(I originally posed this question in a Cafe Society thread on West Wing, and it turned into a thread-killer. So I’ll try here.)
On West Wing’s special terrorism episode, a character made the comment that the amazing thing about terrorism is its 100% failure rate–no group has ever achieved its goals through terrorism.
Counterexamples: I seem to recall that the move for Algerian independence was a terrorist campaign.
And, it could be said that any progress toward peace in Northern Ireland, with improved conditions for Catholics, is due in part to the IRA.
Terrorism is not revolution. Revolutionaries want to sieze control a government or a country. Terrorists merely want to annoy a government into changing its policies, or just annoy a government, period. Most terrorist acts are pointless from a revolutionary’s point of view–there’s no reason to think killing random civilians helps you gain control. Lenin was a cold-blooded SOB, but I think even he would have condemned the WTC attacks as a useless waste of political capital and valuable agents.
The West Wing episode was largely correct. Terrorism is almost always ineffective in achieving its stated goals. The only successful terrorism campaign I can think of is the campaign by the Jewish terrorist group Irgun against the British in Palestine during the late '40s. On the other hand, the Brits probably would have left anyway, so it’s unclear whether this really counts as a terrorist “success.”
If terrorism is ineffective, why is it so popular? One reason is that it gives aggrieved people the feeling that someone is “doing something” on their behalf, even if that something is useless or counter-productive. Indeed, terrorist acts often provoke a crackdown, which produces more volunteers and more donations.
Then too, a terrorist organization can be a way of life and a going concern for its members. The real long-run goal of a terrorist organization may not be the achievment of its political aims, but instead the continuation of the movement as a profitable enterprise. The IRA, for example, has managed to turn its terrorism expertise into a consulting business.
One, I’d like an authoritative cite for that definition. Two, by that logic, most of the republican paramilitaries in Northern Ireland are revolutionaries, not terrorists.