The Right-Wing Terrorism Miller and Rubio Conveniently Neglected to Mention at Their DC Summit

A couple weeks back, I wrote briefly about the stench of fascism that accompanied efforts by Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio, at the international security conference in Washington, DC, that they strong-armed representatives from dozens of countries from around the world into attending, to whip up a frenzy about left-wing political parties, movements, and individuals.

As I have traveled for the past two weeks around Argentina, a country filled with the ghosts of those who were tortured and disappeared during the 1976–83 dictatorship, the Miller-Rubio double-act has struck an ever-rawer nerve.

Both men gave a master class in selective presentation of information. They zeroed in on a few, admittedly horrifying, examples of recent political violence perpetrated by ideological left-wingers, while neglecting a slew of attacks around the world carried out by those with white nationalist or Christian nationalist worldviews, who were seemingly egged on by Donald Trump and his allies.

There was mention of a 72-year-old Greek woman who was burned to death by “far-left and anarchist actors,” but no mention of the 2011 massacre of more than 70 people, mostly teenagers, killed by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, whose theory of a Great Replacement destroying Western culture has been all but explicitly embraced by Miller. There was mention of assassination attempts against Trump, but no acknowledgement of the deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, or at the US Capitol, no mention of the murder of the speaker of the Minnesota House by a right-wing fanatic, no mention of the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which the Trumps (senior and junior) subsequently mocked. Nor was there mention of the racist mobs, which many critics argue have been urged on by Elon Musk, that have, in recent months, burned asylum seekers out of their homes in one country after another in Europe. Going further back in time, there was mention of Cold War–era attacks in Europe by the Red Brigade, but no mention of the 85 people killed in a bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980 by Italian neofascists who likely had links to both NATO and the CIA. There was mention of academics and political leaders supposedly giving a nod and a wink to left-wing violence, but no mention of the assassinations, on US streets, of American citizens and undocumented residents by federal agents who have been promised immunity by Trump and others in the top echelons of American leadership.

These speeches were truly malignant, seeking to tar any-and-all-progressives with the vicious, bloody, legacy of some far-left movements from times past and places distant.

Marco Rubio’s cherry-picked reading of history demonstrated his extreme willingness to massage facts to fit a MAGA agenda. “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,” he said, conveniently overlooking systemic acts of terror from far-right forces such as, to take the most obvious and extreme example, the Holocaust. “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.” All true, but no mention of the tens of thousands of people tortured, raped, driven off of ancestral lands, in many instances killed by government troops and right-wing paramilitary death squads in those same countries during those same years.

He continued with a litany of Cold War–era leftist terror attacks in Europe and in the United States, from the Weather Underground to the Red Army, and then made the inevitable pivot: “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.” Rubio went on to list a number of statistics to underscore his point about the purported rising levels of left-wing violence, before explaining why these “architects of revolutionary violence” are committing political acts, like attacking pipelines, railroads, and power grids: “They despise the West because the West is great.”

Stephen Miller, the man most responsible for America’s despicable war on immigrants and for the massively expanded network of immigrant detention camps proliferating across the US, picked up where Rubio left off, conjuring up ever-darker visions of a hate-filled, even physically deformed left. “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. And they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.” Once started, Miller simply couldn’t stop. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”

If this hadn’t been one of the most influential people in Washington speaking, one might have been excused for thinking it was the fevered, hallucinogenic, vision of an apocalyptic preacher. “Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected. You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.”

Online, there were all the predictable jokes about how these dictatorial, ironfisted speeches sounded so much better in the original German. But having spent much of a day last week at the devastating Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Buenos Aires, in the naval-barracks-cum-torture-chamber-cum-execution-center through which thousands of designated enemies of the state were processed before being liquidated, I fear that the jokesters got the language wrong. What Miller and Rubio were arguing for was an all-encompassing domestic counterinsurgency strategy taken straight out of the US-sponsored School of the Americas playbook from the dirtiest days of the Cold War, a playbook that reached its logical, most savage, endpoint with the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; the wholesale kidnapping and disappearance of left-wing “terrorists”; and, at the urging of Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the creation of an international assassination syndicate under Operation Condor, by which the juntas of the region shared out their assassination dirty work with each other, as Peter Kornbluh recently wrote about in devastating detail in The Nation.

By this logic, Miller and Rubio’s chilling, dehumanizing words would have sounded far better in the original Spanish—the clipped, military Spanish used by junta leaders to justify their brutality: kidnapping people off of city streets and out of their homes; subjecting them to unendurable pain and torture at concentration camp–like sites such as the Naval Academy on a main avenue in Buenos Aires—in the basement of which, where victims were electroshocked, beaten, and otherwise subjected to unendurable pain, one can still see the rust-colored stains of old blood on the marble floors; used to rationalize the drugging of these victims once they had been tortured into spilling every bean they could spill, before they were thrown out of airplanes into the ocean below; used to declare entire political movements and parties to be terroristic and thus to justify hurling the full, unaccountable, force of the state against their members.

Miller and Rubio’s words were redolent of those spoken and written in Spanish a half century ago to explain away the kidnapping of the children of the disappeared so that they could then be adopted by good, solid, “normal” Christian family-values types in the military and business elites. They contained echoes of the rhetoric used to defend Western civilization against the Marxist barbarian political hordes clamoring at the gates; the Spanish used by the ironfisted and jackbooted caudillos and their oligarchic pals to denounce homegrown academics, human rights advocates, and economic justice campaigners who dared to dream of a slightly fairer, kinder, gentler world.

Even today, 50 years after the first spate of disappearances under the Argentinian dictatorship, surviving family members still demonstrate in the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires adjacent to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Originally, the mothers who came out to protest every Thursday afternoon, at a time when protesting could all too easily result in one’s death, wore white cloth diapers folded as headscarves to symbolize their missing children. These days most of the original mothers, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, are long dead—though a handful, now in their 90s and beyond, still show up in wheelchairs each Thursday. It is through their decades-long movement that the memory of the disappeared has been kept alive. It is in tribute to them that in working-class neighborhoods such as La Boca huge murals paint the stories of those disappeared victims. It is through their insistence on accountability that, after the dictatorship ended, and despite the best attempts of the political leadership to enforce an amnesty that would forgive-and-forget the torturers and executioners—and, more importantly, those who ordered the torture and the executions—many of these ironfist acolytes were tried and sentenced for their crimes against humanity.

The Madres’ protest movement is brave, magnificent. It speaks to what ordinary people can do even in the most extreme of circumstances. And it speaks to the need to always call the powerful to account, even when those powerful nebulously claim to be acting to defend civilization against the so-called left-wing barbarians who would, they confidently tell the world, burn it all to the ground.