Iran And The Ghost Of Democracy

It has been a year since the government officials counting the vote in Iran reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as the country's president. This exercise in creative accounting not only proved famed political philosopher Joseph Stalin correct when he pontificated that the people casting ballots elected no one, that was done by the folks counting ballots, but also initiated a period of protest and repression which was longer than expected but not bloodier.

Amnesty International has released a comprehensive report on the repression portion of the protest-repression dyad. It makes for searing reading. It also constitutes a severe indictment of the Iranian regime and its bully boys. In addition, in the Amnesty International methodical documentation of the human consequences of the Iranian exercise in regime maintenance exists a charge of moral cowardice directed against the US and other Western governments.

The Obama administration generally and the president specifically have maintained a discrete distance from the dance of protest and suppression. This detached approach has been justified on a number of grounds. A firm stance in support of the pro-democracy factions would be counterproductive in that it would bolster the regime's claims that the opponents of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were foreign puppets. Any measures taken against the Iranian regime would hurt the people we intended to assist. The US had to stay on message, had to focus on stopping the Iranian nuclear program regardless of any other consideration no matter how worthy.

All of these reasons (leaving aside any consideration of the lack of internal consistency) are superficially plausible. All make sense of a sort.

But the real deal exists on a more fundamental level. Any effective support of the pro-democracy elements of Iranian society (which, it must be noted includes members of the clerical ruling class) would automatically violate the imperatives of cultural relativism. This is not an inconsiderable fact given that Mr Obama and many of his "team" are strong adherents of the notion that no one cultural, social, political, or economic system is preferable to another. The president and others of his inner circle really believe that all political, social, economic, and cultural systems are ethically equivalent, and any value judgement which holds one to be "better" than another is the product of insensitivity, chauvinism, or xenophobia.

To take on the mullahs and their frontmen would demand that the US, as a matter of policy, declare that secular, pluralistic democracy is ethically superior to clerical rule, subverted elections, and the wholesale violation of human rights by the government of Iran. Any open, effective support for the dissidents in Iran would require that the US, as a matter of policy, hold that states and institutions produced by the European Enlightenment are inherently superior, hold a moral high ground in comparison to states and institutions produced by the Prophet and his successors.

That sort of thing has been, is, and will remain a definite no-no to people such as Mr Obama for whom cultural relativism is a species of revealed Truth. The only correct course of action open to a person who is a True Believer in the dictates of cultural relativism is expressing a sort of vague distaste for the violence associated with repression surrounded by a preternatural detachment which refuses all value judgments as unacceptable "privileging" of a specific outside political position.

So people die in Iran. So people scream in the torture cellars of Evan prison. So, even the graves of those murdered by the Thugs of the Koran are desecrated. Memories besmirched. Lives destroyed. Bodies mutilated.

Through it all the US, the current administration turns the other way, eyes carefully averted as if we were some thwacking great maiden aunt suddenly confronting a vulgar drunk on the steps of the church. Averting our collective vision not for any real world concern, any realpolitik goal, but simply due to the dictates of an intellectual fad of the moment.

A similar dynamic from the same root is at work in the refusal of Team Obama to name properly the enemy we confront daily not only in distant places but here at home. It is cultural relativism which denies us the right to name the threat which confronts us, the gangsters who menace us.

To call the enemy political Islam is to explicitly exalt other monotheistic religions over Islam. To call the people who try to kill us in Afghanistan or in Times Square, Muslims, is to contravene the requirements of cultural relativism as to do so holds Muslims as occupying an ethical niche inferior to those people who do not follow the strictures of Islam.

There is only one cause for the spineless American posture regarding the Iranian election. It is the same cause as underlies the gutless and brainless refusal to call the threat facing us and the rest of the West by its real name.

The cause is not, as is often alleged, "political correctness." That is simply one more convenient excuse for avoiding the truth.

The truth is simply that at the head of this nation there is a president afflicted by a very dangerous, even fatal mental virus. Other Americans of high rank or office have the same affliction. So do many in the elites of the media and academia. The president and all the others who think as he does have caught the same mind destroying disease.

The name of the disease is cultural relativism.

Unless and until the US government can get out from under the dead hand of cultural relativism the US will continue to fail to protect not only its own core interests but also the ambitions and goals of others who would be as we are--citizens of a republic who are still more free than not. In turn this means the US has surrendered its ancient and quite honorable calling to be the "city on a hill," a shining beacon of hope for all humankind.