I tremble as I write these lines.

For Iran—brave and heroic Iran—trembles on the edge of a horrific bloodbath.

And I have no doubt that the fascist regime of the mullahs will take, if it can, a terrible revenge on the civilians who are defying it.

But the reality is clear.

What has been happening for the past eight days in the cities of ancient Persia is not a revolt. It is a revolution. The difference? Both tiny and immense. A revolt—Iranians have known at least five revolts in the past 15 years—demands reform, the mitigation of misery, negotiation. A revolution expects none of that and does not accommodate, at all, the hated order of things; it does not seek the adjustment of the regime, but its replacement.

Tocqueville: A revolution begins when people cease to imagine the future as an anamorphosis of the past.

Hannah Arendt: An insurrection challenges power; a revolution rejects its very principle and foundation.

This kind of event is rare in human history. But this is where the Iranians now stand. When they say, “Death to Khamenei,” they have crossed that threshold and entered this new era of both hope and tragedy.

Of course, the uprising may still be crushed. Of course, we are speaking of thousands of women and men executed in the secrecy of the electronic night that has fallen over the country. And, of course, we know of revolutions that ended drowned in blood.

But what has been has been. The Iranian women and men who have shouted at the top of their lungs that they want to live, but are ready to die for that, will not turn back. They will no longer accept the offers of negotiations made by cornered ayatollahs.

Those who fail to understand this are grotesque.

To those who still dare to reduce this conflagration to some so-called American Zionist plot—shame on them.

They are already and forever in the dustbins of History.

Small-minded, petty spirits, obsessed with order in all things, are choking: “How can this be a revolution? A revolution requires a leader; it wants to see only one head; and we see no head, except that exile, that ghost of Pahlavi …”

Oh, the fools! Oh, the ignorant! And History, thank heaven, has so much more imagination than they do!

First of all, why not Pahlavi? What do they know about him, other than that he is his father’s son? And what do they know of the mysterious alchemy that arises between a people and a man—any man—once he finds the right words at the right moment and the honorable gestures at a time when honor itself is lacking?

But above all, it does not matter. History does not wait for events to present themselves with a cast list, an organizational chart, and approved spokespersons.

And if revolutions, by definition, have no laws, there is nevertheless this rule: Revolutions choose their faces as they move forward; it is revolutions that create the men called to embody them, not already-named men who lead revolutions.

No one knew Danton or Robespierre on the eve of 1789. No one knew Lenin when he boarded his sealed train in Zurich for Petrograd. And on the eve of Solidarity, Lech Wałęsa was just another worker in Gdańsk, who spoke poorly and prayed a lot and whose most notable feat was climbing over a wall to enter a striking shipyard.

Calm down, good souls who demand a man!

That man will come. And it may very well be a woman.

And now Trump … ah, Trump! How, ask the same people, can Iranian revolutionaries dare to call for help from a scoundrel, a fascist, a certified counterrevolutionary like Trump?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you who never stop giving lessons—this is where your ignorance becomes obscene.

For no one knows whether Trump will respond to this desperate call. It is perfectly possible that, if he were to strike, it would be Venezuela-style—opening the door to “a magnificent deal with a tremendous guy” salvaged, at the last minute, from the ruins of the old regime.

But we have known since Machiavelli that a man without virtue can, unknowingly, perform a virtuous act.

We have known since Hegel that the great turning points of History are often accomplished, as if by ruse, by men who have no idea what they are doing—and even less what they are unleashing.

From some Roman emperor bringing about, without truly intending it, the 2,000-year reign of Christianity, to Napoleon Bonaparte, that tyrant who exported the spirit of 1789 by war—how many men unworthy of what they nevertheless made possible!

If Trump, by caprice, narcissism, or calculation, were to decide to strike the Iranian regime—and if, by striking it, he were to hasten its collapse—he would be absolved of nothing.

But History would have to be seen as it is: ironic, unjust in its instruments, but just in its effects—and one would say of the act that it was great, even if the man was not.