Success In 2005 An Iranian View - Road to the Middle Class

WHETHER OR not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the eye of the hurricane we call the War on Terror, you always want to keep an eye on Iranian writer Amir Taheri. He probably represents the voice of the suffering city people of Iran, the ones who want to come into the world, the democratic capitalist world that we Anglospherists have spread across the planet. Only they live under a regime that is at war with the democratic capitalism.

Taheri is encouraged by the year just past. And why not? “27 nations advanced towards greater freedom — an all-time record.”

And in the nations that an Iranian would be particularly interested in, after his own, he notes that both Afghanistan and Iraq staged a bunch of elections and constitution ratifications in 2005.

He is even encouraged by the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran.

I also regard the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new president of the Islamic Republic as good news. The reason is simple: Ahmadinejad has the courage, some might say recklessness, to cast aside the hypocritical mask worn by his two predecessors (both businessmen-mullahs) in a strategy of deception. He has eschewed taqiyah (dissimulation) and that, believe me, is welcome news. His presidency will force the people of Iran and the rest of the world either to come to terms with the Khomeinist revolution or to challenge it in a meaningful way.

Ahem. That is certainly an interesting way of putting it. But it makes an important point. Sooner or later, the rest of the world is going to have to confront the fact of an aggressive, expansionist Iran. Will we decide to confront it? Will we decide to contain it? Or will we decide to appease it? And what about the Iranian people themselves? Can we separate the Iranian regime from the Iranian people in the way that the peoples behind the iron curtain understood our policy during the Cold War?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Conversion

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Postmodernism

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Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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