I had to take it out of my book, which was a shame because

“it was a great episode, but just didn't actually happen, but the other thing that we know a lot”

about now, partly because some amazing documents have been released previously classified documents

who released, and also I got a few that still kept classified to the subject, and that immediately after the tackle Munich, the Israelis felt they had to do something they felt very strong and they'd been let down by the Germans and Europeans, which I had to be, and so they launched a clandestine assassination campaign across Western Europe, which it's long said they're just vacation two, is that they were targeting those who were actually responsible for killing their

people in Munich, and in fact they weren't really going after the exact culprit, they did get most of them the survivors eventually, but they were really just looking to disrupt and eliminate

“lots of people who they felt were involved in the Palestinian armed factions and their”

terrorist violence in Europe, and quite a lot of those they hit were really the only ones they could find, they weren't particularly deeply involved, and it ended in a real disaster when they killed completely their own person, they just killed a waiter in Norway, but it's still a kind of storied episode, and again it says a lot about these countries, these states, this grasping, trying grouping really for some kind of solution to the problem they had, they'd lost the initiative

by this stage and they were looking for a way of doing it, and I spoke to people who were involved with that campaign in Israel, and I spoke to some of the people who were targets from the Palestinian side when I was in the West Bank and elsewhere, Jordan, and one of the other, but all framed it differently, and so there's really this framed it as going after the guilty of Munich and said

they never felt any doubt that they were doing the right thing, and the Palestinian said it was

an unequal battle in the end, but at that stage it was I for I, they felt that they'd given

“as good as they'd got basically. I think it all underscores as it was reading that section and thinking,”

it's the worst dilemma you could be in as an official, because what came later is that there are official policies we don't negotiate with terrorists and so forth, but at this time it's also being worked out, so every single decision you make can cost lives, the whole world's watching, and I just couldn't think of a worse situation, because you can say we're not negotiating and everyone gets killed or you could negotiate and then that leads to further terror later,

you basically said it's a good policy, so I don't think we've ever got to a solution of it,

but this is really playing out with them having those questions in this moment. Absolutely, and one of the things that changes over the decade is that at the beginning, they almost had no alternative, but to negotiate, because they didn't have any capability that they could deploy against terrorists who seized a plane or a train as happened or a building, or whether it's a Munich or London or wherever, and because of Munich, they all set up all

the various governments and we've got to have a team who we can deploy, a team of specialists, and so the British use the SIS and the French use the GIGN and the Germans use GIS, nine of these various groups that are unique to the specialist units that they then set up, and that means by the end of the decade, they're even quite fast actually, by 1977, in '78, they've got these teams, and these railings do it in '76,

these rails are actually doing it earlier, and these railings are doing in '72, '73, and they're using special forces to assault planes that have been hijacked. But I mean, it's worth pointing out with the hijackings that there have been lots of hijackings in the '60s all over the US, but they tended to be criminals or they just tended to be people who were just trying to get to Cuba, and all of them, so yeah, exactly, and nobody really,

and the policy then was just just given what they want and let us go away, and obviously that wasn't working for '72, so they do develop these capabilities, these sort of specialists, squads that can go in and hopefully end the hijacking without hurting too many or

of the hostages, again, continues, we saw under the caliphate that different nations had

“very different policies towards journalists, for example, captured, you know, I did some”

reporting around John Cantley, and it's just so interesting that the Brits and American said,

"We're not coming to help you, Spanish and French were basically like, we'll pay their

answer and get them back." And again, when we've had the hostage crisis in Israel, in that instance, it was, you know, sometimes people were killed when they were trying to rescue missions, I mean, it becomes really a complicated issue. All through the book, right, and I was finding these dilemmas, and these moral questions, the, a still very current today, and it's not just interesting on the side of the officials, I mean, I don't, the book is not about the officials,

on the official response, the book is about the perpetrators, and, you know, and really about

“why they were doing what they did, and how they did it, and just telling those stories.”

And among them, this is what was interesting, is you find a similar discussions, I mean, from the, from the terrorist side, if you like, the extremist side, and there's this amazing scene that I came across with German extremists in 1977, when they are under a huge pressure, this is the

ren Army faction, better known as the bottom line-off group, and there on the huge pressure,

their leaders are all in prison. Their leaders have said, if you do not get us out or do an attack that might get us out within two weeks, then we'll take matters into our own hands, which implied that they were either going to commit suicide, or they would log some kind of suicide let's hack inside the prison. The outsiders, these are much often younger, quite inexperienced members of the Red Army faction, were meant to do this attack, where they were going to abduct a

senior industrialist, a former Nazi, and holding ransom against the freedom of their leaders. That was a plan, and they worked out that if they were going to do this, they would have to kill his body guards, and his body guards were just, as they would put it, proletarians, normal working class men, feeding their families, doing a job, nothing special, low grade policemen, but they

would have to die if they were going to seize their target. And this amazing scene that is really

well described in a lot of the literature of German literature, which I was able to read, the British stuff, the English language stuff, but the of how, for all night, this group of 20-somethings sat around smoking endless cigarettes and discussing, they're in a safe house in color, discussing whether they should go ahead with the attack. Is it morally justified to kill these working class men just to free their leaders, or should they wait, but they're under pressure,

and it's a really kind of human moment, even if what they're doing is a borham morally and entirely unjustifiable. And that's the sort of thing that really interested me, you know, that kind of trying to get inside these people's heads, very young people often, I mean, some of my 18-19, and they're making life literally life and death decisions based on ideology, based on all sorts of other reasons. If you're a listener of this show, you probably don't

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of free 30 day money back guarantee. Again, that's Surfshark.com/Eli-D-L, or just use the code Eli-D-L at checkout. That link in code are also in the show notes. There are so many vivid characters. I did want to make some time to talk about Carlos the Jackal as a kind of front-wave figure. Tell us a bit about him and how you tell his story. So, so, Carlos is just awful. I mean, he's just a horrible man. And has been hugely glamorized, partly because he's called Carlos the Jackal, which kind of sounds great.

His real name is Eli-D-D-Ramira Sanchez, and I call him Eli-D-D-Ramira Sanchez in the book. I mean, why should he get a special name? And no one else does. I actually might just get in touch with him in prison, and we exchanged some letters. I wasn't able to go see him, but it was really

“interesting. But partly because what he sent me was a load of press cuttings, mainly about him.”

And he was very keen to sort of make sure that I'd understood him and his background and his

story as he wanted to be seen, as a revolutionary and as a revolutionary hero. And it struck me then.

And it was also very charming. I mean, he's very polite, so he's nice letters and things. That he's in everything I'd learned about a man who'd killed a lot of people, of course, in norms like the suffering. He wasn't actually particularly good terrorist, quite a lot of what he did went wrong. But he was really successful because he was very charming, very seductive, very manipulating, really good at getting people to do what weaker people to do, what he wanted

them to do. And he also really knew how to build a myth. And he was basically the first celebrity terrorist. In an eight where, you know, this sort of celebrities like we have now was just coming through. He was known everywhere. I mean, I was reading reports of him being in kind of Mexico, and Germany, and Uganda, or more or less at once. I mean, he was like this sort of global figure. Like once we had sort of as I'm a thin lad in, and these other sort of terrorist celebrities.

The same sort of thing. Actually, his story is much more mundane. He's a left-wing middle-class kid from Venezuela, who ends up kind of in an ex-pat life in Britain, educated for a year in Moscow, gets involved with the Palestinian armed factions, worked for them for a while, as leading a couple of attacks, very high-profile attacks, gets globally known. The Carlos and the Jackal name is completely effective. It comes from a passport that the

French found in a false name. And the fact that the day of the Jackal, the famous for South novel, was in a, it was in the hall of the flat of an ex-girlfriend. And that the German is going to put it together. It went, "Okay, this is Carlos, the Jackal." And that stuck. And it gave him this

“amazing aura, and he uses it. And that's what's incredible. He uses it later to get himself out of”

a whole load of scrapes by sort of saying, "I'm the famous Carlos, the Jackal." So you can't possibly execute me from messing up your terrorist operation. And also, if you're, as was the case,

an Eastern European communist regime, you can't throw me out because partly I'm a revolutionary,

partly because I'm a revolutionary hero. And also, because you know who I am. And you know what I could do to your embassies around the world. So please, I'm going to stay here in my five-star hotel in the middle of your capital and have a nice life. And you're not going to do anything about it. Are you? And it worked for quite a long time. I mean, worked until the mid-80s. So here's a fascinating idea. There's so many stories. I mean, there's only ridiculous stories about what

he was doing. And you know, how he's buying design a clothes the night before he goes on doing this attacks. And he drives this gold plate, gold sprayed Mercedes in in Prague. And it's just generally, and in the end, it all goes wrong from him because he launches this, he launches a personal campaign to free his girlfriend who's being detained by the French police when she tries to blow up and newspaper office in Paris. And that's a commission from the Syrians, but you know,

let's not get too into the details. But I'm the story is on just mad. But at the base of it,

pretty sorded at the end of the day. I mean, he's a very, he's a sociopath. Right.

Like a maniac who just kind of uses people. He's no ideology. Yeah, I was just going to ask that question because there's so many things that I thought about it. I mean, it's also the age of of serial killers as well and a kind of type of celebrity. But in this instance, they get to at least actors, if there's a moral basis for the the killings that they have. But when you gave the examples there of all his spending these kind of tropes of capitalism, one might think, is that just because

he's a narcissist who doesn't really care or was it he would say two fingers to the establishment or what's going on there? That is a narcissist who doesn't care. I mean, he sometimes has to explain

it and there's that he gives one interview. It's not really an interview. It's got complicated

story how it happens and he gets very cross about it. But his quoted is saying how he likes to find a thing in life and he likes fresh, clean fresh sheets and the theatre and you know find cigars and find wine and then he sort of realizes that he's probably said a bit much and then he says, "But I am, but my heart is above all I am committed to the revolution." I mean, it's total

“rubbish. There are others and that's why he's a sort of outlier. Some of the people I was talking”

to and I tracked down quite a lot of them and those who are still alive and out of prison, quite a lot of them were prepared to talk. Some very great length for days. I spent days with

someone, some became quite a friend, actually, bizarrely. But they were deeply committed. I mean,

they were young people who were hugely committed ideologically. And they were talking to me about it. Some still are, actually, very ideologically committed. But others were saying, you know, I was young and I just believed it. I just genuinely believed we could change the world. And then you look at some of those who are obviously now dead, someone like Gudren Enslin, who was one of the main founders of the Red Army faction in Germany, and she's a highly intelligent,

literate, articulate, where ideologically committed woman. I mean, much too ideologically committed.

“I mean, completely binary and her thinking and that's what leads her into violence and doing some”

pretty dreadful things. But, you know, no one could say that those people were not genuinely committed to doing what they wanted to do in terms of a project. Others, Carl Os is one Andrea Sparta, is another of the Red Army faction founders. I mean, they're more interested in the mayhem than the Marxism I think. Certainly, they're more interested in the Meglamania than the Marxism. And, you know, it's fun and it's adventurous and it's exciting and they're at the centre,

something that is extraordinary and they build themselves into these myths. They watch too many films, they, you know, and it's pretty squalid at the end of it. And has a huge cost in sort of human suffering. And I try to get, I kept that in my head all the time, but it's, you know, it's quite easy to get into the sort of centre's stick, and the flares and the disco balls, and, you know, actually what they're doing is really horrible. Yeah. And that is something

I wanted to ask you about. One thing we explored on the show was looking at a bottom line of group as an explanation, or to try and understand the mangy, any effect. And the question we were looking at was, like, why do middle class, very intellectual kids become the ones that break bad, so often. Some of them have such a specific profile. It's almost like copy-paste. And I wanted, if you got to that, whether, you know, there is a type and why it's them and over anyone else.

I think a two really interesting point somewhere there. One is the absolutely, I mean, almost everybody in my book is a university degree. Yeah. Yeah. And the Germans then looked at this and spent, you know, huge amounts of money and time, trying to do these stardes of radicalisation of fine that unique factor that explains it. And there isn't one, you know, there just isn't one.

“The only thing you can say is there's no direct link between poverty and, and, and violence,”

certainly not political violence. There's nothing that we've ever found that shows that. Clearly, people who feel more empowered, people who feel more able to control their own lives, have that degree of agency. I like more likely to go out and try and change the world for good oil. I mean, historically, it's kind of the middle classes, or the often extreme

And that leads me to the second point I was going to make, which is obviously some of the book

“is about the Islamist wave that comes through in the Middle East in the second half of the decade”

in the 80s. And what really interested me was how a lot of the elements, the attributes, qualities of the secular actors, the left wingers, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere,

and those of the Islamist were the same. And there's an amazing study that was done with Egyptian

Islamists in the early 80s, actually, one of the very few that have ever been done certainly that period, that nature, which showed how similar the leftists were to the Islamist in the Middle East. How they were mainly middle class kids, how they were often educated. I mean, there were, obviously, for a few are women among the Islamists, but then there weren't very many women among the leftists in the Middle East anyway. There were, obviously, in the West, but much less

so in the Middle East. But that in both cases, this researcher found you were talking about

model Egyptians, how he put he was talking about Egyptians. But it would have been the same in Iran,

it would have been the same in Jordan or Syria. And they're all these middle class educated young people who genuinely often believe that they are trying to change the world. And they have different ways of doing it or different thoughts about how it should be changed. But this project of challenging an older generation, challenging authorities that you think are corrupt or hypocritical or unrepresentative, rejecting pacifism because you think it doesn't go far enough, and that

“the only way to bring about changes through the shocking dreadful spectacular violence.”

All of that is you find not just across the period I'm looking at my book, but also the period I've

been reporting on for the last 30 years, which is our last decade. And you could look at right wing violence, which I haven't had time to look at space in the book, but also really interesting has its roots, like US, right wing extremers, has its roots in this period, in the 70s, and you have other people coming through with kind of cookie ideas of what you like the Uniborma and so forth. I mean, all of this this project starts in the 70s and kind of gathers

pace through the 80s and 90s. As I think ideology, other kind of big structural ideology, the big Marxist ideologies, Cold War ideologies, that kind of falls away and you get much more kind of identity motivation. And that that can be the white supremacy, it can be Islamism, it can be a whole series of kind of subsets of identity politics, push to the absolute extreme.

“And that's the kind of thing, that's what I really thought was interesting in the 70s,”

you could start with one, where it's all ideology and you end in a place where it's much more identity and actually with much more lethal violence as well. And that's why I just want to end with asking you about, as you said, it kind of is almost the origin story of our present day, how much did you find that or in your reporting or through the book that there's an awareness by a zombie laden and others of that past and how it failed or how it didn't achieve those goals

and how do they actively use that to utilise with change they want to see and the means they take? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, been laden is a child of the 70s. This is one of the things I, you know, I found, if you like, and I looked at reports, I've been out for decades, but it hadn't really struck me, he was born in '57, you know, he was a teenager through all this this period and it was obviously sort of soaking in everything that was around him at the time.

And other things I found was that how the Islamists were actually influenced by what the leftists were doing. And the fact actually that the leftists were the ones that caught the brunt of the state repression was very useful to the Islamists because it opened up a vacuum that places like Iran, they could absolutely fill because the leftists still been killed or been incarcerated or expelled. But, you know, they were, they were looking at what the leftists were doing.

They were seeing it as an example. They were seeing it as a challenge. How come they can do it?

there's absolutely lots and lots of interaction and influence and so forth. In a way that

I think has been completely ignored as soon as completely, I mean, they're completely different

strands of extremism, but they did start at the same time in the late '60s and they grew at the same

“time and necessarily that's going to have an influence and an impact. The only thing I would say is”

obviously that in the West, it's pretty much over in terms of the leftist stuff by the end of the

70s and that's largely because society's worked. You know, a lot of reforms were enacted,

“voting ages were dropped, money was better funding for university, better divorce rights for women”

abortion rights, all this stuff came through in that period. I meant that for a lot of young people by the early '80s, there wasn't that much to shout about. If there was, it was the environment,

“it was nuclear disarmament, but it wasn't revolution, but in the Middle East, when you got none”

of that, there wasn't a single concession. None of the grievances were answered in any meaningful way. There was a reason to shout for revolution and they went and did it. It was just a very different sort of revolution. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Breaking History. It really helps us if you leave us a five-star review and share with your friends. We'll be back very soon with that series that you lay has been teasing and we'll have more details to share with you very

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