The more things change, the more they stay the same. I found the following in AN Wilson's (2006) "After the Victorians", London:Arrow Books. The comment was written in the 1950's by a founding member of the Irish Sinn Fein, and historian of the predecessor of the IRA (then the IRB), PS O'Hegarty:

"We adopted political assassination as a principle. We turned the whole thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with power over life and death over large areas. We decided the moral law, and said there was no law but the law of force, and the moral law answered us. Every devilish thing we did against the British went full circle, and then boomeranged and smote us tenfold; and the culminating effect of the whole was a general moral weakening and a general degradation, a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or decency, in goodness or uprightness or honesty (cit ap. Wilson 2006:113).

Sounds contemporary.