By Michael Washburn
Sunday, February 01, 2026
As chaos grips the streets of Minneapolis in the
aftermath of two citizens’ deaths at the hands of federal agents, a reader of
Jason Burke’s ambitious new work, The Revolutionists: The Story of the
Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, may look at the turbulent scenes and
reflect, with bitterness and a sense of irony: Plus ça change.
In one of many accounts of the revolutionary fervor of
the time, Burke describes the protests that spread in Germany in the aftermath
of an incident not entirely dissimilar to what has made headlines in Minnesota
in the last few weeks — namely, the shooting and killing of Benno Ohnesorg, a
young demonstrator, by a policeman. The shooting occurred at a street protest
against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Germany in the spring of 1967, and it
sparked outrage and gave momentum to a revolutionary movement that spilled over
into the 1970s and beyond, when Baader-Meinhof terror became the norm in West
Germany.
Burke’s subjects are the revolutionaries who committed
bombings and murders in Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and elsewhere, and the
attitudes and ideals that animated them. Burke has done his research, and his
lucid writing and brisk pace keep the reader engaged from page one. Many of his
chapters read like more authoritative versions of events that received
superficial or sensationalistic treatment in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich,
the story of efforts to track down and kill members of the Black September
network responsible for the 1972 Olympics massacre; Irvin Kershner’s Raid on
Entebbe, one of the earlier films about the 1976 Israeli rescue of hostages
from an airport in Uganda; Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, about the notorious
Venezuelan terrorist; and The Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel’s account
of the middle-class revolutionaries who wreaked havoc in Germany.
It is the latter who become the subjects of Burke’s most
incisive chapters. Those of us who have watched in dismay as antisemitism —
often thinly veiled by the euphemism “anti-Zionism” — has grown ever more
prevalent, and indeed normal, throughout the ranks of the left, will find this
part fascinating. To read The Revolutionists is to revisit a fleeting
moment where, Burke explains, many people on the European left actually showed
sympathy and support for the embattled (and then quite young) Jewish state. In
Germany, that sympathy was often a natural outgrowth of remorse and guilt over
the Holocaust and a justified sense of responsibility to help the Jewish
people. A young Gudrun Ensslin, one of the book’s protagonists, is an example
of a militant leftist who briefly supported Israel — in part, Burke suggests,
because her parents did not avoid painful discussions about Germany’s wartime
record.
But such noble sentiments were not to last. In Burke’s
view, a turning point was Israel’s swift and stunning success in the Six-Day
War of 1967. A state that bested its adversaries so skillfully no longer struck
Ensslin or her fellow Marxists as an underdog. The German left also took note
of Malcolm X’s visit to Gaza in September 1964, only months before his killing,
and of the public stance of other stateside militants such as Huey Newton,
whose Black Panther Party demonized Israel as an aggressor and an agent of
Western, and specifically American, imperialism.
Hence, it came as little surprise that, after fleeing
Germany to escape legal consequences for the bombing of a Frankfurt department
store in April 1968, Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhof made their way
to a Fatah camp in Jordan, where they trained and plotted further operations.
Fatah, co-founded by Yassir Arafat, was the enemy of their enemy — Israel. But,
as Burke reveals, that did not mean that the young German revolutionaries fit
in there or that their stay in Jordan was without tensions — tensions that
pointed to a larger misalignment between aims and approaches on the global
left.
Burke’s accounts of the Baader-Meinhof gang and its
bloody campaign will revolt readers, and not just for the obvious reason that
the young militants plotted and carried out cowardly bombings that killed U.S.
servicemen and innocent drivers and bodyguards. Ensslin, Baader, and Meinhof
come off here as a deeply spoiled bunch. Baader, in particular, acts like a
toff and a playboy in Burke’s account — a selfish, arrogant, self-indulgent
lout who posed for erotic magazines, loved to drive and sometimes stole fancy
cars, and rarely acted with maturity or restraint. These supposed allies of the
poor often take advantage of the favors of rich and powerful friends, keeping
out of the reach of the law by staying at their fancy residences in Italy and
France. Far be it from these revolutionaries to have to rough it.
During their time at the Fatah camp in Jordan, the three
young Germans prove inept with weapons, and on one occasion, Meinhof freezes
after pulling the pin out of a grenade on the training ground, leading Baader
to call her a “bourgeois sow.” They complain about having to consume a diet of
rice, flatbread, water, and tea. It is as if the revolutionaries, whose public
personae are predicated on identification with the oppressed and impoverished,
are saying to their hosts, You actually expect us to subsist on this
standard-issue fare? What are we, a bunch of proles? The hosts are shocked
that the revolutionaries want to sleep together and sunbathe in the nude.
Germany’s textile-free bathing culture, fine dining, and other trappings of the
bourgeois life are not dispensable just because the three happen to be guests in
a terrorist training camp in Jordan.
Spoiled kids were the tip of the revolutionary spear in
the 1970s. What a surprise — and how utterly unrecognizable to us today — that
the co-executive directors of Indivisible, the Washington-based organization
supporting the protests, are both graduates of elite Carleton College in
Minnesota, whose annual tuition
is over $90,000. Many of the protesters running riot in Minneapolis are relying
at least partly on a $7.8 million funding package provided from George Soros
through Indivisible, according to a New York Post report. One does have to wonder whether well-heeled,
college-educated young sunshine soldiers in the war against oppression would
give up their comfortable lifestyles for the good of their cause — or even
trade places for one day with the immigrants they claim to champion.
Upon finishing Burke’s sweeping, nearly 800-page history,
the reader may recall T. S. Eliot’s famous lines about how the end of our
exploring “Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the
first time.” Though Burke is not the first author to recount the terrors and
traumas of the 1970s, his scope is broad enough that we — as witnesses to
scenes today not unlike those that fill the pages of his account — are uniquely
positioned to grasp the revolutionary dynamics that drove events of that earlier
era. With that understanding, we can clearly see how much our present moment
owes to the past one.
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