Article by WorldNews.com Correspondent Dallas Darling
For both the United States and Iran, 1979 was a pivotal year. In a speech to the nation, President Jimmy Carter said America faced a moral and spiritual crisis. He claimed good and decent values were being replaced with over-consumption, greed, militarism, and an alienated and highly partisan government. President Carter described it as an "invisible" crisis, one that could be seen in the growing doubt about the meaning of peoples lives and in the loss of unity of purpose for the United States. He believed that if a nation lived only for the moment and disregarded the past and future, that its social and very political fabric would be destroyed, its possibilities robbed. President Carter also warned Americans not to lose faith in hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and God. He believed self-indulgence and materialism should not define human identity and self-worth.
Four months later and shouting "God is Great!", Islamic students in Tehran marched on the U.S. Embassy taking 52 U.S. personnel. Many of the students, along with thousands of others in Iran, had just helped Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, return from exile. They had witnessed three decades of U.S. militarism, including the overthrow of a democratically elected government. Thousands of religious and political opponents-who had opposed a Western-styled government based on self-decadence, a separation of mosque and state, and corporate privatization of resources and services-had been arrested, tortured and killed by the Shah's secret police, trained and armed by the CIA. When the Shah fled to America, Iran sought his extradition. President Carter refused, and it was then that Islamic students stormed the U.S. Embassy.
The prolonged hostage crisis and a failed rescue attempt amplified President Carter's unpopularity. Facing the Energy Crisis, rising unemployment, a stagnant economy, and the loss of a secularized Iran to an Islamic republic, Americans turned to a popular actor and governor of California, Ronald Reagan. With his "Standing Tall" theme and his tough and belligerent archconservative rhetoric, not to mention his good versus evil dualism and his extreme nationalism, Ronald Reagan offered a different kind of patriotism. It consisted in waving a flag and supporting U.S. global militarism. It eventually replaced assembling and petitioning elected officials and promoting human rights. Reaganism also moved America from a national-reflective and national-corrective society to a more global-projective and global-reproachful society, a road traveled by most empires, past and present.
Since 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has never invaded another nation, but something dreadful happened to the United States. In 1980, the U.S. encouraged (and then militarily aided) Iraq's Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. While toppling governments in Grenada and Panama, it fought covert wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Afghanistan killing tens of thousands of innocent people. In 1988, following a guilty verdict of structural terrorism against Nicaragua, the U.S. shot down an Iranian passenger plane killing 293 passengers on board, including 66 children. Since 1991, the U.S. has fought several wars in Asia and the Middle East. It still has thousands of troops and private security forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. And while it appears that "God is still Great!" in Iran's public life, in the U.S. "God is Separated!," even nonexistent. President Reagan's Morning in America, or the-road-most-traveled, turned into a godless nightmare.
More so than oil, perhaps this is the real reason the U.S. has turned into an aggressive and belligerent superpower. Since 1979, the U.S. has traveled down the road of a militant and materialistic, self-indulgent empire. Unlike Iran, which tries to find meaning and security in God, the U.S. finds meaning and security in militarily dominating other nations resources and, of course, their beliefs and governments. Iran's great experiment, or a theos-oriented republic, can be heard in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's announcement that any use or threat to use nuclear weapons is religiously forbidden. In contrast, America's theos-disoriented and alienated society can be witnessed by its nuclear arsenal and in finding loopholes to justify when to use them, as it has in the past. Will the U.S. Empire and its client states ever take the road less traveled, as Iran has done? Will they ever question their own evil, which is usually projected onto other peoples and countries?
In 1979, Iran prophetically perceived that at some point, violent wars cannot be enough to sustain a more peaceful society and world. In an era of technological superiority and post-modern confusion, Iran has attempted the-road-less-traveled by pursuing the meaning and purposes of God. For the United States, though, and in the words of President Carter, the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of American democracy has been lost. The meaning and purposes of God have been commodified by the "corporate moment" and a militarized-industrial complex. While violently repressing and rejecting the past and future, they have also destroyed governments, schools, religious institutions, and even God. Instead of seeking God's likeness, truthfulness, purity, mercy, and forgiveness, the U.S. is trying to remake the world.
Is this the real reason the U.S. is at war with itself, with much of the world, and with Iran? Whereas Iran has chosen to pursue a more sanctified republic in which God, community, faith in the future, a belief in eternal consequences, and even government is still considered sacred, the U.S. has embarked upon an extremely secular and dangerous path in which very few things are holy and where depravity and confusion reigns supreme. For unholy empires that usurp the meaning and purposes of God, and for immoral superpowers that commercialize and commodify values, ideas and life itself, things fall apart and the center cannot hold. In the epochal battles over meaning, 1979 and the U.S. and Iran's the-road-less-traveled is just another chapter.
Dallas Darling
World News
