Interesting Times

Having spent a long time watching Elon Musk, and having talked with him, I believe I understand what he understood before almost anyone else. And it's something every one of us needs to understand now. Western civilization is not one civilization among many. It is the one that gave the world freedom of thought, modern science and the dignity of the individual. And it is under attack. Not by peoples, but by ideologies that want it dead. If it dies, the world will not become more just. It will become poorer, more brutal and darker. For everyone, including those who hate it. Why? Because civilizations are not interchangeable. We were told that any culture could be blended with any other, like mixing colors, and that the result would always be harmonious. It isn't true. A society where women are equal to men cannot coexist without friction with a worldview in which a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. A society where you can criticize God, change your religion or have none cannot absorb, without fracturing, a worldview in which apostasy is paid for with your life. Every people has its own genius and moves at its own pace. But not all values are equal, and you cannot build a nation on laws that contradict each other. Saying so is not racist. Racism is about blood. I am talking about laws, customs and values. And those values belong to no race: a Japanese, a Senegalese or an Iranian can make them his own, and millions have. That is exactly why they are worth defending. Let's remember where they come from. It all begins in Greece. In Athens, for the first time, men decide that truth does not descend from a throne but is sought through reason, and that a city governs itself through debate. Socrates chooses death rather than give up thinking freely. At Salamis, a handful of free cities stops the greatest empire in the world. Then comes Rome. Rome invents law that binds everyone, the citizen who holds rights, the Republic. And one immense idea: you can become Roman without being born Roman. You become Roman by adopting its laws. Christianity adds the most revolutionary idea in history: every human being, slave and emperor alike, has infinite worth. Then France. The cathedrals, those ships of stone our ancestors built over centuries for descendants they would never see. Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. And Napoleon, who gives France the Civil Code, the lycées, and one simple principle: careers open to talent. Murat, the son of an innkeeper, ends up a Marshal of the Empire and King of Naples. The Civil Code spreads across much of Europe and still shapes the law of dozens of countries today. And this civilization goes on to abolish slavery, which had been practiced on every continent since the dawn of time, to push back the plague, smallpox and the night itself, and to set foot on the Moon. Peoples of the West, be proud of this history. Proud does not mean blind. Every civilization has committed crimes: conquest, slavery, war. Ours is the one that went furthest in examining its own faults, to the point of abolishing what it had once practiced. This capacity to question itself is its greatest strength. And that is exactly the strength now being turned against it. Because for decades, this magnificent system has been getting hacked. Not by an army. By an alliance of two forces that have nothing in common except one enemy: us. The first is communism. It lost the economic war, lost the Cold War, lost history's verdict with its tens of millions of dead. But it never lost the universities. It survived by changing costumes: class struggle became the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and the West was declared guilty of everything. It taught our children to be ashamed of their ancestors, their borders and their culture. It is the root cause, because before you can bring down a civilization, you have to take away its will to defend itself. The second is political Islam. I am not talking about Muslims, many of whom came here precisely to escape this ideology and are its first victims. I am talking about a political project that wants to place religious law above civil law. It has no doubts. It feels no shame. It rushes into the void the first one dug. One disarms. The other advances. And let no one on the left believe they will stay in control. History has already staged this play. In 1978, Michel Foucault was enthusing over the Iranian revolution. Iran's communist party, the Tudeh, backed Khomeini and called on Iranians to vote for his Islamic constitution. By 1983, its leaders had been arrested, the party banned, and its chiefs paraded on television to confess their “crimes.” In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were executed, communist activists among them. The second always ends up devouring the first. Useful idiots are only useful for a while. So here is my call to every Western people. To the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, to all of you. We are at a turning point. What we do in the next ten years will decide what our grandchildren are allowed to say, believe, write and love. I am not asking you to die for the West. I am asking you for something harder: to live for it. Learn its history and pass it on. Have children. Speak without fear, even when they call you every name in the book. Vote, get involved, run for office. Build companies, schools, factories, families. Refuse the shame they are trying to inject into you. And stop surrendering anything that makes us who we are: freedom of thought, equality before the law, the dignity of every person. The historian Arnold Toynbee understood it: civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And those who think they can let the West fall without paying the price should remember the Iranian communists. They helped tear down what they despised, and then they were next. The Greeks at Salamis were outnumbered. They won because they knew what they were defending. We are the heirs of Athens, Rome, Notre-Dame and the Civil Code. It is no accident that the rockets that will carry humanity to Mars are being built in a free civilization. It is time to prove ourselves worthy of what we were given. The West is worth defending. And no one will defend it for us.