Real Irish Republican Army

The Real Irish Republican Army is identified in the book as a foreign organization on the United States’ official list of terrorist organizations established on October 5, 2001. It receives no separate history or account of its activities. Its significance in the text is therefore institutional and comparative: the listing provides a concrete instance of the government’s classification system, which Chomsky discusses alongside his critique of how political power shapes the use of the word terrorism.

Identification and Listing

The organization appears as the twenty-second entry in the list reproduced in an appendix. The excerpt supplies its name and position but does not describe its membership, operations, aims, or the circumstances behind the designation. The book thus records an official classification rather than offering an independent organizational profile.

The Official Framework

The appendix presents designation as a legal process with stated criteria. An organization must be foreign, must engage in terrorist activity as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act, and its activity must threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States, including its defense, foreign affairs, or economic interests. The Real Irish Republican Army is included in the published list, but the cited material does not explain how the government applied each criterion to this organization or provide the underlying evidence.

Political Meaning of the Label

The listing sits within Chomsky’s wider distinction between a literal definition of terrorism and its conventional political use. He endorses a definition centered on calculated violence or threats of violence used to achieve political, religious, or ideological ends, including through intimidation, coercion, or fear. He argues that public language often reserves the label terrorism for acts by enemies or adversaries, while comparable coercive conduct by powerful states is described differently. The organization’s appearance in the official list exemplifies the state’s power to classify non-state actors; it does not, by itself, resolve the broader question of whether the same evaluative standard is applied across different actors.

Limits of the Account

The book does not connect the organization to a specific incident in the material presented here, nor does it recount any subsequent change in its status. Its documented role is narrow but clear: it is one of the organizations named in the October 2001 designation list, within an argument that treats the naming of terrorism as both a legal act and a politically consequential use of language.