A brave martyr for Democracy, not religious totalitarianism

A friend alerted me to this MEMRI post publishing a letter from an imprisoned Iranian dissident. This is a prisoner of the same type of ideologues who just blew up dozens of Iraqi children and who have declared war generally on the Western world. It is clear that, behind their evil ideology, they are a Big Brother organization, fully carrying out the destructive Group Think and Newspeak George Orwell envisioned when he wrote 1984, a book about the complete triump of totalitarian ideology. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

"Lying has become a virtue among the totalitarian regimes, while for ordinary people it is a sin. The liars falsely claim that there are no political prisoners [in Iran] and that there is no solitary confinement. [2] Moreover, they insist that there are no hunger strikes in Iran's prisons, and that our prisons have turned into hotels. They think they can alter reality by changing words and their meaning. That is why they call the solitary confinement cells 'the special ward,' claiming that the problem has been completely resolved. They are known as 'liars' and as 'Islamic clerics'... and they deny imprisoning people for their opinions [and claim] that the detainees are suffering because of their own character flaw. "The entire world knows of hundreds who have been incarcerated in Iran's prisons in recent years merely because they had different thoughts. Nevertheless, the liars deny that there are prisoners of conscience in the Islamic Republic. Tehran's Islamic Prosecutor [Saeed Mortazavi] fabricated a few stories about the circumstances of my arrest. Once he made up [the story] that I was in solitary because I began a hunger strike, and the next day he denied I was on a hunger strike, and falsely claimed that I was in solitary to teach me a lesson. Recently he has been telling various stories that I am in solitary because I suffer from mental problems, and require medical supervision. "What does this medical supervision consist of? The person is imprisoned in a dark unventilated dungeon, and is denied visits even if he is in need of medical supervision. In addition, he is prevented from reading newspapers or using the phone, and is denied the 20-minute period in the sun and fresh air given to every [other] convict. "The Islamic prosecutor said he wanted to punish me until I have 'sobered up and understood the error of my ways and recanted, just like others in the Islamic prisons.'"

By the way, Tony Blair, unexpectedly, since he has previously been one of the worst panderers to the Islamists within his country, despite his heroic stance on the Iraqi War, seems vaguely to be grasping that the religion is in thrall to a violent totalitarianism. In a speech he gave today, and which I heard quoted on NPR (although I can't find a reference to it right now in the internet), he was able to say that the bombings were rooted in Islam, to the extent that they represented a perversion of Islamic doctrine. Thus, while he still repeated the cant "Islam -- religion of peace" he went the next step and acknowledged that there is a violent strain of Islam that has nothing to do with peace, and everything to do with worldwide death and destruction.