Revolution is not a tea party – Mao Zedong

October 2010 sees the release of, French auteur, Oliver Assayas’ biopic of Venezuelan freedom fighter/terrorist IIich Ramírez Sánchez, better known by his tabloid alias Carlos the Jackal. Following in the boot prints of two recent epics, Uli Edel's Baader Meinhof Complex and Steven Soderbergh's Che: Parts one and two, Carlos appears to be following the trend for lengthy (164 min) explorations of the extremist end of the 70s New Left.

Sánchez cut an exciting figure in his 70s heyday. He was born in Caracas in 1949 to staunchly communist parents, even going so far as to name him after Lenin. Adopting their politics from an early age, he joined the youth movement of the Venezuelan national Communist Party at age 10, attended a guerrilla warfare training camp in Cuba between semesters at The London School of Economics, and finally joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at the age of 21.

His CV from his time with the PFLP (a Marxist national liberation group, similar to the Provisional IRA) includes taking part in the Black September conflict in Jordon, assassinating a leader of the British Zionist Federation, car bombing several French Newspapers and accidently blowing up a bank. In 1975 he was expelled from the PFLP for a botched plane high jacking (back when plane high jacking meant taking hostages not suicide missions), and fled to the middle east where he formed his own group, The Organisation of the Arab Armed Struggle, and remained there until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and his eventual arrest in 1994.

The Jackal was part of a school of international terrorists (including the Baader Meinhoff gang in Germany, Patty Heart and the Symbolise Liberation Army in America, and the UK’s own Angry Brigade) who grabbed both the public’s imagination and the headlines during the early to mid seventies. These men and women were glamorised as heroes by young radicals across the world and the image of terrorist chic was born, gangs of post-modern Robin Hoods, set on bringing down the establishment.

Now, in the 21^st century, terrorism is dominated, not by left-wing idealism, but by militant religious fundamentalism, and the destruction is focused on innocent people rather than property or industrial sabotage. It makes a certain degree of sense that in these dangerous times we should look back on Carlos and his contemporaries with rose-tinted nostalgia, despite the wave of terror they held Europe in. And with bands such as (international) Noise Conspiracy and Sonic Youth (see their video for Sacred Trickster) bringing Terrorist Chic back into the hipster zeitgeist, it seems the time is right to bring the revolution back.