Long after he was forgotten, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the elusive terrorist known to the world as "Carlos the Jackal," has reappeared -- a graying throwback to a time, a quarter century ago, when the liberal order of the West was hit by an assortment of young brigands: the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Japanese Red Army, other children of the affluent 1960s proclaiming the end of the "bourgeois" world, the Palestinian terrorists on the edge of that amorphous world of terror. They were showmen, the young people of terror. They knew how to shock and how to entertain. On some instinctive level, they knew they worked in a permissive environment that saw their cruel outbursts as a "legitimate" response to the inequities of the liberal world.
In Carlos's last big spectacle -- before he faded into safe houses in the Communist world and into years of boredom and drinking in Syria and Sudan, where he at long last was captured - - he and five followers burst into a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna in 1975. They kidnapped the oil ministers of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela and killed three men, a Libyan, an Iraqi and a plainclothes cop. They were there, they announced, to seize the resources of oil wealth "for the benefit of the Arab people and other peoples of the Third World." He was "cold as ice," it was said of Carlos, who flew his hostages to Algiers. There, a "progressive" government worked out a deal. The ministers were freed; Carlos and his gang of murderers vanished into the shadows.
Carlos and his fellows made their own contribution to the more frightening world of the 1980s, the decade of wholesale terror and "martyrs" and suicide drivers who took the war against civility to new levels of cruelty and cynicism and waste. It was the young men and women of Carlos's time -- the Third World graduates of Moscow's notorious Patrice Lumumba Friendship University, which he attended, the Palestinian terrorists who blew up airplanes and struck at civilians in the name of a higher purpose, the restless Japanese rebels in search of a role beyond their conservative land -- who erased the distinction between innocence and guilt and turned political terror into an indiscriminate weapon that did away with all moral limits. Children and housewives and men and women on a stroll and passengers on airliners and athletes at the Olympics and an old man in a wheelchair on a Mediterranean cruise: They all became legitimate targets of the new terror.
Historians tell us that the Turkish sultan Abdul-Hamid, who ruled during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, knew how to blunt assassination attempts on his life. Riding in his carriage in his weekly appearances in public, Abdul-Hamid kept a small child on his knee. The sultan knew the moral limits: Assassins distinguished between innocence and guilt. Those limits were to be demolished in the radicalism of the '70s. To some extent, we still live in the world that Carlos and his likes created for us.
