>>OPINION

They are not just reading Lolita in Tehran. They are also reading Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty. A Velvet Revolution inspired by Western liberal philosophers is underway in Iran. The theocratic regime of the mullahs is violently suppressing student demonstrations for freedom of speech and women’s rights. Dissidents are being jailed, beaten, tortured, and disappeared.

Young Iranians are dying for liberal values we take for granted in the US: democracy, freedom of speech and assembly, women’s rights, the right to peaceful dissent.

We hear very little news of these horrors and there has been only a muted response from American and European liberals. Young Iranians are dying for liberal values we take for granted in the US: democracy, freedom of speech and assembly, women’s rights, the right to peaceful dissent.

A fiery new book by Danny Postel, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, takes issue with American liberals for their listlessness. Part of the problem, Postel argues, is that the neo-cons have stolen the agenda of American liberalism with their rhetoric of freedom and democracy, a discourse that sounds idealistic but is not, as evidenced in Iraq.

Iranian intellectuals see this more clearly than we do. They want the support of intellectuals and NGOs, but not any sort of interference from the US government, certainly not armed intervention. It’s a fine line that Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has empasized by calling on “human rights defenders, university professors, international NGOs” to support the human rights struggle in Iran.

Akbar Ganjo, another eminent dissident, has put it in no uncertain terms: “We don’t want intervention. We only want the moral support of the global community for our fight.”

The Iranian drama is a great opportunity for American liberals to reassert their proud tradition of defending human rights at a time when radicals on the Left and the Right can’t see past their hatred of each other. The Left ignores the democracy movement in Iran just as it ignored the democracy movements in Eastern Europe that led to the collapse of those tyrannies. The Right is using rhetoric to make its case for war.

The liberal philosopher, Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian dissident who has been imprisoned and now lives in exile, told Postel that “…freedom is possible even in a world of secret police and of the rule of autocrats. Freedom is a universal human possibility.”

Sounds familiar to me: That is the sound that toppled the Berlin Wall. There was no military invasion there, just a unanimous call for human rights. Liberals, quit cowering before hacks of the con, neo or not. Say it loud, I’m liberal and I’m proud, and there will freedom but no war in Iran. 

ANDREI CODRESCU is a regular commentator on National Public Radio. His book, New Orleans, Mon Amour: 20 Years of Writing in the City, has just been published.