I've been absent from Patreon for a few days because I've been in a creative fury writing about what has made the West "Western." From Athens through Rome, Europe to the United States, what was new was that it was tyhe first civilization not to impose checks on the emergence of oligarchies.
That civic function was the role of Mesopotamian "divine kingship" with its Clean Slate proclamations cancelling debts, Egypt with its pharaohs (the Rosetta stone was a tax-debt cancellation), to China's emperors pledged to keep the population sufficiently satisfied not to revolt. All Asian civilizations, and also the indigenous tribes studied by anthropologists, had checks against personal selfishness.
But the Western oligarchies celebrated this drive. It has culminated in Chicago School "free market" drives to disable any government power to restrain the polarization of economies into oligarchies whose creditor, landlord and monopoly claims are a form of overhead blocking overall economic growth.
Rubio is just the last to celebrate this, in the form of Trump's demands for tribute from other countries (just as Athens levied). Here's his speech from yesterday (Oct. 7).
Speaking in Athens at the Acropolis on October 7, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said:
"Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of the traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; ... This was the foundation of the Western mind: our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion.... and the whole tradition of natural law."
"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 that we deserved our greatness. The word"nationalism"became a dirty word."
"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." 1
But it is not the West that will determine its role in the coming world order. It is the countries that are being victimized by the West's "nationalism" centered in the demands for tribute from its successive presidents. Trump has simply pressed the asymmetry to the breaking point.
1 state.gov, The Pynx, Athens, Greece.