Watching the footage of the latest pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran, I meditated on the nature of bravery.

Despite the shootings, show trials, the two hundred who remain behind bars, the beatings, rapes, “ring leaders” sentenced to death, some brave souls continue to demonstrate.

The footage shown on the BBC was smuggled out – there’s a media blackout now – although in the butterfly-minded West, interest has largely waned.

Dictators learn the lessons of history too – time and greed forgive all post-Tiananmen – and curiously the very wealth of information today serves to drown out clarity and concern: there is always another cause, another point of view, it seems, to distract us.

And don’t forget evil too can be modern: Italian fascism gave birth to its own art form, futurism. Joseph Goebbels was the first proper spin doctor, combining the insights of Machiavelli with the dawn of the mass media:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And it is precisely this principal Iran’s Islamist government practices today on the streets of Tehran. Truth must be suppressed, whatever the cost.

So evil can be, often is, cutting-edge. Yet modernity itself is something of an illusion.

As John Gray remarks: Human knowledge grows, but the human animal stays much the same.

This is the problem with Jacobinism, Fascism, Bolshevism, Maoism, Neo-Conservatism, Islamism – all Utopian creeds that seek to impose heaven here on earth.

When Man assumes the role of God, he builds little more than a pile of corpses to the sky.

Yet despite all the odds, the protestors in Iran persevere.

Now, as a former journalist and some-time spin doctor myself, I suppose you could say I’m a pretty cynical person, although I prefer to call it “realistic”. So realistic in fact I have got in to trouble at more than one dinner party for suggesting those pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen were not only pro-democracy but as largely middle class students the very people who would benefit from an end to (the then) communist regime.

And self-interest I suppose could also be said to figure in the motivations of Iran’s Green Movement. But what struck me about the latest protests in Iran was that they now had next to no hope of success. The Tiananmen protestors believed they were riding a wave of reform and when the crack-down came it was unexpected. The one’s in Tehran can be under no such illusion – the regime is firmly in place.

All the protestors can hope for at present is that they are not injured, imprisoned, raped or murdered. The West will not come to their rescue.

So to still protest is true bravery in my book, a kind of compulsion to act in truth despite the likely consequences.

Truth – an eternal value that transcends human frailty. It is not negotiable, self-interested, a matter of opinion: argument avoids the firing squad.

To risk all for the truth is something like an act of faith.

Which is precisely what the men who claim to speak for God are so afraid of.