transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] The two operatives hijacked the aircraft once it left Rome. It was August 1969, and Leila Kale and Salim Issaoui had been expecting the Israeli ambassador to the USA to be on board the flight. He was a man who one day would become Prime Minister of Israel, Itzhak Rabin. He was supposed to be on that flight, TWA 840, but he was not. The hope had been that they would capture Rabin and then force Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, or at the very least help to bring awareness of the plight of the Palestinians to the world. And that indeed is what they pivoted to in mid-air, whereas they realised they did not in fact have a senior Israeli diplomat. By the time they landed in Damascus, Leila Kale had a statement ready. She insisted that they had hijacked the TWA flight because it's one of the largest American airlines, it services Israeli air routes and it was an American aircraft, it was a Boeing. She said, the American government is Israel's staunchest supporter. It supplies Israel with weapons for our destruction. It gives the Zionists tax-free American dollars. It supports Israel at world conferences. It helps them in every possible way. We are against America because she is an imperialist country. She said that just after she'd evacuated the aircraft and blew up the nose section with her colleague, they then went straight into Syrian custody, but the two of them were later released without charge. Now, the hijacking of aircraft is something that largely has been eradicated in today's world, but if you had been a news hound in the years that followed, this would have been something rather familiar. These two hijackers were just two of a radical fringe in a global movement that believed in revolutionary change, utopians, the overthrow of traditional elites, the destruction of capitalism, the transformation of conservative social institutions. Their demands include things like the liberation of Palestine from Israel, of Northern Ireland from the UK, of the world from America. This was an era that saw the birth of that type of violent political extremism. The 1970s was the decade in which that form of direct action was forged, and today on Dan Snows History Hit, we're going to tell that story. It's a story of technological change, it's a story of new ungovernable spaces beyond official control. It's a story of economic hardship, of popular frustration, of generational impatience. It was a time of kidnapping and bombings and hijackings and violence, all designed to engage the mass media, to put pressures on government, to light up people's television screens in the evening. But in this podcast, you're also going to hear the story of how that terrorism diverged. It sort of died out in the West and yet it morphed into something quite different in the Middle East, where you see the emergence of Islamic fundamentalist violence. Now, I've talked me through that story as really one of the only people alive who can do that and do it brilliantly. Jason Burke, he's the international security correspondent for The Guardian. Over the years, he's covered Europe and Africa and South Asia and the Middle East. He has reported from the very heart, from the very front lines of the war on terror, where he forged his international reputation. He's written as well as an article, some wonderful books as well. He has spent so much time in the Middle East and Africa. He's met and interviewed so many people that he refers to in this, a history book. He's a great journalist, great scholar, huge honor to have him on the podcast and listen to him tell us how his fascination with Islamic fundamentalism, with violent extremism, it's all around him, led him back through this history to some pretty surprising places. So here it is, the 1970s. Let's get into it. Jason Burke, what an honor to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining.

Speaker 2:
[04:03] It's fantastic to be here, massive fan, really excited.

Speaker 1:
[04:07] Take me back to 1970s. I'm thinking in the deeper history, there had been an Arab uprising against British rule in Palestine in between the First and Second World War. But there wasn't this elision that many people now think of between Islam and this type of political violence, this radical political violence, call it terrorism, that we now see and we've seen in the last 50 years. Tell me back to the 70s, was that a distinction that people would have recognized at the time? Was there a link there that people recognized at the time?

Speaker 2:
[04:35] I'm going to take you back a little bit further than the 70s. I'm going to take you back to the late 60s, because that's really where it all starts, which is this amazing revolutionary moment, radical moment in the late 60s. We all know it from 68 in Paris and then what's going on in the US as well, with big protests and this big wave of radical energy in the West, particularly among young people who are looking to change the world in a very real sense. And that is not just confined to the West, it's very much present in the global South, it's present in the Middle East. In the Middle East particularly, it's the 1967 war and the defeat of Arab powers by Israel then, and the occupation of remaining Palestinian territories at that moment that starts this new dynamic among the Palestinians. But in general, you have this moment that is huge and global in terms of millions of people seeking radical change. And actually, it fades quite quickly. But before it does, it generates a whole series of groups, factions, even individuals who feel that the only way they're going to get that change is through violence. And they include leftist groups in Europe, they also include groups all over the Middle East, including at the time, some of the Palestinian factions who are on the whole nationalist, pretty secular, give or take, certainly the ones that I was looking at specifically, did the most spectacular acts of terrorism, were very secular, they're Marxists, progressive, and very different from what follows only a few years later. And that's what I think is really interesting, how quickly in the Middle East you move from this nationalist, secular, progressive vision among militants and militant groups to something that is faith-based, very conservative, and a very different ideology, though it shares crucially a kind of utopian project.

Speaker 1:
[06:45] From a modern point of view, there will be assumptions around Islam and direct action around terror that simply weren't a reality back in 1970 or the late 60s.

Speaker 2:
[06:54] I had to really get my head sort of back into that place, and the whole idea of what radicalism or extremism meant was completely different, and what terrorist violence meant was completely different. This is where you get lots of people talking about terrorism as theater and how terrorists want lots of people watching, but not many people dead was one of the phrases that people came up with at the time. It really struck me when I was reading through government documents and found someone referring to a recent attack in Israel, which had involved, what appeared to be a suicide attack. And the response from the official was, well, it can't have been a suicide attack. Arabs don't do that, only the Japanese. And it was at that moment, I suddenly thought, how did that change?

Speaker 1:
[07:44] So interesting, putting it in its global context, and also to remind us of the changing nature of it. I suppose that's interesting about the 1967 war. So Israel and Palestine light the heart of this as well, don't they? So 1967 war is so interesting, is that it's one of the most catastrophically one-sided wars in history. And it is just a disaster for states, isn't it? Syria, Jordan, Egypt, sort of big government, top-down war, just looks like it's not going to be a goer. And so I suppose that means that people go, I think we have to do this ourselves. We're going to have to take this into our own hands, right? Is there a sense of that?

Speaker 2:
[08:15] Absolutely right, yeah. I mean, that's the logic among Palestinian activists at the time. They've been looking to Egypt particularly, but also other Arab powers to, as they would say, liberate Palestine at the time, defeat Israel, destroy Israel, in fact. And it doesn't happen. In fact, the opposite happens. And they realize that if they're going to do anything, they're going to have to do it on their own. And they involve different kinds of strategies to do this. And again, you've got to remember that this is a moment where you have the Vietnam War is raging and a really big influence and inspiration for people in the developing world everywhere. You've just had the Algerian War of Independence, which was a success, again, a big inspiration. So among the Palestinian leaders, there are several who are thinking, okay, we're going to launch our own version of the Vietnam War and we're going to win. Others think that isn't the way to go, but we can do something different, something which they would say is cleverer. And we're going to go for this new battlefield that has just opened up this new space, which is aviation and TV and all these things that are emerging in the late 60s and early 70s that give them the opportunity to project power and spectacular influence and violence in a completely new way. So you've got this kind of big global thing happening, but it ties in with exactly what's happening on the ground in the Middle East and that's pretty unprecedented.

Speaker 1:
[09:42] And the global-ness of it all is, I suppose, reflected by some of these groups. They're very transnational, aren't they? I mean, people may have heard of Carlos the Jackal, but can you tell me about him and how he sort of symbolizes or embodies some of this?

Speaker 2:
[09:55] So Carlos is great in the sense that he's an amazing character. He's a repellent human being. I got in contact with him in his prison in France where he's been since 94. I sent him a whole list of kind of complicated questions about what he'd been doing and all the rest of it. And he sent me just a batch of press cuttings all about himself and kind of how great he was. I mean, it's just astonishing, deeply unpleasant, but very useful for me in terms of trying to tell a story because he is a key individual in terms of the internationalization of what was otherwise quite a local conflict in the Middle East. I mean, he's Venezuelan. He comes from a kind of middle class Marxist family. His interest is not ideological. His primary interest is simply his own career, as it were. He loves spectacular luxury hotels and all sorts of other things. The finer things of life, designing clothing and ties and flying around to San Tropez and stuff for a weekend with a new girlfriend, all this sort of thing. So he's really not like a kind of ascetic, committed Marxist militant of the old school. But he gets involved with the Palestinian groups, particularly the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. When he's at university in Moscow, and he's connected to them by variety, whereas he ends up being recruited. And he becomes this kind of maverick figure for them. And he's quite a bad terrorist. Quite a lot of what he does goes badly wrong. But he's really good at two things. And one is human relations. I mean, he's a seducer, he's a charmer, he's a manipulator, and he's really good at it. The other thing he's great at is his own image, the media. And the opportunities now in the 70s are much bigger, much more TV, much more press media and so forth. And he exploits it absolutely. And it has to be said, the media lap it up, or they give him this massive platform. And he uses it, he uses it to pretend he's much more powerful than he is. That helps him in loads of ways. He bluffs and he cheats and he congs people for years. And he kills people, he starts killing people quite early. In 1975, he kills, there's a shooting, which he kills three in one go. From then he doesn't stop. But in terms of ideology, there's nothing there. But the key thing about Carlos, apart from this sort of extraordinary character he is, and the celebrity, is that he is an internationalist, deliberately, and he ties together groups in Europe and his clients, Gaddafi, in Libya, the Syrians, with the Palestinians, when it suits him.

Speaker 1:
[12:44] But it's interesting, so his targets are international as well, aren't they? Because he tries to kill a Jewish businessman who's senior in the British Zionist Federation. And he also carries out this attack on OPEC in Vienna. So he has a quite a big capacious strategic sense of how to resolve Palestine, I suppose, in some ways.

Speaker 2:
[13:02] To be honest, I don't think he cares about Palestine, really. I mean, he's not doing it for the Palestinians. I mean, others are. He's doing it for himself. The 1975 OPEC attack, which he rightly point to, is a really good example of what Carlos does and why. So the OPEC attack in 1975 was an attack on conference center in Vienna, where all the Arab world's oil ministers were meeting to thrash out pricing of oil, this vital commodity that was the jugular vein of the Western economies and so forth. And they met in this one building, the OPEC building. And Carlos was commissioned by Colonel Gaddafi to attack it. And he teamed up with some German leftists who he knew previously, done some operations with them, and he drew together a bit of a team. And it was all under the supposed umbrella of the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, but really it was kind of Carlos' gig. And he successfully attacks this conference, takes dozens of ministers hostage. And the idea is that they're going to fly these ministers around the Middle East and get them to do like a mini press conference in favor of Palestinian rights at every single capital. I mean, he's mad. And then they're going to shoot the Saudi oil minister and the Iranian oil minister at the end. I mean, it's hugely ambitious and never going to work, but they actually take them hostage. They then fly them to Algeria and then Libya and then back to Algeria, and then it all goes wrong. One of the main reasons it goes wrong is because Gaddafi pulls his support in the middle of it being as mercurial as ever. But Carlos does a deal with the Algerians and may have taken millions of dollars off them to basically end the whole operation. And he then disappears into a luxury guest house and a luxury hotel and surfaces some months later to face the music at the PFLP's headquarters in Yemen and gets away with it because he's so famous. The group feel they can't actually shoot him because no one shoots Carlos. It would reflect very badly on them. So it's absolutely perfect example of why he was doing what he was doing, how he got away with it, and how he came out of all these things with his own interests, not just intact but actually advanced. He does this all the way through. A fascinating man but utterly repellent in many, many ways. A killer and lots of victims, lots of trauma, lots of destruction.

Speaker 1:
[15:44] Just listening to you and looking at your book, I'm so struck by how the politics, the desire to free Palestine, for example, is one that endures today. But so much of it is so rooted in the period, the aircraft, the nature of communications, the nascent television sets in people's homes. It's just so 70s, isn't it? And it has to exist exactly at that time in the way that it does. Tell me about planes, because there's flying people from place to place. That would have been quite exotic at the time. And you do see a lot, you mentioned already, aviation is present in this story in a way that might be surprising perhaps to a modern audience.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] We take it for granted, fly to Paris, fly to Rome, fly to the Middle East, wherever. Relatively inexpensive masses of different planes, routes, all the rest of it. Late 60s, early 70s, through the whole of a decade, this is really the beginning of mass aviation, certainly outside the US. And security is really flaky. I mean, there just isn't any in many places. Airports are designed like train stations, so you can just kind of get out of your taxi and just walk on to a plane basically. There's a whole new area that has opened up, which states as such are just not across, they're not policing it, they haven't got no real intelligence on it. And it is a massive opportunity for bad actors or for any actors to occupy that space and start doing things that states don't like. It doesn't last that long, but the first five years, six, seven years of the 70s, those who are hijacking planes and such like have a pretty much free run. States haven't got any answer, so they negotiate, they release the prisoners that hijackers want released and they hand over huge sums of cash. The Germans gave a whole load to a different Palestinian group when they hijacked a plane. It was just, they didn't have any answer. Then they got an answer, which was effectively highly specialized military or police units, something the Israelis pioneered initially. And that raised the cost of the hijackings greatly because if you did one, you were quite likely to die. And by the end of the decade, after a couple of spectacular interventions by these groups, the states are pretty much back in control of this new space that aviation has created. I found it fascinating. I was reading people saying things like, I know we could put all passengers' baggage through a separate scanner, and then somebody else will be writing, this is government memos going, no, that's an absolutely ridiculous idea. Nobody would ever tolerate that.

Speaker 1:
[18:21] Grotesque invasion of privacy.

Speaker 2:
[18:23] Absolutely. Then coming up with later ideas about rights and wrongs of legal interventions and so forth, or sovereignty, and all of this stuff has been thrashed out at the time, and it was completely new. The opportunities were there for bad actors to do what they wanted.

Speaker 1:
[18:39] Not unlike some of our discussions around digital space in the last 20 years. Interesting, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[18:42] Yeah, absolutely. It's a new space, unpleased space. Yeah, it's a good point. I hadn't thought of that.

Speaker 1:
[18:47] You mentioned Germany a few times. So, what's happening in Germany? There's something going on in Germany as well, isn't there? And is it fuelled by the same transnational energy?

Speaker 2:
[18:54] Well, yeah, it's certainly part of the same movement, but it's quite parochial. What's happening in Germany is perhaps one of the most extreme examples of what came out of the late 60s and that kind of radical moment globally. And what you have by 1970 is a small fringe of people who are very committed to violence, to unmask what they see as the fascists. The reality of West Germany at the time. A lot of the background is to do with how the Germans had not come to terms with Nazi crimes and a new young generation were challenging older generations over that. It's also to do with how the universities were working there, a whole series of other factors, political factors on the ground that was specific to Germany. But what you do get is this really big protest movement, and all these offshoots of kind of squatting and communes, and all this counterculture culture, if you like, in the late 60s, and out of that emerges a few small groups. There are a few people who are really fascinating and really good examples of what happened, such as quite a famous female journalist called Ulrike Meinhof, who was actually a bit older than most of the other militants I look at in the book, and she was in her mid-30s. But she was like this really prominent left-wing journalist. She was on TV a lot, debating with kind of right-wing commentators, all smoking like chimneys in these late night discussion programs. She was a columnist, very well known, very well read, highly articulate, intelligent, educated woman. And she makes this split second decision in 1970 when she's confronted by a particular choice as to whether she carries on with that life or whether she goes underground and follows, quite literally follows real militants committed to violence into clandestinity and commits herself to that, as they call it then, armed struggle. And she makes this decision in, I'm clicking my fingers, in like that second, jumps out of a window, quite literally, into a getaway car and disappears into clandestinity. And so rapidly that she has to call a friend to get her two young daughters picked up from school. And she then disappears into clandestinity. She's arrested two years later, has a very tough time in prison because the Germans are really cracking down hard on Germany, the militants, a series of terrorist attacks, quite murderous ones, that are really shaking Germany, the biggest post-war crisis of its democracy in many ways. She ends up in prison, solitary confinement, really awful conditions for some of the period, and then effectively persecuted by her fellow inmates, other militants, and she commits suicide in 76. And it's a terrible, tragic story in many ways of a woman who has very strong ideals and then goes wildly off the rails. And that interested me greatly, she interested me greatly. There are lots of other examples of people like that in the book.

Speaker 1:
[22:12] People have had the Bader-Meinhof gang, they bomb US Army base in Germany, they kidnap industrialists, and they hijack a plane as well.

Speaker 2:
[22:20] They do. And people talk about the Bader-Meinhof gang, which is a bit unfair to Gudrun Enslin, who's like the third member, third leader. She's another ferociously intelligent, but very misled woman, and very interesting in her own right. But she and Andreas Bader, the other leader, also end up committing suicide in 77, when an incredible episode that's very little known outside Germany, but very famous in Germany itself, they kidnap a senior industrialist, conservative industrialist with a Nazi past. And they're convinced that with this man now captive, they will force German government to release all their own prisoners, including the leaders who are in jail. And they're wrong. And the Germans don't give way to the government, and they're forced to hijack Lufthansa plane. They get the PFLP, the Palestinians to do it, this one faction. By now, it's actually a faction of the PFLP who is involved in this. So it's all kind of Monty Python-like splitting up of all these different groups. And they grab this plane, they fly it around the Middle East in horrendous conditions. It's getting worse and worse. It's really hot. They haven't got enough water. They're really violent and brutal with the passengers. It's a real heroics by cabin staff. One of the pilots, the pilot is first intimidated, and the pilot himself is shot. And it's horrendous. And it ends in Somalia at Mogadishu on the tarmac when the Germans fly in their brand new team of special forces slash police who go in and actually do an assault, one of the first of its kind, certainly by Western government, and free them all. And that is really the end of the Baden-Meinhof gang as such, the leaders commit suicide in prison immediately afterwards, and then they kind of splinter. And there's a third generation and it still goes on, one was arrested quite recently, but effectively that's over. And that for me in the West is really important because in Western Europe, you don't really get anything like that again. That radical leftist violence is pretty much over. I mean, there are bits and pieces. There's ethno-separatist violence, if you like, which is based on something very different in the South Country, in Ireland, and so forth. But that kind of violence is done in the West, and it's really interesting as to why that is.

Speaker 1:
[24:58] Well, there you go. That's the next question. Talking to you, I'm so struck by the fact that we've come to associate Islamic terror with a rejection of globalization. And here we are talking about the 70s, which is this crucible of direct action, of terror all over the world, which it's global. It's a reflection of this globalized world that people are living in. How does that fragment? Why does Middle Eastern terror sort of go on its own and very different path?

Speaker 2:
[25:26] So one of the things that's really interesting is if you look at the late 60s as a start point for all this kind of radical violence, protests, so forth. And a lot of the slogans you just said are really kind of familiar to us. Anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti a certain form of globalization for a new form of global solidarity and so forth. A lot of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism as well often. There's a lot of that built in as a common language, if you like. Breaks down quite often on the ground where people don't get on because they don't have the same languages, cultures or the rest of it. And there's some hilarious incidents of the kind of real cultural clashes where you have, you know, the Bardeminov gang turn up from Germany in a Palestinian training camp in Jordan. And it's a mixed group. They want to sleep together in the same tents. The women want to sunbathe topless or even nude. I mean, this is a conservative Arab country. And even if it's a progressive leftist movement, they're really not used to that kind of behavior. So I mean, there's a huge argument. I mean, there's that sort of thing happening. And I spoke to one very famous leftist Palestinian who was absolutely full of contempt for these left-wing activists who were turning up in her training camp in the early 70s. And she would say, they do a university sit-in and think it's revolution. I mean, that's not revolution. And then they wanted to talk about, you know, boy-girl things all the time. What's that got to do with revolution? It was really interesting listening to sort of actually how things worked out on the ground. But there was this genuine shared commitment to a campaign and effort against certain shared targets. The Americans seem pretty ignorantly, sort of generally, as the world's worst force for evil all over the world. And then Israel has a projection of that force, of the capitalism, and da da da. So that they did share. But what I wanted to look at was how you start in this place with left-winging in Europe and in the Middle East. And you end somewhere really differently. And what I think happens is that in the West, democracy kind of works. So you have this massive protest movement. A lot of the grievances that are raised by the protest movement in the West are effectively addressed. I mean, democracy kind of functions. So voting ages are lowered. Reproductive rights for women are massively reinforced. You have a whole series of young people who become quite prominent, either as politicians, as writers, as sports people in a way that's completely new. Old hierarchies really are challenged and broken down. There are lots of other examples. By the end of the decade, that radical energy has kind of spent itself. It's achieved quite a lot culturally and socially, politically, not economically particularly, but it has achieved quite a lot. That energy goes elsewhere. So you see environmentalism, you see campaigns on specific identity, politics. The economy is doing much better. You see people are much more interested in their Walkman than they are in global revolution. I mean, I was one, really. So anti-nuclear campaigning becomes a big thing then, and it takes away a lot of that energy. In the Middle East, you get something completely different. You have the same radical energy and it's directed at many of the same targets, and it's the same utopian project, but they get nothing. There is no concession to any of these grievances in any substantive way. What you get instead is the absolute repression. You get the destruction of all these leftist groups, whether they're the extremists or more importantly, much more moderate people who are asking for change in a pretty moderate, often nonviolent way, and they are destroyed. And there's a vacuum. The circumstance hasn't changed. The grievances are still there, but there's a massive ideological vacuum. And what fills it is a new ideology, one that offers many of the same objectives, if you like, the same program, but is framed in a completely different vocabulary. It's much more socially regressive and conservative. And it crucially marries the identity element that the left has always had difficulty with in the Islamic world, with the economic elements. And that's a really powerful combination, particularly towards the late 70s, 80s in a world of much more illiteracy, much greater media penetration, much more opportunities to spread a message that is as attractive as that. So you end up somewhere completely different in the Middle East with this new wave of resurgent Islam that very quickly develops a radical violent fringe and that is in a sense what we're still living with today.

Speaker 1:
[30:30] So there's the religious element and that will be for many people in all cultures, arguments over doctrine, the best way to get into the afterlife, to be one of the chosen. But what would people in the Middle East understand by the economic program of Islamic extremism? Is there a sort of a whiff of socialism there? Is there a legacy of that 1970s struggle evident?

Speaker 2:
[30:51] I think you need to distinguish between the kind of real hardline violent extremists who are looking to use terrorism or mass insurrection to depose what they see as hypocritical, unbelieving rulers and the more general package of what, say somebody like the Ayatollah Khomeini was offering Iranians in the 70s in Iran. Now Khomeini definitely wanted to remove the Shah of Iran, but he thought it could be done through a broad-based campaign of mobilization rather than a terrorist attacks one after another. What he was saying in this repeated propaganda effort over the years was, follow me, follow us, you will get social justice, you will get security on the streets, you will have a world that is, or a country that is close to your traditions, that hasn't been polluted by westernization. That's very powerful in a context where those who have benefited most from westernization are often seen as the out of touch elite or the regime, the repressive regime. He appealed to primarily migrants from rural areas into the cities who were feeling disorientated, who missed nostalgic way the certainties of rural life as they saw it. I mean, it was all very nostalgically imagined. But this is really powerful and it was really powerful at the time. So there's a really interesting story told me by an amazing man I interviewed at length who was the leader of the leftists in Iran at the time. And he said that he and a friend, both very prominent leaders in the leftist movement in Iran in the early 70s, one ended up dead. My friend Farouk ended up in West London a long time later. But after leading this group called the Fedayini Khalk for many years, and they were involved in all sorts of horrendous violence over that period. You can't romanticize what they did. But the key thing that he told me was all summed up in this anecdote. They were on the run. They met in a remote rural area. They went for a hike together to talk. And on this hike, they stopped in this very poor village, and they found themselves in a kind of stable workshop in a farm. And they made themselves a poor meal of oats, and were sitting down looking at it, talking about, why couldn't these leftists motivate a broader range of society? And Farrokh turned and pointed to the wall, where there was a portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini, nailed to the wall of this poor rural village. And he said to me, at that moment, we had no idea why we couldn't get that kind of popularity. Why weren't the peasants, so to speak? Why weren't they buying our vision as educated, urban, middle-class revolutionaries? But they didn't. I mean, they were speaking the same language, literally Farsi, but they weren't speaking the same cultural language. And Khomeini actually stole lots of stuff from the left. He even stole entire kind of phrases and concepts from the left. But he said it in this kind of strong regional accent. He said it simply. He said it with great reductive power. And it worked. It appealed to people in a way that the left never could in Iran. And so now when we talk about the Iranian Revolution, we talk about Khomeini and the radical clerics, but nobody talks about the left-wing revolutionaries who for decades were actually the main threat to the Shah of Iran's regime. And that's a really good example because the leftists were destroyed, moderate and the extremists, like my friend Farrokh. I mean, they were put in prison, they were killed, they were tortured, all the rest of it. And that left a huge vacuum. So when the revolution did come, everybody coalesced behind Khomeini and the clerics, just because he was the obvious person, he was the only real figurehead left. And we know what happened later, but at the time, people didn't think they were opening the way to a repressive, radical Islamic regime. They thought they were opening their way to a new kind of Iranian utopia.

Speaker 1:
[35:34] Your head's been in the 70s for years writing this wonderful book. It must be so tempting to see parallels in the world around you at the moment, because you're still doing your day job as a phenomenal journalist. What are the sort of lessons, the thoughts that perhaps we should bear in mind when we think about this period of radicalism?

Speaker 2:
[35:50] There's absolutely loads that is similar to today. Looking at the 70s, you have successive ways of economic distress. You have deep distrust of politicians. You have a kind of paranoid conspiracy theory genre, which is really widespread. Disrupted media technologies, war in the Middle East, super power conflicts. I mean, we haven't spoken really about how all of this was framed by the Cold War. The penultimate decade of the Cold War. All of that is what you have now. And I think the answer is quite simple in a sense. It's that people will always want to change things, particularly young people. And most of the people in my book have been in their late teens or early 20s. And they're right to do so. And unless they have a way of being heard at the very least, but actively affecting the societies that they live in, then some of them, by no means not all, but some of them will turn to violence. And if that is then completely dismissed or just destroyed, then others will follow the same process. And you're stuck in this continual cycle, often escalating cycle of protest, violence, repression, and so forth. And that is what I think I'd take away from looking at the 70s. In a way, we haven't quite got there yet, where we are now. And we can't make direct borrowings, one from the 70s to now. History doesn't repeat it, rhymes and all that, you know, that better than anyone else. But there are lessons there. And that is one. And that is that where there are voices of demanding change, they do at least need to be listened to and understood, even if nothing follows afterwards. But that listening and understanding is absolutely crucial.

Speaker 1:
[37:39] Well, what a great point to end on. Thank you very much, Jason Burke. Tell everyone what your book is called.

Speaker 2:
[37:43] It's called The Revolutionists, The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s.

Speaker 1:
[37:49] Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking all about it.

Speaker 2:
[37:52] Thank you. Pleasure. Very much so.

Speaker 1:
[37:57] Well, everyone, thanks so much for listening to that. Huge honor to have Jason Burke on the podcast. We've got podcasts on Afghanistan, the history there. We've got podcasts on the Middle East, of course. So please go and check out the feed. Make sure you like and subscribe and all that sort of business wherever you get your pods, and then you'll just get them delivered into your feed as if by magic. And also, if you could take the time to give us a review for some reason that really matters with the old algorithm, so very useful indeed. Thank you very much for listening. See you next time.