Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism at the State Department yesterday, warning far-left extremism and violence are on the rise. Here is an excerpt of his remarks:

For far too long our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.

Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference.

In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized — that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.

A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system — I’m sorry — that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system.

A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is.

But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary — well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.

Ideological prejudice

For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.

It is the reason why, here in my country, 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.

It is why during those so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.

It is the reason for the now infamous image of a news anchor from a very prominent agency standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful.

This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

Tragedy across globe

The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly. Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade, about energy, about immigration.

You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world.

You came here because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80% of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office.

You are here today because for five days this winter the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.

You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs.

You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned. You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.

The simple fact is none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence.

Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember — remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes.

You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.

US confronts radicals

Today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40% in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80% of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.

Americans have seen what those numbers mean — an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A healthcare executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.

It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.

It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist.

But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.

Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism.

It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it sounds good in theory but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.

Beware communism

The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without — a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.

For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization — for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy.

They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.

It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again. We know what we must do, and now we must do it.