Jack Bell makes a timeless point and leads many at Samizdata.net wonder if not just Iran but some Western societies are not well overdue for Jefferson’s prescription.
Reason has an editorial everyone should read. It discusses the story of Dr. Hashem Aghajari who is facing a death sentence in Iran because he called for secular and religious reform. He has turned down a negotiated appeal with the religious courts of Iran because, as Dr. Aghajari says
“… those who have issued this verdict have to implement it if they think it is right or else the Judiciary has to handle it.”
Basically he is willing to die to make his point.
In these days of jihad where our focus is on the religious fanatics and their facist fellow travellers, it is good for us to know that there are also those in the Middle East who share our belief in the rights and dignity of man and the liberty of the individual. In freedom from religous and secular tyranny. Share it strongly enough to pay the same ultimate price as was once paid here in America to secure those very rights for us.
I wonder how many of us will be standing up for the count in a decade or so if (when) the apparatus of protection we are so busy erecting is used for darker purposes? Personally I think Thomas Jefferson said it best:
“What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Jack Bell
Iran seems to be different from other muslim Middle East states – as it seems it has a sizeable class or group of people who are familiar with, and want, democracy and liberal tolerance, in the Western style. We don’t hear about such groups in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
Why is Iran different ?
Maybe it has to do with the “tyranical”, 30 year reign of the Shah, brought down in 1978, with the assistance of Nobel Prize winner Jimmy Carter. It seems it was during the Shah’s rule that Iranians learned about Western ways and values.
Or an Indo-European heritage?
Let’s not forget that Persia was an advanced, dynamic civilisation long before the advent of Islam.
Perhaps some of their ancient traditions are beginning to re-surface after centuries of Islamic suppression.
Might I suggest a real economy, education system, civil society and such? One must remember where the Saudi’s were before oil, before WWII. They were little more than Bedoin tribes living in the desert.
Iraq is also a nation with an ancient heritage of civilization and I have suspicions in may not be nearly as hard for them to change apres Saddam as some may think.
They’re more like pre-War Japan than Iron Age hunter gatherers with petrobillions.
This is not to claim anything in particular wrong with the Saudi’s as a people; they simply have a case of arrested development because they can afford not to grow up.
I have to agree that we haven’t had to fight for liberty in a long while. However the current war on Islamo-fascism should provide ample opportunity.
This is simply an amazing amount of courage in the face of tyranny. If the Islamic authorities do kill this freedom fighter, they just might be putting a nail in their own coffin.
I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the demos at universities in Iran in support of Hashem Aghajari.
Their students remind me of Tiananmen square. May they succeed this time.
Besides Jefferson’s quote, another American patriot writer, Tom Paine, said this in his pamphlet “The Crisis (No. 1)” in 1776:
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. “
Dr. Aghajari’s case might well be the spark that lights the fuse of revolution against Iran’s lunatic theocracy, should the mullahs be crazy enough to carry out the sentence. For an enlightening view of the situation there just a few short years ago, I can recommend the chapter on Iran in VS Naipaul’s “Beyond Belief.” In a nutshell, Iranians are fed up to their eye teeth with the mullahs and want them out, out out.
Indeed, the Persian culture is historically secular, humanistic, liberal (as in classical) and rational. Foisting on it an alien culture like Islam was forcing a square peg through a round hole.
I work with an Iranain fellow and few people I’ve met can compare with his education, wit and humanity. He hates the mullahs and is considering returning to Iran after their fall. From all reports (and they are woefully few), he is typical of his countryment. May they be liberated sooner than later.
The whole quote from Thomas Jefferson is:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
the whole quote adds more to the point you are trying to make