Regarding Iranian universities, Amir Nafisi, author of the fine book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was a professor of literature in Iran at the time of the revolution. She found it difficult to continue teaching after Khomeini took over and enforced Islamic fundamentalism in the universities. Perhaps things loosened up a little after a time, and now evidently there is to be another crackdown.

Nafisi is an honest writer but even she cannot bring herself to say what knowledgeable readers can find between the lines of her book, that the intellectual freedom and liberal education that she had enjoyed before the revolution were due to the shah who, for all his faults and crimes, was a much more liberal ruler than the Islamic theocrats who replaced him while the ecstatic Iranians cheered–a good portion of them anyway. All those young women who were screaming down with the shah in the late 1970s both in Iran and here in the U.S. owed their education to him and to his determination to give women equal rights and to make Iran a modern nation.

Nafisi does relate that as the theocracy closes in on the women of her generation, they marvel to think that their own mothers enjoyed so much more freedom in their younger lives than they do. What a horror. Younger Iranians today wish they could have what their parents threw away.

Another negative example of revolution comes from the John Huston movie We Were Strangers (1949), with John Garfield and Jennifer Jones. It’s not exactly pleasant to watch. There’s a long, awful sequence in which the main characters dig a tunnel through a graveyard and have to claw through decaying bodies in the Cuban heat and, ugh, you really feel it. But the film is most instructive in showing the fatuous ideas about revolution in Cuba held by Hollywood and possibly by many Cubans too. The film shows Cuba living under the corruption and oppression of the Battista regime, and there is a lot of discontent. A small group plots violence in the hope of precipitating a revolution. All they know is that they seek to overthrow the dictator and secure “freedom.” But it doesn’t even occur to these characters that what might follow Battista could actually be worse, and longer-lasting. And it also doesn’t occur to them to plan for anything. They seem to have the idea that freedom is the natural result of overturning a dictator. (Hmmm.) And by film’s end it does appear that a revolution has begun, foreshadowing the horror that we now know was to come.

What a contrast to the American Revolution! The Founders were not naifs just seeking to overthrow kingly rule in the name of abstract ideals, but wise men with clear ideas of the kind of liberal democracy with which they wanted to replace it, along with specific ideas on how to bring that about.

Instead of learning all the flaws and shortcomings of the American Founding, young people should be made aware of what a monumental achievement it was in the history of mankind. And how easily revolutions can go wrong.