"Unbounded" morality eventually becomes counterproductive, even when the same moral principles are sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.
Thomas So well
There is a story about Robespierre in which the leading agitator of the French Revolution jumped out of his chair as soon as he saw a crowd gathering outside.
"I have to see where the crowd is going," he is said to have said, "I am their leader."
People who use violence to achieve what they believe to be just are alternately known as "terrorists" or "freedom fighters".
They all share several common characteristics:
The hard core idealists accept the cause (in most cases the freedom of a group of people). They base their claims on history - real or hastily constructed, on a common heritage, on a language shared by group members, and above all on hatred and contempt directed at the "enemy". The latter is almost always the physical or cultural occupier of the space that the idealists claim as their own.
The loyalties and alliances of these people shift effortlessly as ever escalating means justify an ever diminishing cause. The initial burst of grandiosity inherent in any such enterprise gives way to cynical and bitter pragmatism as both the enemy and the people grow weary of the conflict.
The inevitable consequence of the real policy of terrorism is cooperation with the less savory components of society. Marginalized by the inexorable march of common sense, freedom fighters naturally gravitate toward like-minded nonconformists and outcasts. The organization is criminalized. Drug trafficking, bank robberies and other forms of organized and criminal crime are becoming an integral part of the fight. Criminal corporatism emerges, structured but volatile and given to fratricidal donnybrooks.
Very often, an unholy codependency develops between an organization and its prey. The freedom fighters are interested in having a despicable and tyrannical regime as their opponent. If they are not by nature prone to suppression and convulsive massacres, acts of terrorism will deliberately provoke even the most unfavorable rule to a hideous ebullition.
A terrorist organization will tend to imitate the very characteristics of its enemy, against which it most defends. So all these groups are rebarbatively authoritarian, menacingly violent, lacking in human empathy and emotion, suppressing them, flamboyant, flamboyant and often murderous.
It is often the freedom fighters who compromise their freedom and the freedom of their people in the most egregious ways. This is usually done either by cooperating with a derided enemy against another, rival group of freedom fighters—or by inviting a foreign power to arbitrate. They often thus catalyze the exchange of one mode of oppressive horror for another, more terrifying and solid.
Most freedom fighters are assimilated and consumed by the very establishment they fought against, or as founders of new, privileged nomenclatures. That's when their true nature is revealed, mired in cruelty and arrogance as they become. Insidious violators of basic human rights often turn into the very demons they helped exorcise.
Most freedom fighters are disaffected members of the middle class or intelligentsia. They bring the merciless ruthlessness of protected lives to their affairs. They mistake compassion for weakness and show none as they unscrupulously pursue their self-aggrandizement, ego trip, sending others to their deaths. This is the stuff martyrs are made of. They are carried on the crests of the surrounding waves, mastering their unbalanced personalities and projecting them to great effect. They are footnotes to history that take on the role of text. And they rarely enjoy the unfettered support of the very people they offer to liberate. Even the most harassed and subjugated people find it difficult to follow or accept the changing behavior of their self-proclaimed liberators, their shifting friendships and enmities, and their passion for violence.
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