ABSTRACT
The Western world has been plagued by a number of left-wing terrorist groups whose ranks were filled with the educated, but discontented, children of the well-to-do middle classes. They mixed Marxist-Leninist beliefs with sympathy for the world’s oppressed, and saw their own governments as reactionary. Postwar affluence, they argued, had made people politically immature. The social revolutionaries believed that their acts of terror would force governments into introducing repressive legislation, thereby revealing the state’s true nature to the public, which would then clamor for change.
