Our Marathon
What a 2500-year-old Athenian battle can teach us today.
When I was a freshman at Yale in 2008, I took a class called “Introduction to Ancient Greece” taught by Donald Kagan.
Professor Kagan was a giant in his field and, at the age of 76, lectured from a chair. Until halfway through the course, when he recounted the battle of Marathon.
That day, Professor Kagan stood. At Marathon, ten thousand free Athenians repelled a force of 15,000 Persians, whipped into battle by their masters. The Athenians, led by Miltiades, then walked back to Athens and prevented the Persian navy from landing there.
Professor Kagan roared, “I can picture the Greeks standing there, one leg in the breakers, holding their shields high so the sun reflected off and blinded the Persians.”
This was 490 B.C. Before Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Phidias, and Aeschylus. Had the Persians taken over Athens that day, it’s likely that none of these writers would have produced their plays, their philosophies, or their science. The democracy of Athens would have been snuffed out. 1,200 years later, there would have been no classical texts to catalyze the Renaissance.
“At Marathon in 490 BC, 10,000 Athenians saved Western Civilization,” Professor Kagan closed.
Many students at Yale likely now bristle at the term “Western Civilization.”. “Colonizer” is perhaps what they hear. Perhaps the term triggers difficult memories of their often private school experiences. Perhaps they find it racist.
In our zeitgeist, it has become difficult to say things that are obviously true. In this case, that Western Civilization - which is to say any nation that has embraced liberal capitalist democracy, including the United States, India, Israel, and those of Europe - produces the wealthiest, healthiest, most egalitarian, most innovative societies.
There are no refugees and immigrants flocking to China, to Russia, or to Iran. There is nothing more in demand than a United States passport.
The youth of America - inheriting the kingdom of the wealthiest, most liberal, most powerful nation in all of history - as most princelings, understand none of its value.
Starting with Black Lives Matter, a socialist movement germinated from the seed of truth that black Americans are disproportionally subjects of police brutality, the American left has reduced itself to a binary worldview of “oppressors and the oppressed”. Colonizers and the colonized. And more insidiously, that all whites carry the original sin of the oppressor.
Now, after Hamas’ brutal murder of 1400 Israelis on October 7th, the evil of this worldview has been laid bare.
On 10/7, Hamas terrorists murdered 1400 Israelis in a manner that would have made Genghis Khan’s army look like saints. They raped. They cut our babies from their mothers’ wombs. They put babies in microwaves and ovens and forced mothers to watch. They called their own mothers and bragged about what they had done. And we know all of this with certainty because in their perverted hubris, they recorded it on camera.
There has been perhaps no act of greater savagery against civilians in a millennium.
And that day, the Arab street cheered. Not just in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. But in Paris, London, Oslo, New York, and Washington.
American Ivy League schools, BLM, and DSA politicians - notably Cori Bush, Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar, and AOC smirked. They refused to condemn Hamas’ actions. Russell Rickford, a Cornell professor, went on camera and told a crowd of students that he found video of Hamas’ rampage “exhilarating.”
Many who condemned Hamas did so conditionally, saying, “the context is important.”
The context is simple. For the last 50 years, the Palestinian people have been held hostage by fundamentalist leaders - first the PLO now Hamas - that have rejected every two-state solution ever presented to them. They walked away from Ehud Olmert’s offer to cede the West Bank in 2008, from the Camp David Summit in 2000, from the Wye River Accords in 1998, from the Oslo Accords in 1993, and from the 1947 UN partition plan, which would have granted them 50% of what is now Israel.
The Israelis, forced to confront a savage enemy at their border satisfied only by their destruction, have taken the minimal action they can to keep their population safe. There is no IDF soldier who wouldn’t rather be in school, working, or raising a family. They serve because the alternative is their end.
Hamas does not seek a two-state solution, but the destruction of Israel. And it seems that many in New York, DC, London, Paris, and Dearborn are willing supporters. Over the last month, Pro-Palestinian mobs have torn down flyers asking for the release of the 250 civilian hostages held by Hamas. They have spoken plainly and on camera of their desire to overthrow their government, establish a Muslim Caliphate, and kill non-Muslims. They murdered a Jewish man in Ventura, CA. They vandalized national monuments in Washington D.C., including a statue of Benjamin Franklin.
Some describe these mobs as protestors. They are not. Protest is Martin Luther King marching arm in arm with John Lewis in Montgomery. It’s a quarter million people peacefully standing before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington.
The behavior of the gathering reveals the moral character of its participants. The Palestinian mob is destructive, violent, and united by hate.
And they are here in the United States.
The Greeks of Marathon had a clarity that we lack. They saw the 15,000 Persians on the field before them, they knew the value of their democracy, and they knew they were staring at its end.
Our enemies do not do us the courtesy of marching before us. They are in the hateful and polarizing worldview of “oppressed and oppressor.”. In TikTok and the Chinese and Russian intelligence operations sowing misinformation among our youth. In our naive immigration policies that have admitted people who march in the streets chanting “Khaybar, Khaybar, yaa Yahood,”, a reference to the army of Mohammed killing Jews.
And in ourselves. In our hubris that the liberty and prosperity we enjoy in the United States is something to be ashamed of rather than a flicker of civilization that we must carefully keep alight.
Whether or not it knows, the Western world is at Marathon right now, fighting for its existence.
All we have to do to win is realize what we are fighting for.