Iran for Progressive Dummies
The world’s progressive political establishment and its media torch-bearers have spent so many years lying and obfuscating on behalf of tyranny, in the name of defending anything that might be seen as useful in their definitive and never-ending war against individual liberty, that they have apparently obscured the truth even from themselves. Thus, they are now, fittingly, subject to what Socrates, in the Republic, defines as “the true lie,” i.e., the ultimate form of falsehood, namely “the lie in the soul,” which is to say ignorance.
Although I would not be so naïve as to imagine that simple clarity and directness about political facts might save the progressives from their self-indoctrinated ignorance, I think such an exercise may be beneficial even for those (i.e., the rest of us) who, though not ideologically-motivated, nevertheless come by some measure of progressive fogginess about the world inadvertently, through a lifetime of unavoidable exposure to these progressive lies.
Here, then, as simply as I can express it, is my attempt at clearing the fog. Let’s call it Iran for Progressive Dummies.
Iran is ruled by an Islamic theocratic despotism that governs without concern for the people, justice, freedom, or, truth be told, religious orthodoxy in any ordinary sense. Their monolithic grip on power is the state religion. Objections to their rule therefore have the status of both heresy and treason, and as such are punishable by imprisonment or death, without nuance or exception, and pretty much without rhyme or reason.
Homosexual relations are also punishable by death, according to theocratic law. On the other hand, according to moral laws set down by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, sodomizing the son, brother, or father of one’s wife does not delegitimize the marriage. On the other other hand, according to the same impeccable source, sex with sheep and cows is taken for granted, the only important stricture being that neither the sodomized animal nor its milk may be ingested by humans afterwards.
Then there is the whole matter of women, where progressives never dare to tread. As explained in a well-researched article in the Financial Post concerning the regime’s sexual obsessions, the current supreme leader, Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Khamenei, has made pronouncements on the matter of women’s dress and head-covering in language establishing in no uncertain terms that “women’s hair is itself seen as seditious and counterrevolutionary.” Publicly exposed hair on a woman’s head is an act of sedition and treason, according to the law of the land. (Recently, Iran erupted in controversy over the “issue” of whether a car with the doors closed ought to count as a private space, with the regime, of course, taking the “no” side, i.e., demanding that police continue to have the authority to arrest women seen in automobiles with exposed hair.) Let me clarify this — this article is meant as a dummies’ guide, after all: If you are a woman, and any man sees your hair in public, you are guilty of sedition and may be arrested and charged as a counterrevolutionary. Many Iranian women are currently serving long prison sentences for violating this law.
And even that brutality perhaps pales next to Khomeini’s theocratic pronouncements on girls and marriage, particularly regarding the acceptable marriage and deflowering practices involving wives who are nine years old.
Present-day Iran, qua theocratic despotism, is less a political entity than an insane asylum for men who have lost all control of their rational faculties, their sexual urges, and their basic masculinity, and who have chosen to overcompensate for their emasculated insecurity by terrorizing their fellow Iranians (and, apparently, farm animals). They purchase social monitoring technology from China to help them upgrade their eleventh-century tyranny to twenty-first century totalitarian levels. They shoot protesters who have the courage to publicly demand basic human liberties and a smidgeon of dignity. They do this without remorse or hesitation, because, as noted above, the theocracy’s absolute authority is itself the state religion, and any form of opposition therefore heretical.
End of entry. Dummies, resume obfuscating. (We know you will.)