Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism to an audience that included representatives from 67 countries is a reminder to the West that the greatest threat to our civilization comes from within. The great political philosopher James Burnham diagnosed the threat more than 60 years ago in his book Suicide of the West. Whittaker Chambers revealed what we are up against and what is at stake in his autobiographical masterpiece Witness. Paul Hollander provided evidence of Western intellectuals’ sympathy with the enemies of our civilization in Political Pilgrims. And Claire Sterling exposed the tactics of left-wing terror groups in The Terror Network.
Secretary Rubio began his speech by noting that while the United States and some of its Western allies have had some success in combatting Islamic jihadist terrorism, the West’s counterterrorism efforts have had a “blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.” Left-wing terrorism often gets a pass from Western intellectuals, academics, and legacy media, Rubio said. Indeed, the threat of left-wing terrorism, he noted, “will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.” The only terrorism threat Western progressives perceive comes from the political right. (RELATED: Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means)
For Modern Western progressives, the French Revolutionary slogan “pas d’ennemis à gauche” (“No enemies to the Left”) guides their every utterance and political outlook. Secretary Rubio rightly characterized this as an “ideological prejudice” that has become “accepted as the neutral and objective baseline” that is now “entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom.”
This ideological prejudice, Rubio explained, is why in the United States and other Western countries “so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.” Rubio provided examples: the George Floyd riots, left-wing attacks against immigration officers, transgender violence, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, deadly political violence in Greece, the terror during the Berlin blackout, and left-wing violence in France. (RELATED: Why Assassins Almost Always Go After Republicans)
Left-wing terrorism, Rubio said, is … “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice.”
Rubio noted that the phenomenon of left-wing terrorism is nothing new. He cited as evidence the 1970 terror groups who wreaked havoc in Europe, Latin America, and the United States in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the 17 November in Greece, the Shining Path in Peru, the Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Montoneros in Argentina, the FARC in Colombia, the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, and Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States. Claire Sterling showed in The Terror Network the Marxist inspiration and Soviet-funding of these terror groups, and traced their tactics to a terror manual written by the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella, which taught that terrorist violence would produce government repression that in turn would create a revolutionary situation that could lead to a communist seizure of power.
Left-wing terrorism, Rubio said, is “driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.” He described it further as “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice” that goes by different names: Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchistic. And Rubio noted that left-wing violence and terror are not new to our time. Its ideological roots can be traced to the French Revolution and Karl Marx’s political theories. Whittaker Chambers believed its roots go all the way back to the Creation story in the Bible, where the serpent entices Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by promising them “Ye shall be as gods.” Paul Hollander explained that Western intellectuals’ acceptance of left-wing terror and political violence grew out of the desire to perfect man, to create a Utopia on earth because for them God and heaven do not exist.
As in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Rubio noted, this left-wing terror phenomenon is a “transnational threat.” “These are not distinct and isolated cells,” Rubio said, using the example of Antifa. “They are interconnected networks … that share the same infrastructure … the same enemies … the same mission.” All this is similar to the terror network described more than 40 years ago by Claire Sterling.
In Suicide of the West, James Burnham called liberalism — what we now call progressivism — the “ideology of Western suicide.” The progressive left is unequipped to defend Western civilization because progressives don’t believe in the superiority of their civilization. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))
The true defenders of Western civilization are those political leaders who have what Burnham called the “pre-liberal conviction” that Western civilization is worth defending because it is the greatest civilization in human history. As Secretary Rubio said: “It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight — fight for what is ours.”
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