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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Ocelot:''' That's how terrorism works. You hold a country hostage and make demands. Not much of a point to it otherwise. I mean, what were you going to do? Call up the White House and say 'We've got [[Humongous Mecha|Metal Gear]], neener neener'?
'''Liquid:''' Well, not in those ''exact'' words...|''[[The Last Days of Foxhound]]''}}
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Caused by the same motives as [[Western Terrorists]], but more so. Apparently, terrorists are willing to kill, maim, torture - not to mention putting their own lives at risk - just [[For the Evulz]]. These can actually be very dangerous opponents, being ruthless, impossible to predict, and impossible to negotiate with, and generally occupying the place [[Older Than They Think|once held by demons throughout world mythology]].
They are related to, and might occasionally be the literary descendant of [[Bomb
In addition, these may be confused with terrorist groups that are [[Silly Reason for War|just plain silly]]. A real life example is Comité Régional d'Action Viticole, an organization made up of French wine growers who don't like foreign competition.
{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==▼
* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' engages in some [[Playing
▲== [[Anime]] ==
** He does finally get to reveal it at the end of the episode, and despite being a [[Mad Bomber]], actually comes off as somewhat sympathetic. The whole episode works better when you know he's very obviously inspired (in looks, MO, and philosophy) by Ted "Teddy Bear" Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who actually had very well thought-out reasons for his actions. TB in ''Cowboy Bebop'' may have had a similar cause but he was never able to explain it past a fleeting generality.▼
▲* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' engages in some [[Playing With a Trope]] in the Teddy Bomber episode. TB ''has'' a reason that's very important to him for bombing tall buildings, and he keeps trying to explain it, but every last time he tries he's [[The Un-Reveal|interrupted]].
▲** He does finally get to reveal it at the end of the episode, and despite being a [[Mad Bomber]], actually comes off as somewhat sympathetic. The whole episode works better when you know he's very obviously inspired (in looks, MO, and philosophy) by Ted "Teddy Bear" Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who actually had very well thought-out reasons for his actions. TB in Cowboy Bebop may have had a similar cause but he was never able to explain it past a fleeting generality.
* ''Why'' does Millennium want to fight Alucard and destroy England in ''[[Hellsing]]''? Revenge for being defeated by the Allies during [[World War II]]? Nope. Do they want to [[Take Over the World]] and have it ruled by vampires? Nuh-uh. Why then? The Major not only admits that "[Millennium's] purpose is the ''total absence'' of purpose," he openly states to his mooks his main drive for doing what he does: "Gentlemen, [[Blood Knight|I like war]]."
** Should be noted that some fascist philosophers actually made that as a serious case. ([[War Is Glorious]] being the essence of fascism) They also quite deliberately avoided making programs or statements that could be taken as such, seeing it as a sign of decadence and that action itself was the mark of the true fascist... Incidentally, this is one of the main reason why the word is so hard to define: They did it on purpose.
* [[Mobile Suit Gundam 00|Ali Al-Saachez]] used radical Islamist rhetoric to recruit child soldiers in the Middle East. He told his followers that they fought to glorify God, but he was really a [[Blood Knight]] and [[Psycho for Hire]].
**
** He makes it pretty clear that he does what he does simply because he enjoys war. He's shown killing people even when it brings no real advantage to him, just [[For the Evulz]]. He's making money while at it, but it's pretty clear that he'd never retire, no matter how much he'd make.
* ''[[Black Lagoon]]'' actually gives this trope [[Deconstructed Trope|something of a serious treatment]] with Masahiro Takenaka, a villain in one of the arcs who's an ex-member of the Japanese Red Army. Having [[Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids|long since outgrown any notion that he'll ever get to incite a worldwide revolution through his actions]], Takenaka keeps fighting as part of terrorist organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with his original goals because being an enemy of the state is the only thing he finds meaning in doing. What with the series' usage of [[Black and Grey Morality]], he is [[Sympathy for
* [[Mad Artist|Deidara]] of [[Naruto]] thinks of explosions as fine art and wanted to share his art with everyone. Because indiscriminately blowing up people and ''villages'' is not acceptable behavior for a nation at peace, he went rogue and worked for various anti-government factions even before Akatsuki recruited him. Pein's own reasoning on why he became this is "Just Because."
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* The [[DC Comics]] series ''Wild Dog'' had an example of this, in a terrorist group that was a coming-together of factions from the fringes of the left ''and'' right. ("We're going to destroy the current order. What will we replace it with? That's for later - first things, first!")
* In ''[[
** [[It Gets Worse]]...the Cult of Crime is growing into a real force to be reckoned with, or at least it was before the reboot. Intergang and other normally-mundane Mafia analogues were being recruited into a massive human-sacrificing cult, and the new Question was trying to prevent them from finding "The Crime Bible".
* Kaizen Gamorra, the global terrorist / [[Yellow Peril]]-style dictator from ''[[The Authority]]'' (see [[Terrorists Without a Cause/Quotes|Quotes]] to hear it from the character himself). It is even stated that Gamorra's economy is based on terrorism.
* Not so much
* The [[Marvel Universe]] has A.I.M. and Hydra, [[The DCU]] has Kobra.
** Kobra, on the other hand, does have a cause, being fanatical worshippers of a [[Flanderization|Flanderized]] version of Kali.
** Hydra was started up by an ex-Nazi, but the group no longer appear to have any Nazi ideology. When Baron Wolfgang von Strucker isn't in command anyway.
** And A.I.M are pretty much another subbranch of Hydra. Or was originally, at least. They've since gone their separate ways despite not having any actual ideology to differ on.
** Hydra's deal is now 'Big Business has taken over everything. Now it's time to defeat them. And take over everything outselves'.
* In ''[[Quarter-Life: Halfway To Destruction]]'', the "bad guy from the game" threatens to destroy Dallas with a radioactive isotope. All he says of his motivation is "If you do not agree to my demans [[You Make Me Sic|''[sic]'']] -- TOO LATE!" before the isotope "[[Artistic License Nuclear Physics|hits quarter-life]]" and begins to meltdown. (Maybe he would have gotten to say what he actually wanted if he used a less radioactive material?)
* In ''[[Desperately Seeking Ranma]]'', the magically-inclined offshoot of [[w:Aum Shinrikyo|Aum Shinrikyo]] which planted the portal bombs seems to have no purpose beyond simply causing chaos, mayhem and death. (Several dozen chapters later, though, you start seeing hints that they were part of -- or manipulated by -- a much larger, more rational consipiracy.)
== [[Film]] ==
* A major hallmark of the ''[[
** Averted in ''Die Hard 2'', where the terrorists are ex-army officers trying to free a [[Banana Republic]] dictator whom they see as an anti-communist stalwart. Probably this was a [[No Celebrities Were Harmed]] version of Ollie North and Noriega.
** Many terrorists commit robberies, mostly for financial ends (terrorism is not cheap), but often for ideological ones (the [[Knight Templar|Phineas]] [[Church Militant|Prieshood]], when not killing the associates of Midianites, robbed banks because they felt they were counterfeiting).
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** Point of order: What part of ''[[Sin City]]'' is ''not'' [[Egregious]] in some way?
* The terrorists in ''Red Eye'', seen only briefly, are white guys who speak Russian. Their reasoning for wanting to kill the deputy head of Homeland Security are never explained, though it is strongly implied that they have one. The primary villain of the film mentions that the organizations "wants to create a big brash message", but never explains exactly what. It's something to do with the Deputy Head's controversial comments and hinted-at authoritarian international policy. In other words, they have a goal, but it's not a very important one to the plot of the film.
* The (possibly) Afghan terrorist organization "Ten Rings" in the 2008 ''[[Iron Man (
* The IRA splinter group in the [[The Film of the Book|film version of]] ''[[Patriot Games]]'' seem to exist solely to see how effectively they can kill people, even taking actions that are clearly counterproductive just to see stuff blow up.
** This is explained in the book. Their real objective was to discredit the leadership of the IRA, so they could take it over and run it the way they thought it should be run. They kept doing things to make the IRA look bad, since as far as the general public was concerned, all Irish terrorists were IRA.
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*** In the book after the IRA in [[Real Life]] murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten, the resulting backlash was so great that the IRA decided to put the royal family off limits. The public outcry against harming a member of the royal family would not help the IRA.
** [[Bill Bailey]] noted this, referring to them as "not the Real IRA, not the Continuity IRA, but only-two-of-them-and-neither-of-them-knows-who-the-other-one-is-IRA".
* [[Older Than They Think|Predating]] the ''[[
* Joe Seluchi in ''[[Airplane!]] II: The Sequel''. He tries to blow up the flight so his family can get his flight insurance money.
** Which a second-degree [[Truth in Television]], incidentally, since he was a parody of a character in the original ''Airport'' movie/book, who was based on a real guy who blew himself and an airliner to bits so his mother would get the insurance money.
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* The Joker, as portrayed in ''[[The Dark Knight]]'', fits this trope to a T. He has absolutely no motivation except to inspire terror. And he's ''really good at it''.
** He may be closer to the 19th century Anarchist archetype, though.
*** No, they had definite
**** Or he might just be [[Ax Crazy]].
** The fact that the Joker is an [[Ax Crazy]] terrorist without a cause is such a big part of the movie that it actually ends up [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] by the Joker in his conversation with Harvey Dent.
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** He explicitly refers to his profession as "terrorism-for-hire", which suggests that he's a mercenary hired by organizations which actually do have causes.
* The villains in ''Next'' are terrorists. Just terrorists. They seem to be a bunch of French-speaking Eurotrash lead by a guy that looks like Gavrilo Princip. The best I could figure, they were trying to liberate Quebec from California and have it form a part of a new Greater Serbia. Or maybe it was just the ''ennui.''
* More than one ''[[James Bond (film)|James Bond]]'' villain have fit this mold.
** Actually, almost none of them do. Bond villains tend to use terrrorist actions as a cover for a brilliant criminal scheme. Its about some kind of profit (or sometimes, some kind of insane [[Visionary Villain|vision]], not the violence.
* So does the ''[[Fight Club (film)|Fight Club]]''. Their members simply go nuts.
** Actually, they were Luddites, or anarcho-primitivists. It's made clearer in the book, though Tyler's monologues in the movie are pretty clear too. It's just that a lot of viewers seem to miss that aspect.
{{quote|
* ''[[
** {{spoiler|Doctor Red Hair does in fact talk about his motivation early in the movie, but the character he's talking to isn't really listening, and the audience haven't been given any real reason to pay close attention to him either - he's just another weird guy in a movie full of them. He's basically a radical environmentalist who believes that humans are destroying the planet through pollution, consumption and overpopulation. In truth, a lot of people [[Humans Are
* Played straight in ''[[The Enforcer]]''. Although assumed to be black radicals by Dirty Harry's boss, the terrorist group that kidnaps the Mayor of San Francisco for ransom are actually small-time crooks in it purely for the money.
* Although the film ''[[Vantage Point]]'' tries to be [[The Rashomon]] for a terrorist bombing, showing the same event from the perspective of the news media, the terrorists, the US Secret Service and an innocent bystander, we never really learn what the terrorists' goals were other than they are vaguely Islamist. It's never explained where their sophisticated equipment came from, {{spoiler|how a respected 20-year-veteran of the Secret Service could be in league with them}}, or what the purpose of their secret plot was. {{spoiler|They assassinate the US President, only it's actually a body double, but they know this, and manage to kidnap the actual President. Which gets them what? They've already convinced the world the President is dead, what does having him prisoner accomplish?}} For a movie about different points of view, they sure didn't bother explaining any.
* In the new Travolta film ''[[From Paris
* The group (that appears to be largely white and British) in ''[[Passenger 57]]'' doesn't appear to have any real motivation for their acts, beyond a suggestion that they may be terrorists for hire and that the two leaders just really enjoy killing people.
* ''[[
** They are presented as having goals, but they are not emphasized very much. The film seems to skirt the issue, as though the filmmakers have some sympathy with the group's goals but don't want to be seen as endorsing terrorism.
* Thrax in ''[[Osmosis Jones]]'' is a rookie virus who wants to kill Frank (portrayed as a city-state of cells in the movie). His sole reason is recognition.
{{quote|
* The bomber in [[Source Code]] was a middle class, apparently educated white guy, who's only articulated gripe is "the world is hell". His plan is apparently to destroy civilization and rebuild from scratch. His motivations seem crazy, yet he has enough intelligence and resources to build a dirty bomb.
* The terrorist in ''[[
* In ''[[Black Butler (film)|Black Butler]]'', we never learn what Hanae was trying to accomplish.
== [[Literature]] ==▼
▲== Literature ==
* [[Meg Cabot]]'s ''American Girl'' begins with a botched presidential assassination, but deliberately avoids political commentary in favor of examining the life of the bystander who thwarted the attack. The solution? The assassin was obsessed with a supermodel, and convinced himself that killing the president would impress her.
** Something like that [[Ronald Reagan|actually]] [[Jodie Foster|happened]], you know.
* Pretty much inverted in ''[[Stationery Voyagers]]'', where ''everyone'' has an agenda and the stories see no problem at all with incorporating [[The War On Straw|scantily-clad analogues of real groups]]. The closest thing to "no cause" is the Yehtzig Pirate League, and their goal is [[A God Am I|to have Astrabolo overthrow God himself]]. The Drismabons come close, wanting the eternal damnation of the entire universe ''[[For the Evulz|just because]]''. The Muhmmaldian terrorists, however, are blatant knock-offs of real-life groups like Hamas. The Crooked Rainbow, of course, are ''gay'' terrorists. Pretty much every bad guy faction on Mantith is guaranteed to be a strawman (though how "straw" it is [[Ripped from the Headlines|may vary]]) for some Far Left cause or another. [[Refuge in Audacity]] seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The Mal Noche from ''[[CSI: Miami]]'' [[Weird Trade Union|started as some weird assassin's guild/street gang/Nicaraguan Mafia]] (apparently Miami has a lucrative market for hitmen) And then one of their leaders became a vaguely worded terrorist and decided to try to blow up an airplane.
** Of course, drug lords/cartels having planes blown up isn't entirely unheard of. See Pablo Escobar.
* One Villain Of The Week in ''[[Criminal Minds]]'' was a Unabomber-esque anti-technology terrorist, but was revealed to {{spoiler|just be doing it because he thought a sci-fi author that wrote a book about a war between humans and robots he based his idea on [[Freudian Excuse|was his mother who abandoned him, but turns out not to be]]}}.
** This is used oddly later, where the team foil a terrorist plot, but the terrorist cell is left shrouded in mystery, with their motivation never revealed. This is strange given that the whole premise of the show centres around trying to work out why criminals do what they do.
* An episode of ''[[Law and Order]]'' had a young white man who'd murdered two college professors claim to be a follower of radical Islam who'd killed his victims for their disrespect towards Islam. Turns out he was just a [[Jerkass]] who'd latched on to that particular variant of Islam to get revenge on a girl who humiliated him in front of the victim during a dinner party he was invited to.
* Sark from ''[[Alias (TV series)|Alias]]''. He routinely changes his alliances, and his true allegiance seems to be only to himself.
* Subverted in the MTV series ''Super Adventure Team''; a group of Middle-Eastern terrorists kidnap some Americans, and Team America wants to know their demands. The terrorists were taken aback; they didn't know that they could ''make'' demands. After a few moments huddling together, the lead terrorists give their demand: "We want to see ''[[
* The United People's Resistance from ''[[
* The IRA are featured in the show ''[[Sons of Anarchy]]'', with the deconstruction of how the IRA have essentially went from terrorists to a glorified crime syndicate that focuses on selling guns to whoever will buy them. This leads to the main character Jax (and fellow biker Chibs, an exiled IRA member who fell victim to the ambition of the leader of the organized crime wing of the organization) being forced to help expose and kill the pro-crime leader of the IRA when a high ranking member of the political wing of the IRA gets his hands upon Jax's son.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''D20 Modern'' includes one of these in a
▲== [[Tabletop RPG]] ==
* The PURGE secret society in ''[[Paranoia (game)|Paranoia]]'' has no common motive beyond overthrowing The Computer.▼
▲* ''D20 Modern'' includes one of these in a supplement -- the group causes destruction, death, and chaos for its own sake as part of a bizarre, paranoid, pseudo-religious doctrine.
* ''[[
▲* The PURGE secret society in ''[[Paranoia]]'' has no common motive beyond overthrowing The Computer.
▲* [[Mage: The Ascension (Tabletop Game)|Mage: The Ascension]] has the Umbral Underground, whose only goals are causing chaos and recruiting [[Power Born of Madness|more]] [[Reality Warper|Marauders]]. Unusually for this trope, they're [[Obliviously Evil]] [[Anti-Villain|Anti Villains]]: Their leader is [[A Father to His Men]], the rank and file include superheroes and chivalrous knights, and they [[Even Evil Has Standards|really don't like the Chaioth Ha-Quadesh.]]
** The Chaioth Ha-Quadesh is basically the Umbral Underground's [[Evil Counterpart|Eviler Counterpart]]. It's a genocidal group that includes [[Knight Templar]] crusaders and jihadists, a Chinese gang that thinks it's [[After the End]], and a group of guys who think they're in a virtual reality FPS and [[Omnicidal Maniac|act accordingly.]]
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[
** Ironically, ''[[
*** Gravel. No, really.
**** Maybe the [[Red vs. Blue|Reds want the gravel because the Blues want the gravel, and the Blues want the gravel because the Reds have the gravel.]]
*** Backstory elaborates on the conflict: two brothers were given by their dying father equal parts of a very large, useless piece of land that the two of them convinced him to purchase. Being brothers, they'd naturally fight over it. One hundred years later, the brothers are still feuding, not merely over the gravel pits, but over absolutely everything that wasn't already owned by Australia. Their most recent gambit in the war involved an immortality machine... which obviously results it the whole thing lasting all those 100 years and probably far into the future.
* The villains in ''Elevator Action 2'' desire to "Crash the Old Order", according to their graffiti, but they don't say what they want to make instead. Their leader mentions a New Society, but that's all.
* The Heaven Smiles in ''[[
* The ''[[Mass Effect]]'' DLC module ''Bring Down the Sky'' averts this by giving the Batarians a very [[Disproportionate Retribution]] sort of reason for their terrorist attack. Given how much of an [[
* Quite a few video game and anime villains are [[Nietzsche Wannabe
** Well, it's true that major conflicts have a large number of good side effects. It's just that the bad main effects usually far outweigh them.
* The Order from ''[[Freelancer]]'' at first seems to be a bunch of terrorists without a cause. That is, until you find out their cause is {{spoiler|to defend the Sirius system from being taken by alien parasites. So you discover they were the good guys all along and therefore you join them.}}.
* Most of the ''[[Metal Gear]]'' antagonists play this trope straight, but the primary antagonists avert it. Big Boss, his cloned sons Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake, and Ocelot all had the same objective: to free the world from the control of the Patriots, the organization controlling the United States government and, by extension, the entire world.
** A few other villains do generally seem in it [[For the Evulz]], though. Mantis expressly states he wants to kill as many people as he could. {{spoiler|Sniper Wolf}} really only waits for [[Suicide
* ''Disaster: Day of Crisis'' has SURGE, a band of elite former special forces soldiers. At first, they have a rather understandable excuse - they were fighting alongside a rebellion in a another country, then the American government at the time switched support and tried to have them all killed. Part of Colonel Hayne's demands was compensation to be paid to the familes of those in SURGE who were killed, a perfectly reasonable demand... Then Evans takes over, and starts doing it for shits and giggles, right to the point of ''trying to set off a nuke in the middle of a hurricane''. The characters even remark that Evans is basically nuts and who knows why he does anything.
* The terrorist group in ''[[Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (video game)|Rainbow Six]] : Vegas'' is rather odd. They waste [[NGO Superpower|an enormous amount of manpower and resources]] {{spoiler|including a state of the art WMD, which they try to use inside Vegas for no good reason.}} in their attack on Vegas. {{spoiler|1=It turns out the whole point of the attack was just to distract the army so they could break into the research facility where those very same WMDs were being build. So... they went through all of that just to get weapons they already had, but lost because they were using them to steal more? And it's not very well explained what they want to do with them anyway, or how they got the first one.}}
** They had one (or two, I forget), but they wanted a few dozen. Hence the plan.
** In ''Vegas 2'', it's ultimately revealed that the entire war was basically {{spoiler|driven entirely by one man's petty revenge against Rainbow, and Bishop specifically. Even his co-conspirators had no idea and thought there was some kind of profit motive involved.}}
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* The terrorists in Eugene Jarvis' ''Target: Terror'' seem to be this.
* In ''[[Modern Warfare]] 2'' it's explicitly stated by General Shepherd that the terrorist leader Makarov has no nationality or ideology.
** May have been subverted by the sequel, though; contrary to what Shepherd said, ''Modern Warfare 3'' shows Makarov to have a very clearly defined goal of establishing Russian dominance over the world, with himself at the top.
* The PLR from ''[[
* The protagonist of ''[[Hitman (video game series)|Hitman]]'' is nominally killing for money. But while in some games there was a given reason he needed the money, in ''Blood Money'' it was only used to buy upgrades so he could do more
== [[Web Original]] ==
* The motives of the terrorist group in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'' are, as of yet, unclear. It's not entirely certain if they even ''have'' a motive beyond trying to cripple the US with fear through targetting its children. For some reason, "ratings" are important to them; that's about all we get. Originally, they were from a country at war with the United States, and one of Danya's demands in v1 is that the American military completely demobilise, but given various [[
* At the end of [[Doom House]], {{spoiler|the police officer is revealed to have been a terrorist...who has just spent the last few days trying to scare a homeowner out of his new house, apparently with nothing better or more terrifying to do. Why? Because it was built on his "burial camp". Right.}}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* The 1940s ''[[Superman]]'' episode "Destruction, Inc.", while otherwise one of the series' better efforts, never gets around to explaining ''why'' they're wreaking havoc at the factory.
** Um, there was this ''war'' going on in the 1940s ...
** But..."Destruction, Inc."? ''Those'' guys never corporatized.
* In ''[[Batman:
** They may have been using the word "terrorist" loosely here, as her plot centers around holding Gotham for ransom using a deadly virus.
* ''[[Captain Planet]]'' has this kind of terrorist. They hijack an oil ship and crash it into a beach [[For the Evulz|just to pollute Mother Nature]] [[You Fail Economics Forever|when they'd be better off selling the bloody oil.]]
** The Eco-Villains did have bizarre and psychotic reasons for doing what they did, however insane they seem to normal people. Three of them (Looten Plunder, Sly Sludge and Hoggish Greedly) were just greedy international corporate raiders, especially Greedly and Plunder. All they wanted was money, making them slightly better than your average [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|Gordon Gecko-like corporate nutjob]]. They're pretty much the personification of rampant capitalism, with Greedly spiking into the realm of what the faux-intellectual call "anarcho-capitalism", that is, literally capitalism without
** Verminous Skumm and Duke Nukem had reasonably clear motives as well. The former was out to destroy humanity, and the latter was a walking nuclear battery that needed to spread radioactivity so that he could feed and survive (this is severely ironic because Nukem could have been an eco-hero if he had just applied his radiation-absorbing powers to existing nuclear waste, instead of trying to cause meltdowns at nuclear plants). Of the recurring villains, only Dr. Blight and Zarm were really wayward, pointless chaotic evil. Dr. Blight claims to do stuff [[For Science!]] or for profit or both, and Zarm at least had the excuse of literally being the [[God of Evil]].
*** According to [[Word of God]], it was quite deliberate for the bad guys to be more about "looting and polluting" than logic would encourage; they were concerned if they made the villains believable, the kids of real-life loggers and such might become convinced that their parents were straight-up evil.
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**** The comics show the Cobra Commander seems to think he's making the world a better place as it shows Cobra is a faction that accepts anyone who was disenfranchised or "wrongfully" exiled by their native country which stemmed from the disillusioned fact that the world is owned by Illuminati type groups which he deemed as snakes and wanted to be the head snake . Mainly because of the aftereffects of the [[Vietnam War]] and how the [[American Dream]] was dead in his eyes when his brother was put the chopping block when [[Start of Darkness|after one of the]] [[Shell-Shocked Veteran|of the soldiers]] torched the halfway house for veterans where his brother was living and it goes downhill from here.
*** During the series' Dork Age, they decided that Cobra Commander wore a mask because he was a snake-man, leading the organization as part of Cobra-La, an ancient cult worshiping serpent-gods from beyond.
* There are some terrorists that the ''[[
** [[Word of God]] has it that their cause would (will?) be revealed... someday...
* In the pilot episode of ''[[
* The Dark Kat of ''[[
* ''[[Transformers Prime]]'' has [[Fun
** Specifically, the manifesto is as follows: "there is a conflict coming between the new world order... and the ''newest''. The winner will be the side which possesses the most advanced technology." This seems true as far as it goes, but why Silas pursues this goal through massive acts of violence rather than, say, buying out Google is never explored or mused upon.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* Some experts, such as Max Abrahms, have seriously argued that this may be [[Truth in Television]] for most or all terrorists. It's remarkably common for a terrorist group's policy demands to contradict each other, or to change suddenly for no apparent reason - in particular, if the group's demands are actually met, they almost never disband, but instead switch to a new issue that may be completely unrelated. In several cases, leaders of major terrorist organizations have been unable to explain exactly what they're fighting for when directly asked. So why do people join terrorist groups, if it's not really about the cause? Apparently because they're looking to make friends. No, really.
** One could argue that the reason these groups are so wildly self-contradictory is because the leaders recruit people using little more than cultural prejudices and peer pressure to ensure that they'll be too fanatical to bother questioning their orders or listen to an outsider. End result: a handful of men can raise an army of servants ready to do whatever they're asked simply to fit in. It's like a grand, horrifying version of high school cliques.
** There's a whole lot of sociology of why terrorist groups get started, why people join them, why their goals change, and so on. It's complicated.
* Many ideologically-motivated
* [[
* More of Riots without A Cause, the 2011 Enlgand riots started because of a police shooting, but involved burning shops and houses down and looting, which has nothing to do with a police shooting. This was lampshaded by a woman giving a speech on the streets when she said that a protest was supposed to be about a police shooting, not about robbing Shoe Locker and other shops.
* In 2011, some acts of sabotage were
{{reflist}}
[[Category:The Only Righteous Index of Fanatics]]
[[Category:Criminals]]
[[Category:Older Than Television]]
▲[[Category:Trope]]
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