Marco Rubio: We must fight to defend Western Civilization

In front of the legendary Acropolis in Greece on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a stirring defense of Western civilization — and why we must fight to defend it.An excerpt:The Greeks of antiquity have an almost mystical hold on our memory.

They call us back to them again and again.Four-hundred-and-eighty years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city, and they put its sanctuaries to the torch.Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island.

But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home.So instead they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay.

For days.They were eventually overwhelmed.The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines and razed the Acropolis to the ground.

But when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood, and decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth — two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic, halfway across the world from where I stand now.Athens gave us democracy.

Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy, our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states.Even much of our political vocabulary — words like “democracy,” “tyranny,” the word “politics” itself — found its origins here.Now all of that is true.But the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners are actually far, far deeper.

These institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fund...