The Age of Useful Idiots Every revolution promises justice; almost none deliver it. And when religious or ideological fundamentalists take over, the outcome is always worse than the problem they claimed to solve. Iran in 1979 was the textbook case. The Shah’s regime was corrupt and repressive - but within a year of his fall, the new Islamist rulers had executed thousands, banned dissent, and erased women’s rights. The liberals, feminists, and leftists who had joined the revolution were the first to hang. Afghanistan followed the same path. In the 1980s, the mujahideen were romanticized as freedom fighters against Soviet occupation. Two decades later, those same networks birthed the Taliban - turning schools into indoctrination centers, destroying cultural heritage, and enslaving half the population under “piety", and turned that revolution into a medieval nightmare. The Soviet Union claimed to liberate workers from inequality. It delivered censorship, secret police, and breadlines stretching for blocks - a country that could send rockets into space but couldn’t keep grocery shelves stocked. Communist China’s Cultural Revolution killed millions in the name of equality. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge “re-educated” an entire population into starvation. Syria’s civil war began with calls for democracy; it descended into a proxy war dominated by jihadist factions. Secular activists were silenced or killed by both sides. Minorities are now being massacred by Islamists. The pattern repeats because it’s structural: the most ruthless, disciplined faction always wins - and it’s never the one that believes in freedom. That’s why Western flirtation with extremist movements under the banner of “resistance” is more than naïve - it’s suicidal. The useful idealists who believe they’re fighting oppression, imperialism, or capitalism end up empowering Islamist imperialism - regimes that would silence their voices, censor their art, collapse their economies, threaten their food security, and their very existence, and ultimately oppress them far more brutally than anything they claimed to resist. The only equality such systems ever achieve is shared poverty and fear. History’s verdict is cruelly consistent: when fundamentalists take power, they don’t fix the old order - they erase it and everything that made opposition possible. Freedom isn’t destroyed by evil alone; it dies when good intentions start making excuses for it.