THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke

Another idea newly influential in analytic circles at this time originated with Brian Jenkins, an expert at the Rand Corporation in California, who had studied art history and was steeped in the radical artistic production of the 1960s. He argued that the use of violence in terrorism was not ‘mindless’ but carefully designed to communicate a message to specific audiences: terrorism as theatre. THE REVOLUTIONISTS is an immense, deeply researched and sourced work about extremists. The sort of people we now call “terrorists,” but Burke has a position on that, and uses “extremists” for reasons. His view of the phenomenon starts post-war, gets going in the 1960s, and ends in the mid-Eighties with the radicalization of Osama bin Laden. It is exhaustive, whipping from squats in Germany to tape cassettes of Ayatollah Khomeini circulating rural Iran as audio samizdat, from the “snow murders” in Japan to a Swedish spy almost getting wiped out by Israeli jets. And, over and over again, a…