As noted by Gurr (1970), the shift from social violence to political violence is facilitated by the diffusion of normative and instrumental justifications of violence, which vary depending on the country and the singularity of their historical development. From this point of view, the experiences common to the three countries most affected by armed rebellion (Italy, Germany, and Japan), i.e. where the construction of the state was both late and painful, and where there is a history of fascism, are most certainly connected. Beyond these similarities, it is important to stress that the shared reference to Marxism of these groups harboured a wide variety of discourses, even if the factional differences amongst Communist credos specific to each group should not be taken too seriously. Indeed, the credos were often confused, a rough mixture of Maoism, Guevarism, and Third Worldism, grafted onto the specific revolutionary traditions of the particular countries, such as Trotskyism and anarchism. In September 1971, the BR portrayed themselves as follows:

In addition, though covered by an artificial ideological veneer, they were really based on group dynamics, the mainsprings of which were of a very different kind, and were emotional and geographical in particular. Their main function was therefore to rationalize, using a valued ideological discourse of the time, the emotional bonds that make up the flesh and blood of social movements, and to mask the rivalries driven by the logics of group distinction and self-assertion. Consequently, the groups’ violent strategies stemmed less from an ideological current than from the political environment specific to each country, which as it were, had wrought the general tone of the protest movement (hence the importance of not separating the study of the 1968 protest from that of ‘terrorism’). They were also directly related to the status of the organizations’ militant forces, as well as to their origins. One last reservation needs to be made over attempts to link violent strategies to ideology, given that these strategies evolved over time as the protest cycle ran its course.