The Butcher of Tehran to Canadians: Shut Up.

I have declined his invitation. So should you.

At the UN General Assembly in New York, Iranian mass murderer Ebrahim Raisi - with an insurrection erupting in 50 cities and towns across his own country at the moment - says Canadians should shut up about his regime’s atrocities. After all, what about all those “mass graves of Indigenous peoples found in Canada” last year? Double standards!

Iranians rise up against an actually-existing theocratic patriarchy.

Right on time, then, here’s me in conversation today with the indispensable Bari Weiss, on that very subject, on her Honestly podcast. Real Story subscribers will recall my Year of The Graves reconstruction for the National Post and the pandemomium the Post piece set off, which ended up proving my whole point.

By the way, if you like my Real Story newsletter you’ll love Bari’s Common Sense. I do. Among other things, it proves there’s intelligent life out there beyond the orbit of the New York Times, where Bari bailed a while back. Here’s her resignation letter.

I’ve been meaning to get around to recommending newsletters I follow. I’ll have a put-your-feet-up newletter for you this weekend that’ll include some of my favorites. Some of the best journalism & analysis of the kind you’ll find at Bari’s place is popping up in journalists’ newsletters, which are increasingly the places where you’ll find stories that should be front page, above the fold, in the maintream press, but aren’t.

If you stumble upon the Real Story newsletter from time to time on the Twitter thing or whatever, for goodness sake, subscribe, and if you subscribe for free, upgrade to a paid sub (no paywell here today though). It’s for all the news I can’t fit into print, and the backstory on the big stories you won’t be reading in the dailies. I’m gone from Macleans magazine, and I’ve managed to work myself into a place where I don’t work for the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen full-time. But holy smokes, like an idiot I’m usually working overtime.

Anyhow, back to Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, a guy directly implicated in the massacre of at least 5,000 political prisoners back in the 1980s. A you might expect, I’m not following Raisi’s advice to keep shtum. Here’s my column in the National Post this week: Mahsa Amini's death epitomizes the depravity of Iran's theocratic regime. What can one say? Say her name: Mahsa Amini. It will not bring her back to life. It will not bring down the regime. It will not abolish the morality police. It will not result in an investigation of any kind, nor bring Mahsa Amini’s killers to justice. Say her name, anyway. Mahsa Amini.

Only last week I was noticing Canada’s strange accomodation of the Khomeinist theocracy’s jetsetting ruling class, which is obscenely consistent with Canada’s accomodation of high-rolling kleptocrats from any number of torture states, I should point out. If you think it’s cool and normal to have an Iranian cabinet minister and the protege of the mass murderer Qassam Soleimani wandering the streets of Vancouver as bold as you please, there’s something wrong with you.

There’s certainly something wrong with Canada. We’re one of the world’s money-laundering capitals, and the problem of “elite capture” is very real in this country. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It’s one of the reasons why it’s become received wisdom in establishment circles that “foreign policy” issues are best left to the “experts.” And that’s why “foreign policy” doesn’t get any attention during federal elections. Also it’s not “foreign” anymore.

This stuff matters. The rapid emergence of globalized free trade has given rise to interlocked supply chains and worldwide digital information and financial networks that have exposed democratic states as never before to elite capture, along with subversion, election interference, disinformation, and dangerous trade dependencies.

Back in 2001, the liberal democracies’ presidents and prime ministers allowed the knife to be put to our own throats by admitting China into the World Trade Organization. How’s that turned out? In Europe, elite-capture degeneracy has worked in much the same way as in Canada, except Europe matters in the world a lot more than Canada does, and Europe’s big problem is Russia.

Specifically, Europe’s existential problem, right now, is the vast blackmail opportunities Vladimir Putin has been delivered owing to Europe’s dependency on Russia’s vast energy reserves. If you don’t think this is a problem, you must not have noticed that Russia was allowed to invade Ukraine and annex Crimea eight years ago, and is now engaged in a scorched-earth total war of conquest aimed at annexing Ukraine in its entirety.

Among other things I’ve been working on for the National Post lately is an in-depth investigation of the global rise of the police state bloc and the eclipse of democracy over the past 17 years (by the Freedom House analytical standards), or more like for the past three decades, according to the University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy Institute.

There’s good news in all this, though. Millions of people have risen up in pro-democracy insurrections all over the world in recent years.

Some of these insurrections we know something about, like the stirring and sensational resistance waged by Hongkongers against Beijing (which Hongkongers lost, owing in no small measure to “elite capture” in the NATO capitals). Others we know about only barely. It’s like listening to crackling short-wave radio broadcasts back in the old days, because uprisings are so often cut off from the outside world by state-controlled internet connectivity and heavy restraints on the news media.

That’s what’s happening right now in Iran, where the regime has started to shut off the internet, as the regime does whenever protests reach a certain crescendo. China has become an Orwellian surveillance state almost wholly cut off from the outside world. Russia isn’t much better, and the Washington Post has just published the results of an investigation of the Kremlin’s surveillance and censorship system, deployed to find and track opponents, squash dissent and suppress independent information even in the country’s furthest reaches.

I’ll be having a lot more about democracy’s revolutionaries in my upcoming extravaganza in the National Post.

Ukraine isn’t just the front line of the moment in the ongoing war between democracy and tyranny. Ukraine is shaping up to be the fight of our lives, the fight that will determine democracy’s fate for generations to come.

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the great hystorian Timothy Snyder. “This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.”

Enough for now. Back on the weekend.