Iranian Rapture Over Rapper’s Death Knell

Talk about radical government overkill. The Iranian rapper’s death sentence for critiquing government excess is one for the ages & recalls how French Revolution justified its terror & guillotining thousands.

As a WSJ article recently noted, “An Iranian court has sentenced a popular dissident rapper to death following his outspoken support of the 2022 women’s rights movement, drawing international criticism of Tehran as it renews a crackdown on dissent.” Crackdown on dissent? What an understatement. The sentence handed down against rapper Toomajk Salehi, 33, was supposedly based on “national security” charges, which Salehi denies, that is, if he can grasp what the vague & unprecedented charges consist of.

Then again, radicals historically have seldom let logic or fair play stand in the way of their self-declared righteousness. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” justifying the American Revolution may be one exception. His powerful logic in defending the American Revolution was so good, it made him a celebrity in France a few years later & the run up to temporarily ending the Bourbon dynasty. But, more characteristically of extremists like those in Iran today, the new Republic’s Cte of Public Safety led by such terrorists as Robespierre & Saint-Just, went utterly bonkers in imprisoning, then, murdering every real or imagined political opponent they could dream up. Any wonder then of Saint-Just’s delusional declaration that “A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses.” Revolutionary Iran. Revolutionary France. Great minds think alike?

Davd Soul