In today's Australian David Burchell highlights the fate of Mohammad Mehdi Asghari:
[I]t seems to have fallen to the mild-mannered Asghari to be the conduit through which Iranians discovered that the national elections purportedly held on June 12 had been secretly aborted, and replaced by another ballot carried out on a computer network run out of the Interior Ministry.
He died a month ago, 'in mysterious circumstances'. Burchell takes Asghari as representative of a cohort of young citizens in countries without a meaningful democracy who are putting many Westerners to shame:
While we've watched and bitten our tongues, it seems, it's been left to young Iranians such as Asghari - and their embattled counterparts in China, Cuba and elsewhere - to become the new global face of what used to be called Western liberal-democratic values... Perhaps this new generation of young global citizens of the non-West - not having yet passed through that process of disenchantment and ennui that nowadays afflicts the citizens of the actual West - has become a kind of virtual West, holding up the values we still mutter about under our breath, but seem to have become too timid to say out loud, whether to Beijing or to Tehran.
The contrast is overdrawn; in every democracy there is a widespread and genuine attachment to liberal-democratic values. But the efforts of people fighting for these values in the countries where they are denied are of the first importance and do merit admiration, gratitude and support. (See also this report.) (Thanks: JN.)