The Persians return to Athens
The Persians return to Athens
MADRID - Standing before the Acropolis of Athens, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio traced the history of ancient Greece all the way to the rise of American industry in a speech delivered on Wednesday, in which he presented Western civilization as threatened by decline.
Rubio called for a return to the "classical conception of politics and the art of governing that the Trump Administration hopes to recover, not only for our country, but for our civilization as a whole."
This seemed to include a renewed claim to national pride, which, he said, the ancient Greeks had embraced, but which the West had abandoned upon feeling "ashamed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world."
The chosen setting is no accident: the pride he champions is anchored precisely in that foundational place. The West, understood as a discourse rather than a geographical location, is a historical sequence, the famous narrative running from Plato to NATO, in which classical Greece plays a foundational role.
Within this narrative, the Western refers to a developed, modern, secular and capitalist society, the result of a specific set of historical processes. Any society sharing these characteristics is considered part of the West. Discourses about the West produce and represent certain bodies in ways that are all too familiar to us. Civilized and barbarian, the West and the rest. The key to all of this is that the West cannot exist without its opposite: without that backward East, without that rest of the world it defines as such.
Finally, to be Western means to be democratic, though this claim conceals the impact of colonialism and racism in subverting any meaningful notion of democracy. In this case, its identity derives from the negation of despotism. The elements that constitute democracy acquire their meaning by being set against those considered constitutive of despotism a boundary with a long history.
According to the hegemonic view, democracy was born in Greece. The identification of democracy with the Greeks does not derive from an enumeration of the forms of government of the various Hellenic communities, but from the perception the Greeks themselves had of themselves as free, in contrast to the enslaved subjects of the Persian Great King. Greek freedom versus Persian slavery constitutes one of the earliest examples of a trope of Western political thought, reproduced as a variation on the theme of democracy versus Oriental despotism.
Later, many authors took this division seriously, to the point that the dichotomy has come to be regarded as one of the great dividing lines between the West and the non-Western world.
But as several scholars, such as Michael Mann, have pointed out, ancient Athens was a far more strictly disciplined society than the one subject to the Persian King of Kings. The King of Kings could command a permanent administration, a standing army, and resources drawn from regular tributes; yet in every case, the demands of imperial control required cooperating with local elites and depending on them. In other words, against the hegemonic idea that presents the West as the cradle of democracy, one could just as easily have presented Athens and, by extension, classical Greece as the cradle of totalitarianism.
Other traditions offer equally participatory models of government. Critical Muslim Studies, for example, formulate alternatives to the Eurocentric narrative that establishes a privileged relationship between the idea of the West and the democratic form. The government of the Prophet Muhammad is seen from this tradition as a manner of governing that was benevolent, just, and participatory. Another example is the government of Imam Ali, also characterized by its justice, benevolence, and attentiveness to the demands of the community.
This demonstrates that the supposed connection between democracy and "the West" is part of a narrative, not something natural. The same applies to the signifier "fanatic," used by Marco Rubio in his address to describe Iran's current leaders, whom he called "fanatics who lead a cult of death and use martyrdom as an instrument to achieve their political objectives."
The accusation of fanaticism directed at Muslims in general, and at the leaders of the Islamic Republic in particular, is once again part of Western discourse that creates a division between a supposed rational self and an "irrational and violent" Islamic other, with whom dialogue and agreement are impossible, and who therefore can only be subdued militarily.
By once again deploying a luminous West against a dark and dangerous East, represented by the Islamic Republic, Rubio's speech falls within a strategy aimed at justifying a possible new attack and presenting it as inevitable, given Iran's "irrational and violent" tendencies.
As Edward Said wrote in his book Orientalism: "Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."
The exact definition of Marco Rubio's speech.
source: tehrantimes.com