The Legacy of "Carlos"

In an apparent act of surrender to the Western bourgeois judicial system, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos" ("the Jackal" epithet was actually added by the media after it was mistakenly reported that the eponymous Frederick Forsyth novel was found in his belongings), is suing a French film crew to defend his name.  Now 60 years old, the convicted terrorist is worried that a documentary about his exploits currently in production will distort his reputation.  According to the Washington Post's report, he has demanded final review of the finished product in order to protect against infringements on his name and "biographical image."

It's difficult for Millenials to get a good grasp of how influential and visible Carlos' efforts were during his '70s and '80s heyday, given how mythologized he has since become.  His most high-profile act was taking an entire OPEC meeting hostage for several days (there's an amusing reenactment of this on YouTube).  His body count is well into the hundreds.  He was only arrested after the French intelligence service lured him to a surgeon in Sudan, capturing him while he was asleep.

Yet there were far more international terrorist acts committed during the years in which Carlos was active (and again, I stress the qualification of international, which is to say committed by foreign parties), which may have diluted his notoriety somewhat. What's more, these acts usually did not involve as many casualties as the more infrequent but significantly more violent acts of terror we witness today.  Take a look at this Wikipedia list of notable hijackings since 1950, and how many end with "no victims" (though this is clearly meant in the physical sense, and not the financial or psychological).  It is true that the terrorists were marked by a more glamorous, intellectualized worldview.  Yet they can be said to have been bound up, relatively speaking, in more material and parochial demands like the liberation of Palestine or Kashmir.  Meanwhile, the ecumenical nihlism of present-day terrorists has, sadly, made many of them household names.