Various Things I’m Noticing about the Green Revolution in Iran

Several people are having cows because Obama is not issuing bellicose rhetoric about Freedom, Democracy and the End to Evil. I think he’s doing exactly the right thing: not giving any ammo to the thugocracy that would dearly love to turn this into a struggle between Iran and the Great Satan so as to deflect attention away from their thuggishness. So I gotta give Obama points for being smarter than the bellicose End to Evil types.

What also strikes me is how largely peaceful the demonstrations have been (from the demonstrators side, I mean, not from the side of the regime Brownshirts who have been beating up and killing protestors). It is beyond ironic that the country most identified in our minds as one of the major fomenters of Islamic nutjobbery should suddenly reveal a gigantic population of people who seem to have grokked the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speaking of which, what also stuns me is how deeply in tune the Greens seem to be with ideas which are now quite despised here in the West by our elites, namely, the truth that, as JFK put it, “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” Our elites, all agog for the New Atheism, sneer at such stuff as incipient “theocracy” even as the marchers in Iran call upon God to overturn the tyranny of the regime. It’s the other side of the coin that secularists never take sufficient stock of: the fact that faith in God doesn’t *just* inspire monstrous deeds. It can also fire incredible heroism and pull down despots.

The Greens in Iran are acting on ideas that are stunningly American (and, of course, deeply Catholic). It is Augustine who tells us that an unjust law is no law at all. It is St. Thomas who says that a people have the right to overthrow a tyrant since raw power is not the same as authority from God. And it is the American Founders who insist that precisely *because* man has rights that come from God, not the state, that the state which tramples those rights is rightfully overthrown. How strange it is to hear Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar!” in support of the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and St. Thomas. But that is, in fact, what is happening in this revolt. Christians with a too-simple idea of the enormous complexity of Islam (and atheists with an even more simplistic idea of religion as simply and solely poisoning everything) should take note.

This is not to say “Christianity and Islam are really saying the same thing” or some such simplistic nonsense. But it is to say that the monochromatic view of Islam that has dominated Western discourse since 9/11 is receiving some major blows as a result of what we are seeing in Iran. What is striking to me is how deeply American culture has impacted there:

Reflexive despisers of All Things Obama may recoil at the above. I think that is to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. What strikes me about it is how deeply the American love of freedom (expressed in the grammar of video that owes *everything* to a specifically American political campaign) has permeated the Iranian resistance to the regime–and all without a shot being fired or a bomb being dropped.

(In case you are wondering, here is a translation of the various signs cribbed from YouTube:

1 (Girl in street): Defending civil rights
2 (Boy next to old man): Counterbalancing poverty/deprivation
3 (Boy pushing away donation box): Nationalizing oil income
4 (Man standing on rooftop): Reducing tension in international affairs
5 (Boy sitting next to satellite dishes): Free access to information
6 (Girl sitting besides her mother): Supporting single mothers
7 (Girl with cast): Knock down violence against women
8 (Boy): Education for all
9 (Boy infront of man locking car): Increasing public safety
10 (Girl on rooftop): Ethnic and religious minority rights
11 (Man on rooftop): Supporting NGOs
12 (Girl in front of wall): Public involvement
13 (Boy and girl): We have come for change
14: Change for Iran

I am not such a pollyanna as to think that should the regime suffer a defeat the New Guy will be a Messiah. But it gives me great hope nonetheless to see the Vanguard of Radical Islam being beaten back by a massive indigenous movement within the Islamosphere. About the only people I can see who find this a bad thing are some End to Evil warmongers whose every idea led to disaster over the past eight years.