“Do you wish to fight the Zionists, or the entire world?” was the question the Palestinian terrorist recruiter poses to Charlie (Florence Pugh) in The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré novel adapted to a TV series by Park Chan-wook. She knows what the recruiter wants to hear, but her simmering resentment against the world is barely masked beneath the surface. This inchoate rage against the world is not unique to this character, and I found this was a particularly accurate and disturbing representation of the tourist radicals of the early 80s provincial European youth.

These children left their villages and trotted off to the big smoke for university, where the ’68 fantasies still burnt strong. They read some French theorists, a few political pamphlets, and somehow got it into their heads that “the people” needed to be “awakened”. This meme lodged itself into their heads obstinately, and they reacted resentfully when their parents – probably still heavily shaped by the experiences of WW2 – responded with derision to the new ideas their kids brought home for the holidays. Depressed with the drudgery of provincial life, embarrassed by their naivety and their unremarkable, almost cookie-cutter upbringing, these kids vowed to disown their past and make themselves interesting.

But innocence can’t be willed away by fiat, and there was no shortage of extremists and cult leaders ready and eager to funnel these restless little babies into their malevolent arms. These kids’ anger at provincial Europe, for well, being provincial Europe, didn’t need a specific ideology, any contingent extremist signifier with some message of disrupting the sleepy status quo would do, it really just depended on which predatory guru they encountered first.

For brainwashing, team Palestine resorts to traditional methods that are ever popular in successful cults, such as extreme isolation, repetition, strictly enforced idiotic rules, deliberate chaos, and the cult favourite: the good cop bad cop routine. Create attachment and a sense of belonging with a pleasant maternal figure, rip it away violently by means of an authoritarian patriarch, and then back to mama for soothing, rinse & repeat..

Conversely team Israel, ever the consummate rationalists, appear to have scientifically distilled a repeatable mind control process, leading to more subdued and subtle methods which they can claim to be mildly more ethical, but when Charlie falls in love with her handler it’s difficult not to be reminded of the horrifying final pages of 1984.

The Euro kids resented being tourists and amateurs in these movements, which made them willing participants in a game of escalating mind control exercises masked as hazing rituals to prove their mettle, their dedication to their newly-acquired, yet entirely contingent, cause. This made them perfect extremists of the most dangerous and frivolous kind. Of course, many didn’t go to the levels of extremism portrayed in a riveting spy fiction like this one, but the unexamined beliefs, cliches, slogans, and signifiers (such as wearing a keffiyeh, or a black turtleneck) of radicalism of the time were common to an entire demographic, and they were directly influenced by the counterculture and radical cliches of the late ’60s.

Without the internet of today and its protective sheen of knowledgeable irony – where posing as a radical means engaging in largely innocuous and highly performative online activities – radical posturing in the 80s in continental Europe was likely to get you into some very strange situations, with brutal and often irreversible outcomes.