What about the Weather Underground? There is a pretty good documentary about them and a good Wikipedia entry.

Are they anything to do with the Red Army FRaction (aka Rote Armee Fraktion), a terrorist group which existed from the 1960s until they announced their dissolution in 1998?

—- there was nothing liberal about the RAF. not to be a dick, but its an important point. ‘liberal’ is a term that quickly loses its clarity outside of US politics, where it has come to stand in for a certain popular understanding of middle-class or bourgeois, popular, progressivism. and even that might be putting it strongly.

RAF certainly shared some of the identity-group politics that inform the current that performs as contemporary American liberalism, but the latter shares very very little of the former’s political economy. This is a crucial distinction if one wants to understand the difference between today’s political spectrum and that of previous generations.

For example, the assertion that the current, now perhaps doomed, health care bill is left, at all, much less ‘far-left’ only reveals the depth of its deceit when placed in historical context. One condition of possibility for the continued circulation of these confusions is the conflation of terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘leftist’ in discussing organizations like the RAF.

I see you caught yourself later tho!

Anti-choice violence has been going on for a long time, with even a good number of murders. So people ARE taking out guns and shooting others for political reasons. Hell, Dr George Tiller survived an attempted murder only to be killed in a second shooting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_States

And there’s no ‘external jihad’ to waive these.

I was really interested to find out more afterward, and by chance I stumbled across Stefan Aust’s book [Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF] – and I would highly recommend reading that (Aust also actually collaborated on working out the movie script, if I remember right).

Though I can’t quite bring to mind Aust’s insightful intro comments, they and the book as a whole provide a good grounding on the whole thing.
To answer one question, going off the book – No, they didn’t really articulate themselves better in real life.

As for whether the Teabaggers or some other group here in the US could “cross the line” into Guerilla Warfare, I’d say no. At least not to the extent that the RAF did, because one of the main problems in catching the group back then was slow and/or poor communication (emphasis, perhaps, on slow, as poor still exists). In this more connected world, you’re definitely less likely to go underground as the RAF did.
The authorities might well stuff up on the level that they did with the Schleyer kidnapping – where the police completely overlooked the apartment Boock was guarding the hostage, even while canvassing the area – butstill, it’s less likely (in other words, it would take more terrible confluences than just having a black nazi fascicommunosocialist in the Oval Office to bring about).

you hit a point with that line. the Baader Meinhof film actually received very mixed reviews here in germany. the main critic point was that the film tries to cover a long and eventful period of time, with the focus more on the happenings (‘the action’) – which leaves not enough space for the politic backgrouds / discussions of that time, and resulted in overly simplifying things to make all fit into the film length and keep the “cinematic arc”.

i just looked at the german and then the english wiki page, i think the english one doesn’t include that aspect, while the german page is running rather long with all viewpoints: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Baader_Meinhof_Komplex

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“where’s the line that gets crossed that leads to domestic guerilla warfare?”

good question.

there’s a fact about the german student’s movement that isn’t included in the film, as it only was discovered recently – and it is directly connected to the crossing-line to violence:

one key scene/date for the student movement was the death of a student in a non-violent demonstration in Berlin in 1967: Benno Ohnesorg, who was shot by the police in the back of his head. this event changed the mood in germany, and let students and liberaly sympathize with the radical left-wing / RAF. it also was the crossing line to violence on the student’s side (‘if they kill us, we have a right to fight back’).

now, all those years later, files were found in the archives of former East Germany that document that the policeman who shot Ohnesorg was a spy, and might have had the order to act as agent provocateur, to try and destabilize West Germany.

i just looked, here’s an NY Times article: “Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany“ – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/world/europe/27germany.html