We just talked live with Jason Burke, veteran international correspondent for the Sunday Times, The Observer, and The Guardian. Burke has spent three decades reporting around the world, and his books, including On the Road to Kandahar and The 9/11 Wars, are key to understanding the inner workings of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia. His new book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, draws on dozens of original interviews with veterans and survivors of the period and archival research in 12 languages to tell the story of the wave of international extremism that swept Europe and the Middle East between 1967 and 1983, and how competing secular and religious ideas of revolution shaped have shaped today’s world. We talked about:
Why leftists gave up on a revolution in the West, and believed they could use violence to spark a worldwide uprising
How left revolutionaries first approached terrorism as theatre (“a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dead”) and why that changed
What drove — and still drives — young people looking to make a difference towards violence
The disconnect between the anti-colonial struggle and the Western left
How Western governments and police forces stopped paying attention to the root causes of political violence
What Islamist extremists learned from the left
How leftist revolutionaries lost out to Islamists as a force for change in the Middle East
If you want to understand the evolution of political violence and the origins of the struggles that still drive international politics today, you won’t want to miss the book or this conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch.
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Join us for more Live conversations this week!
Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, February 4, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when The Ink Book Club unveils its February pick. And immediately following, Wednesday, February 4, at 1:00 Eastern, we’ll speak with legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams about Five Bullets, his new book on the Bernie Goetz shootings and what they mean for our current crises over race, crime, and safety.
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