<SAVAK may have been brutal in its treatment of fundamentalist extremists - but not nearly as brutal as the extremists were when they seized power.

So it's OK merely to break a man's arms rather than his neck? Please.

The Shah seems to have started out all right, but years of government corruption took its toll on the monarchy's popular support. No longer sure of his people's allegiance to his regime, he fell back on the most repulsive weapon of dictatorships everywhere.

What makes you think that the extremists would have seized power if the Shah's government had not undermined its own authority by using brutality against its dissident citizens? Why do you claim that SAVAK was only deployed against fundamentalist extremists?

And suppose our government had a secret police that kidnapped and tortured fundamentalists in this country. Would that be bad because our fundamentalists are primarily Christian rather than Muslim (or Jewish, for that matter)? It's true: the First will be the First To Go.

Kidnapping, torture and murder are not legitimate means of promoting a political agenda featuring adversarial debate and free speech. That is not only necessary for Western democracy, but for a vigorous scientific community as well.

Ask Galileo. I'm sure you knew him.

Time travellers and those with past lives hardly ever grew up as serfs.

Peter the Great was a remarkable man for his time. In his travels, he met the child King Louis XV of France. You remember him: after he grew up, he observed, "Après moi, le déluge." Après him, also, the American and French Revolutions. Russia finally made it to the party in 1917 for about half an hour. That's because the great reform Tsars -- Peter, Catherine, even Alexander -- were interested in making the Russian state a Western military and economic power, not in encouraging the liberties that are the true underpinnings of Western progress.

You want democracy? You want freedom? You want an open society? Peter the Great wouldn't like that. Peter the Great crushed rebels like elephants crush peanuts. Peter the Great executed his own son. Peter the Great would be a disastrous anachronism in a Western democracy, but you're right: in a world of absolute dictatorship, he would fit right in.

As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

What kind of people do you want us to become? What difference will it make if we "win", only to discover that we have done so by turning into what we thought we were fighting against?

You horrify me, you know that? Why don't you go talk to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to discover the brave new world you advocate?

Still shuddering--
Mary Anne