Valuable freedom

Back home in Iran during the struggle between hardliners and reformists, since 1997 – after electing a reformist president – there were lots of deep discussions in dozens of social newspapers, that really helped my generations to feel the importance and value of freedom of speech, press, ideology, and more general information.

The first months that I arrived in the US, I was surprised about the low respect of the people for this valuable thing that freely was out there. It wasn’t what I had expected to see at all. I was telling myself that it might be because this generation have not fought to gain it, so they don’t know how valuable it is.

After seeing the support of lots of people about the restricted laws under the post-9/11 condition, I became certain that again security is becoming a reason to kill freedom. A very common method, that hardliners in Iran were reasoning about their method too. I was astonishingly looking into so much similarities between so-called hardliners (back home), and people in government here who were cause of those laws. Here are some examples:

1- Both groups claim to be so religious, to come from God, to have special mission in the world. Similarities between them could clearly be seen in their slogans, and speeches.

2- Both groups do not believe in freedom of information, and prefer to prevent free flow of information.

3- Both groups are alive by expressing their hate to their enemies, not by their own characters.

4- Both groups believe into black/white world, true/false system, 0/1 logic. They can not think about anything somewhat right, somewhat wrong.

5- Both groups would like to fool superficial and/or illogical people by showing themselves as religious people, and misuse their support.

6- Both groups believe in a focused and controlled governments.

7- Both groups do not have major support of academic people of their societies.

8- Both groups’ supporters are among small towns and/or villages, and their opponents are among academic and educated people mostly living in big cities.

9- Both groups do not care to do any cheating or anything to maintain the power, although claim to be so religious. But in practice, they use religion just to fool religious people.

10- Both groups claim that security is so low, and they need to decrease freedom in order to increase security. …..

Isn’t that strange? Could you believe such similarities?