The State Department released a video earlier this month showcasing the rights Iranians enjoyed before a radical Islamist dictatorship came to power in 1979. Many Iranians and Iranian Americans celebrated the video on social media, but there was also a backlash from critics who condemned the video for “whitewashing the human rights record of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,” Iran’s prerevolutionary monarch. The legacy of the shah is destined to remain controversial, yet the critics miss the point: The State Department is reaching out effectively to millions of Iranians struggling for freedom after 40 years of the Islamic Republic’s brutal and tyrannical rule.

As a crashing economy and mass protests weaken the clerical regime, Iranians struggling for a better future take a measure of comfort and even inspiration from nostalgic memories of the better lives they or their parents had before 1979. Yet acknowledging the past is very different from wishing to repeat it.