Page "Red Army Faction" Paragraph 31

Despite killing 34 people, Baader-Meinhof garnered a degree of support from the West German population.

According to Fred Siegel, the group of militants began to be accepted, if not always admired, by " guilt-ridden liberals ", who saw its panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany's " boring bourgeois life " and who resented their nation's association with the American war in Vietnam.

Siegel asserts that Baader-Meinhof seized on this sentiment and carefully cultivated an outlaw image, wholesaling the ideal of authentically acting out one's impulses, in order to break through " the fascism of convention ", just as its heroes abroad like Che Guevara supposedly " broke through the iron wall of American imperialism.

" Drawing on its New Left counterparts in the United States, the group even began to borrow such phrases as " burn baby burn ," " right on ", and " off the pigs ".