2008-07-31 - 12:11 p.m.
If it were not for the fact that I was born in Iran, my point of view would be different. I would be confused, I would be frustrated and I would be nervous and angry. At Iran. The way many people in the world are, at the moment, with regards to the impasse about Iran's international relations policies. But I was born in Iran. I share an ancestry with the people who live there and people from there. There is a plight upon the people of Iran, within and without its borders. That plight is their government.
As a people, Iranians, all of the various ethnic factions, are proud of their heritage. They hold their heads up high and rely on their history, full of mighty kings, brilliant scholars, venerable artists and righteous citizens, to carry them on into future histories. The people of Iran make it what it truly is, a remarkable and wonderfully prodigious civilization.
The government of Iran, however, has betrayed its people. I am of the opinion that a modern government must be OF the people and FOR the people. The current government of Iran is neither of these things. They are not OF the people: They are exclusionists, in that they pare off those who wish to participate in the government but who do not share the theological ideologies. And they are not FOR the people: They are usurpers of power, in that whence in their high offices, they reap the fruits of the dominion of Iran (people and resources) without bestowing them to the benefaction of all of the citizenry. Furthermore, the seclusion of those in high office has given them a false sense of righteousness, and a mystical nature in their own beliefs, to the point of appointing divine providence upon every single thing that they do and say, and thus endangering the lives of their citizens from their international exclusionism, and oft-inflammatory tactics.
In that light, I put forth my plea to the world, that although it may seem strange that the government of Iran is abrasive to the point of hostility, the government of Iran is not actually IRAN. The meaning of the word is so much more about the people and the land. The government and the reality of what Iran truly is, cannot be compared.
We are all, as human beings, living in a time when the methods of making a good life for ourselves is no longer the same as in our recent memories. The population boom of the 19th and 20th centuries has been largely due to the abundance of usable energy and innovations in using that energy. That energy resource is on the cusp of diminishing, just as this huge and ever-growing planetary population is catching up with its wonderful uses. Iran is not immune from this phenomenon. Its people wish to survive, just like everyone else on Earth. Their situation is complicated in that they are sitting upon the resources that has fueled the world: oil.
As such, we (American citizens and other people of Western nationalites hostile to the Iranian government) must pose the question to ourselves (because we have turned a deaf ear to outsiders who have posed it): are we willing to trade in our civility, to sell our souls and revert to our barbarian ancestry and subvert other groups of people and to force them to bequeath to us their resources, so that we can maintain our way of life at the expense of their destitution? In our heart of hearts, we must admit that that is what the world is coming to. They (the Iranians) have the source of energy we need. The world is demanding more of it for everybody. We, Americans, are demanding it for ourselves. And we are willing to obfuscate the facts, to obfuscate our actual intentions, and to go there and take it for ourselves because we believe our group of people deserves it more than the other peoples of the world.
Even a slight change in the posture of American economic might can send the productivity of our Western industries into a downward spiral, and instead of investing in other ways of bolstering these industries, and substituting something other than oil to keep these industries growing, we choose to cheaply sell off our ideals of peace and democracy, and to use our military might to take what we need by force.
We use the excuse of a trecherous Iranian government - and all that it stands for that clashes with our American "ideals": religion, human rights, creed, etc. - as reason for helping to "free" the people of Iran from the oppression of their government. If it were not for the simplicity of the people who hear, reciprocate and endorse it, the farcical nature of this argument would be laughable, and very easily disspelled.
Unfortunately, the might of the modern Western government, in collaboration with supporting institutions and entities such as the education sector, the media, the financial powers and the military, has an incredibly devious hold on the average Western mind, even more so than the Iranian government has managed to gather over the minds of its citizenry. With this power, the governments hostile to Iran have convinced their populations that such a war to change the ideologies of "those" people over "there" is absolutely necessary.
In other words, we are so unwilling to risk our own necks, to tighten our own belts, make the heavy investments and changes and especially sacrifices necessary for our perpetual survival, that we can call upon the faculties of war and destruction to placate our daily addiction needs for an oil fix.
To be sure, the Iranian government is by no means innocent of anything. They do not represent or protect their people. They do practice ideological manipulation and strong-arm tactics to control their own people. They are deceptive in relating to other governments of the world. This is very much in line with what all of the other governments of the world do with relation to their own people, and with one another.
However, any attempt to forcibly undermine this stability would necessarily put the people of Iran, the ACTUAL Iran, in harm's way. Whether at the hands of the Iranian government or the coalition of foreign militaries that attack, innocent Iranians would die. And with their willingness to be a proud people, defending their land from encroachment and each other from peril, Iranians would unite to resist the onslaught. Hence, a very large proportion of Iranians would die. This would be a very poor exchange, indeed. Any attempted justification for this payment for the idealized gains would be reprehensible. Never, ever, would the cost of so many lives be worth the economic gain of so few. It would be akin to butchering cattle for meat. And if our "civilization" is willing to stoop to that level, we would be hard-pressed to call ourselves a "civilization" ever again.
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