A History Lesson For Marco Rubio

A History Lesson For Marco Rubio

Fatemeh Shams, Professor of Persian Studies at Penn

https://x.com/shazzshams/status/2108608790044213534?s=46

 

“Mr. @SecRubio, I write this as an educator at one of your Ivy League schools, the University of Pennsylvania, and as someone who has spent years teaching Persian history and culture and their intersections with Greek and Western history and culture.

 

Your dangerously Eurocentric account of Perso-Greek history is not only distorted and misleading; it also ignores the most basic facts about centuries of cultural exchange between civilizations you frame as fundamentally opposed.

 

Greek civilization did not develop in isolation from its eastern neighbors, nor did what we now call Western civilization emerge independently of the intellectual and cultural worlds to its east. The Persians and Greeks were not simply enemies locked in an eternal civilizational struggle. They were also neighbors whose worlds intersected through diplomacy, trade, art, religion, literature, philosophy, science, and political thought. The Achaemenid Empire itself was a vast, multicultural world connecting the Mediterranean to Central Asia. Greek thinkers lived and traveled in the wider Persian world, while Greek knowledge, art, and political ideas circulated across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. These encounters were complex, reciprocal, and often shaped by both conflict and cooperation.

 

Yes, there were imperial wars between Persians and Greeks, just as there were wars between other ancient empires. But reducing their history to military invasions while erasing centuries of cultural contact and exchange is not historical analysis. It is ideological mythmaking.

 

Had you engaged seriously with the histories of Persian and Greek philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, mythology, art, and literature, you might have recognized how inadequate and dangerous it is to reproduce the crude civilizational binaries popularized by the notoriously racist movie 300. Invoking this caricature of ancient history to mobilize support for contemporary military aggression is not an innocent historical error. It is a way of manufacturing an enemy by presenting an entire civilization as an existential threat.

 

History shows us where such rhetoric can lead. The Nazis exploited myths of national humiliation and betrayal after the First World War, scapegoating Jews to legitimize exclusion, persecution, and ultimately genocide. The historical circumstances are different, but the broader warning remains: the deliberate construction of civilizational enemies can help normalize dehumanization and mass violence.

 

When a senior US official selectively weaponizes a complex history he demonstrably misrepresents, he does more than spread misinformation. He helps advance a worldview in which war between civilizations appears inevitable and aggression becomes defensible. That is how dangerous political narratives are built, and how human catastrophes are made easier to justify.

 

Your speech is historically uninformed, aggressively Eurocentric, and deeply troubling. At a moment when the consequences of military escalation are measured in human lives, we need historical literacy and intellectual responsibility, not racist caricatures dressed up as civilizational history.”