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Leftwing political violence is a “fatal cancer to civilisation”, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, told an international summit on far-left terrorism convened by the US state department on Thursday.
If left unchecked, political violence from the left “always becomes a Gulag”, Miller told the gathering, which was attended by senior officials from more than 60 countries in Europe and Latin America.
“It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering, in order to establish complete and total control, control through psychological and physical and actual terror,” Miller said.
Trump administration officials claim that leftwing political violence remains a blind spot in international counterterror efforts, which have historically focused on the threat posed by Islamist extremism and far-right groups.
The issue rose to prominence following the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Critics have warned that the administration’s focus on leftwing violence could lead to over-reach and that the government’s broad counterterror powers could be abused to target its critics on the left.
Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee sent a letter to Rubio on Wednesday questioning the state department’s focus on leftwing violence and accusing the administration of failing to provide data to support this focus.
“The Department’s reported focus on far-left extremism at the expense of other kinds of violent extremism is troubling on several grounds,” they wrote, noting the agency’s mandate does not extend to countering leftwing groups in the US.
The American Civil Liberties Union last year warned that a presidential memorandum signed by US President Donald Trump in September on countering domestic terrorism and political violence could be used to target civil society and Trump’s critics.
“If anyone needed proof that ‘terrorism’ and ‘political violence’ are slippery and fraught categories subject to political, ideological and racial manipulation and bias — well, this is it,” wrote Hina Shamsi, the director of the group’s national security project.
A counterterrorism strategy released by the White House earlier this year described leftwing extremism as “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist”.
It named leftwing terror as a prime threat, alongside transnational drug gangs and Islamist terror groups but omitted any mention of violence by far-right groups.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio, who is presiding over the summit, described leftwing terrorism as a “distinctive and unique evil”. “It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilisation itself,” he said.
Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, said leftwing antifa — or leftwing anti-fascist — protesters appeared to be “deformed” by their hatred.
“Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred,” he said.
An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies released last year found that leftwing violence has risen in the US over the past decade, particularly after Trump’s entrance into the political arena in 2016.
The report noted that leftwing attacks were “remarkably less lethal” than those carried out by the right or jihadis.
In November, the Trump administration designated four European leftwing groups as foreign terrorist organisations and offered a reward of up to $10mn for information on their financing mechanism.
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