Western Civ 101

It was January 15, 1987, and the “Rev” had joined some 500 students marching down Palm Drive, the spectacular tree-lined entrance to the Stanford University campus.

The students were — quite literally — calling on Stanford to end the requirement that all freshmen take an introductory course to Western Civilization. (Jackson, in a typical act of cultural appropriation, wanted the course expanded to include non-Western cultures.)

Alas for our country and our culture, the protest was successful and pretty much ended the era where the Great Books were taught at major college campuses, to be replaced with cultural relativism and the “intersectionality” gobbledygook of Marxist ideologues.

Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is bringing it back. In a magisterial speech on Wednesday in front of the Parthenon, Rubio reminded us that Western Civilization began in Athens, and it spawned centuries of astonishing accomplishments — and yes, greatness.

WATCH: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Acropolis in Greece

Read the full transcript here.

“For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence,” Rubio said.

“Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.  We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.”

The West is facing “an inflection point,” Rubio said, where we must either reclaim our greatness, our thirst for innovation and new frontiers, or be left in the dustbin of history as more aggressive competitors dominate the world stage. “We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all,” he concluded.

This week, we all watched as another great civilization, that of France, came under attack from organized mobs of Leftists and Islamists. Sure, the protests began with high schoolers and college students, but they were quickly appropriated by former Communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his anti-Semitic thugs.

Mélenchon is hoping to pull off a Chirac during next May’s presidential elections. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen beat out the Socialist Leonel Jospin in the first round of the presidential elections, so that French voters who reviled the elder Le Pen had only one choice to defeat him: Chirac.

But Marine Le Pen is not her father, and France today is not the France of 2002. She is pro-Israel, pro-immigrant, anti-illegal immigration and anti-jihadi Islam. And her popularity is soaring as radical Muslims waving Palestinian “flags” flood the streets of Paris.

I’ve seen this movie many times before, having lived in France off and on for fifty years. The French have an unhealthy addiction to mass protests that shut down vital services and business. “General strike” is just a synonym for national holiday. And the French love their holidays — more than they do work.

You might object that the US has a similar level of debt. “The difference,” Millière writes, “is that the US may still be able to grow its way out of such a hole… whereas France, crushed by overregulation, cannot.”

When the UK was still a member of the European Union, enterprising young Frenchmen emigrated to London to chase their entrepreneurial dreams. Today, they flock to the United States. Why? Because France remains a sclerotic, class-driven society.

Imagine Elon Musk leaving South Africa to immigrate to France. If he had attended French schools as a teenager, he would have been taught that because he couldn’t spell properly he was going to end up on an assembly line. Or as a taxi driver. Or a gardener.

No electric cars. No SpaceX. No going to Mars. Just a small flat in a suburban high-rise desert, with only a monthly paycheck on the horizon.

That is the France of today. As Marco Rubio put it, the French preoccupy themselves “more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.”

“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 we deserved and had earned our greatness.

“The word “nationalism” became a dirty word.  And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history.  And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.  In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.”

On the streets of Paris today you can see the face of the future. “What brings Islamists and the revolutionary left together is their intention to tear down Western civilization,” Milliere writes, citing a May 2025 report by the French Interior Ministry on the Muslim Brotherhood and its “long process of political conquest” of France.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday in the Jacksonville, Florida, area on 104.9 FM or 550 AM or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. You listen later to the podcast by clicking here.

Yours in freedom.

©2026 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com

Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here.

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.