Rubio Delivers Speech at the Acropolis, Rallying the West to Embrace Western Values and Western Roots

It seems strange that anyone would even have to advocate for this.

Ben Whedon for Just the News:

Rubio's Acropolis speech pitches Trumpism as a return to Western roots

Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a speech Wednesday at the Acropolis in Athens cast the Trump administration and its broader movement as a conscious revival of the foundational principles of Western Civilization and urged Europe to follow its lead.

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Rubio's decision to deliver the speech against the backdrop of the Acropolis was deliberate. The ancient site is perhaps the most widely known monument associated with classical Greece, which scholars have traditionally viewed as the progenitor of what is now called "the West."

"For thousands of years, the civilizations that built what stands behind me have captivated the imagination of the Western world," Rubio opened. "The things we owe to this place as Americans -- and as Westerners -- are actually far, far deeper. What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man."

But Rubio went beyond romantic invocations of the ancient past and insisted that the modern Trump administration was working to advance a classically-influenced theory of politics. He further spelled out a tangible theory of statecraft on the world stage and encouraged European nations to adopt it themselves.

"For all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive," Rubio argued. "They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy. But they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force with prudence when diplomacy fails."

"They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it. This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim, reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization. We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago."

Rubio then went further to explain how to weave those ideas into the political landscape of a modern, increasingly international world, saying "[n]ational interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions" and that nations still faced threats that required them to respond.

He stated that the path forward was to rebuild international institutions while "understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them, but is to defend them, and that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests."

That position seems to come as a rebuke of globalism, cultural uniformity, and mass immigration on a large scale as many Western nations shift toward the political right in response to the influx of non-Western immigrants.

The full speech is here.

The speech begins with a narrative about the rise of democracy and western values. I'll skip past that to get to the part where he begins to make his argument.

This passage is about the need for actual competition in a society, and standards of excellence, lest that society devolve into shapeless, useless communism.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man's existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle -- to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction -- from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it -- the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride -- is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

The word "nationalism" became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left -- the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West's confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

That's a refutation of fake, communist "equity," in which everyone is a winner and everyone gets a participation award, and of course no one accomplishes or produces anything because there's no benefit to doing so.

He also attacks transnationalist "Davosism," the socialist dream of all national borders melting away into one gigantic ultrastate.

Now it's has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one's own people. And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

They believed -- fiercely -- in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

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These -- these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, "We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

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This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes -- our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now, we take the West's conception of these things -- heroism, honor, duty -- we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

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The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers -- born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point -- an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together -- understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them. And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

An excerpt:

Full speech here:

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:30 PM

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