While the more serious threat came from the extreme Right—better organized and much closer to the heart of the state—the ‘Red’ terrorists made the greater impact upon the public imagination. This was in part because, like the Red Army Fraktion in Germany, they traded upon widespread local sympathy for radical ideas. Official Communists correctly saw this appropriation of the revolutionary heritage as the terrorists’ chief asset, as well as a symptom of the risk that they posed for the credibility of the mainstream Left.
