Jason Ross- U.S.Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Credit: U.S. State Department
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 13 and delivered what was meant to be a stirring defense of Western Civilization.
It was the European continent, he declared, “that produced the genius
of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and
Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” Leave aside, for the
moment, the embarrassment we feel on his behalf for comparing a rock
band with Beethoven. The deeper question Rubio’s speech inadvertently
poses is this: What is the actual state of the civilization he claims to
champion?
The answer is being provided, in excruciating and nauseating detail, on the other side of the Atlantic. This week’s Epstein revelations
exposed Obama’s former White House Counsel exchanging adoring emails
with a convicted sex offender, a Dubai logistics magnate corresponding
approvingly about a “torture video,” and sitting members of the Trump
Cabinet caught in documented lies about their ties to Epstein’s island,
while the Attorney General was caught spying on Congressional research
into the files and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche declared new
prosecutions “unlikely.” In Britain, the Metropolitan Police raided the
home of a former ambassador over evidence he may have passed state
secrets to Epstein, and the Prime Minister’s own chief of staff resigned
in the fallout. This is not a scandal at the margins. This is the
operating culture of the trans-Atlantic elite—the same elite that
lectures the world about a “rules-based order.”
Rubio extolled
five centuries of Western expansion, “its missionaries, its pilgrims,
its soldiers, its explorers.” But he made no effort to distinguish the
anti-imperial philosophy behind the American Revolution, from the
imperial depredations conducted in the name of “the West”—such as the
slave trade, the opium wars, or the looting of entire continents. He
described the post-1945 retreat of empire as a tragedy, driven by
“godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings.” What he
could not bring himself to say is that the imperial system he mourns has
always required the kind of moral disfigurement now on display in the
Epstein files: a ruling class trained to separate the exercise of power
from any sense of human empathy. The British “public school” system
perfected this for centuries. Was Epstein’s operation part of its
American franchise?
Natural law is unforgiving on this point. You
may pass whatever statutes you wish, deploy whatever armies you command,
but a civilization which tolerates a leadership class oriented toward
domination rather than development is a civilization in terminal
decline—not because of some external enemy, but because it has hollowed
itself out from within. The same disregard for human dignity that
permitted Epstein’s circle to flourish is what permits a genocide to be
televised in Gaza, a merciless blockade of Cuba to continue, and the
threat of sustained military operations against Iran to be treated as a
manageable policy option, all while the trans-Atlantic financial system
is bloated beyond belief and overripe for collapse.
What would
George Washington, who led a revolution on the principle of promoting
the common good and the concept that government derives its legitimacy
from the consent of the governed, make of an Attorney General who spies
on legislators reviewing evidence of crimes? What would Benjamin
Franklin—the brilliant printer, scientist, and diplomat—say to a
Secretary of State who defines civilization as an entitlement to
dominate, rather than an obligation to uplift? The question answers
itself. The American republic was not founded to administer an empire.
It was founded on the proposition that human beings possess inherent
dignity and creative potential, and that the purpose of government is to
foster both.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the
Declaration of Independence. If that occasion is to mean anything beyond
pageantry, it must become the starting point for a reckoning—not merely
with the crimes documented in the Epstein files, but with the culture
that produced and allowed them. A civilization worthy of the name does
not measure itself by the power it projects, but by the beauty it
creates and the creativity it unleashes: in science, in infrastructure,
in education, in the arts.
The question is not whether the West once produced Beethoven.
The
question is whether it can produce anything of comparable moral value
today—or whether it has surrendered that ambition to the degraded
culture now being dragged into the light, and with it, the elevated
vision of the human individual on which any civilization worth defending
must rest.