It has been claimed that exposure to Western culture in the communication age is the thing most feared by the ruling classes, which in most cases includes the clerics and is at the heart of the anti-Western sentiment.
It is interesting that in Iran there is a student movement that is pro-US. One can only speculate but that group is the one that would be most exposed to Western culture and it's philosophical ideas, not only through the electronic media but also through it's literature. That is probably the best hope for change. Of course we could be sure that the freedoms and movements in the West, like radical feminism, may be just too heady a mix, even for the most enthusiastic of pro-Westerners in those closed cultures. (As it is indeed for some of us).
The article reinforces the feeling that a move to democracy by the "Patriarchal" societies, if there is to be one, will be a generational progression. In the meantime a benign dictatorship may be the best that can be expected.
