Standing With Freedom

by Bruce S. Thornton
FrontPage Magazine

Remember when the liberal punditariat sneered at George Bush for putting Iran in the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address? Whole legions of sophisticated, nuanced thinkers rushed to explain the crudity of Bush’s thinking, not to mention his indulgence of dangerous religious ideas like “good” and “evil.” Iran is not a Hitlerian totalitarian state, they sniffed, and elections are held there, offering some level of democracy.

Typical of such thinking is a column not long ago by the New York Times’ Roger Cohen, in which this nuanced thinker wrote:

Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it's far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable. Most of Iran's population is under 30; it's an Internet-connected generation. Access to satellite television is widespread. The BBC's new Farsi service is all the rage. . . . The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared to the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned down the Majlis, or parliament.

I wonder what the people in the streets of Tehran would think about this “genuine contest,” or whether they appreciate Cohen’s sophistries like “un-free” and “intermittently brutal” and “margins of liberty” and “complete subservience to the state.” What percentage of a citizen’s freedom has to be eliminated before a regime will meet Cohen’s criteria for “complete subservience”? Let’s see, all candidates for office have to be approved in advance by the mullahs, and even then the election is blatantly stolen, after which protesters are killed and beaten, opposition leaders and their families arrested, the media silenced and internet interdicted, the “Supreme Leader” (sic!) Ayatollah Khamenei publicly threatens violence against his own citizens, gangs of paramilitary thugs rampage through Tehran like storm troopers — looks pretty totalitarian to me, though time will tell whether it ultimately lasts or not.

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