While the movie allows its hero a certain amount of charisma (many extremely thin women seem to find him irresistible), it does not glamorize him. Even at the beginning, when he is in tune with the radical spirit of the times, his vanity is all too evident, as is his utilitarian approach to women. Over the years he becomes increasingly abusive. As a revolutionary, he is a loose cannon who can’t take orders and screws up his operations, but everything he does only makes him more of a media star—he even gets asked for his autograph. But the end of the Cold War is also the end of Carlos, who has been sustained by backup and money from the USSR and its allies. The politics have changed and nobody wants him anymore.

 

            Over the years, Carlos has gradually morphed from a militant to a mercenary. We first meet him in 1971, a well-dressed Parisian working for Wadie Haddad of the PFLP, in whose service he tries and fails to assassinate the head of Marks and Spencer; organizes a failed attempt to take out an El Al plane with handheld rocket launchers; and stages a shootout in a Paris apartment, killing three policemen and a comrade who has betrayed him. Despite this less than brilliant record, he is put in charge of a team assigned to kidnap all the OPEC ministers from a Vienna conference, hold them hostage, and then kill the ones from Saudi Arabia and Iran. This plot is the brainchild of Saddam Hussein, just coming to power in Iraq. But the OPEC operation becomes a long, drawn out fiasco, and Carlos is kicked out of the PFLP. He then forms his own group, the Organization for Arab Armed Struggle, and with help from the East German Stasi and clandestine backing from the USSR, sets up bases in several East European countries, notably Hungary. He even contracts to take out Anwar Sadat, whom numerous parties want to punish for making peace with “the Zionist entity.” Unfortunately for Carlos, the Islamists get there first.

 

            And why is all this ancient history interesting today?   Partly the film reminds us of a time when the Israel-Palestine struggle was defined differently and the “rejectionists” who opposed all compromise were Palestinian rather than Israeli. It also puts that struggle in the context of wider Arab political issues and rivalries. And then it shows the new wind of Islamic fundamentalism beginning to blow.

 

            Near the end of the film, we see Carlos—who started out, remember, as a Marxist revolutionary—at a meeting with Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese Islamist leader who invited Osama bin Laden to make his base in Khartoum. Clearly trying to suck up, Carlos tells Turabi he has converted to Islam. By this time he is basically a mercenary and a nihilist; he believes in nothing, but he sees the way history is moving. His old leftist employers are scared and France is after his blood. Where else can he go for patronage except to the new source of power in the region, Islamic fundamentalism? Since the new guys use the old language of anti-imperialism when it suits them, this is not a hard transition for Carlos. He is still allowed to drink, smoke, and whore.

 

            Here’s the moral: go far enough to the left and you can end up on the right, standing with fascists and theocrats. Carlos may have been an anti-imperialist but he never stood for human liberation or freedom; he stood for terror. It hardly mattered after a while what this terror was in the name of or how many civilians he killed. And a certain part of the left always supported Carlos, just as they supported Sendero Luminoso and the Tamil Tigers at a time when they were terrorizing and exterminating their own base, and just as they support salafi-jihadi militants today. Some people will support anything in the name of anti-imperialism or, more accurately, anti-American imperialism (they don’t seem to mind so much about the other kinds). Don’t they care that, alongside the supposed anti-imperialism of the Islamic right, is a determination to subjugate women, a murderous hatred of gays, an exaltation of brutality and the cult of the gun, and a determination to set up theocratic dictatorships everywhere in the Muslim world—even though that is the last thing most Muslims want?  Some progressives even seem willing to overlook the dependence of salafi-jihadi networks upon Saudi Arabian oil money.

 

            I think the left needs a more critical eye and more stringent standards about whom they support. Personally, I do not support anybody who violates human rights, no matter how progressive they sound. I have seen how revolutionaries like Carlos end up, how their actions always strengthen the very powers they set out to oppose, and how easy it is for someone who lives by the gun to end up using it on the very people he says he is trying to set free.