ABSTRACT
Terrorist movements are usually some kind of youth movements and to dwell upon the idealistic character of youth movements is only stressing the obvious: they are not out for personal gain and they always oppose the status quo. For the student of terrorism, as distinct from the lover of literature, V. Ropshin the Russian ex-terrorist turned writer, is as of much interest as Dostoyevsky and Liam O'Flaherty is more revealing than Henry James. Terrorism as a moral problem continued to preoccupy some of the leading writers of the 1930s and 1940s. The dilemma of terrorism reappears in Sartre's Les Mains sales, and Camus' Les Justes. Terrorist operations were the subject of many movies with a Second World War background, most dramatically perhaps Andrzej Wajda's Kanal and Popiol i Diament. In Latin America there is a long-established tradition of revolution ary songs, the cancones de protesta, to which guerrilla and terrorist groups have made a significant contribution in recent decades.
