Manchette’s tale is something of a political-policier potboiler. A group of anarchists kidnap a US diplomat and encounter a predictable fate. It’s pacy, pulpy and seems very much rooted in its time. To think that in the seventies politicians and businessmen were kidnapped or assassinated on a fairly routine basis in France, Spain Germany, Italy, the UK, USA. It must have made the countries on the other side of the iron curtain seem like oases of peace. That kind of terrorism has been scotched, seemingly, to such an extent that the instinctive response to a supposed assassination attempt (cf the USA) is to dismiss it as a false flag. Manchette mentions the Tupamaros, who also kidnapped a diplomat, this time British, but whose fate differed from those of his anti-heroes. That event was part of the other Cold War, the war of idealists against the military-business consortium. It was a war that was definitively lost, as we can see from the way in which the weapons industry now exerts an outsized influence on political action, just as much if not more so than in the seventies. The tragic, unheroic deaths of almost everyone involved in the kidnapping operation feels like cynical but truthful takedown of the thwarted dreams of an alternative society to the capitalist model.
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