Reflections on Rubio’s Speech at the Pnyx
By Yavor Tarinski
The speech by Marco Rubio at the Pnyx in Athens was an appropriational feat typical for conquerors, as well as a far-right call for more nationalism and war. The US secretary of State attempted to appropriate place and time in the name of domination and imperial ambition.
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On the one hand, he targeted the temporal dimension of Ancient Greece by appropriating its legacy as property of the US. He refused the historic reality of it being part of the wider Mediterranean world of antiquity and closely interwoven with Eastern civilizations of the past. Instead, he placed this legacy at the service of contemporary US imperialist ambitions in the Middle East, creating an artificial rift that supposedly exists since ancient times between “the West” and “the East” — intended to justify war, destruction, genocide.
On the other, Rubio’s choice of a venue targeted the spatial dimension of the Pnyx — the place where the public assemblies of the democratic period of Ancient Athens were conducted. While plagued by patriarchy and slavery, the Athenian polis for couple of centuries developed a conceptual and institutional framework that allowed its management to be undertaken by a public assembly in which all citizens (free males) had the right to participate. This deliberative institution was inspirational for the emergence of similar face-to-face organs of the people in later revolutions, in which political participation was universalised for all genders and refuted slavery altogether.
Contemporary parliamentarism, within which Rubio’s current official position is situated, has nothing to do with the tradition of the popular assembly, but is instead a descendant of another tradition — that of oligarchy, as it emerged in Ancient Sparta or the Roman Republic. The advent of parliamentarism in the early modern period was perceived by the then emerging new elites as a tool to narrow the liberatory horizon of the toiling masses to the electoral field of representation in a hierarchical non-deliberative setting. Furthermore, the political tendency to which Rubio belongs — that of the far-right — is the main opponent to the popular passion for self-management.
Filled with irony and cringe-worthy, the speech was meant not as a serious historic exploration, but as a declaration of “civilizational superiority” of US imperialism, directed toward both “friends” and “foes”. For anyone serious in standing for universalist values of democratic autonomy and self-determination, as manifested throughout history time and again in communities in all corners of the world, the speech of Rubio was nothing short of a further commitment to a vision of perpetual war, nationalism, authoritarianism, exclusion etc.
In short, a vision that must be opposed if we are to have a livable future on this planet.
