Iron Mullahs Eliminate Songs of Freedom

Fire of Liberty

The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial today(Its locked behind a subscription firewall) on how President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fellow mullahs are strengthening their iron noose around the necks of the Iranian people with their most recent banning of all forms of Western music. So not only does the Iranian people face persecution and violent crackdowns by the Iranian government because they have called on their government to grant them the right to G-d's given rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as well as an ability to democratically choose their own leaders and not out of a group pre-selected by the Council of Guardians, they also face the strong arm of the government because they choose to listen to The Rolling Stones, Mozart or the ever so entertaining melodies of Outkast rather than what the mullahs want them to listen to. I believe the folks over at the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board pretty much sums how this move is yet another example of how Iran is steadily returning to the virulent Islamic radicalism that emerged during the fall of the Shah in 1979. Take a look what they had to say about the current actions in Iran:

Iranians have been here before, as have other victims of dictatorship. Ayatollah Khomeini banned all forms of music after the 1979 revolution, but the rules were gradually relaxed after his death. In the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, music was banned along with all other expressions of art and culture, and hundreds of musicians were murdered. The Nazis extolled the music of Wagner, yet they famously tore down the statue of the Jewish-born Felix Mendelssohn in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The Communist regimes also had their songs, including such memorable hits as "The East Is Red."

There is a philosophical pedigree to this madness. In Plato's "Republic," Socrates notes that music holds a key to fashioning the souls of men, and therefore is a tool in the education -- and subjugation -- of citizens. There is probably something to this.

But as Vaclav Havel reminds us, music can also be a tool of liberation. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution took much of its inspiration from the Velvet Underground. Iranians, too, may eventually find themselves taking a Walk on the Wild Side.

I can assure you that this regime has created a situation with the under 30 crowd, who make up 60% percent of the population and support real democratic reform, that will probably be the straw that will finally break the camels back. Hopefully in the near future we'll hear them singing songs of joy in the streets of Tehran as they chase the mullahs out of Iran once and for all. I look forward to that day and hope the White House is facilitating such a movement.