The Perils of Ideology

Posted on January 10, 2004 in Crosstalk Social Justice

Yule reprints a letter from the Victoria, BC, Persian community blaming the recent fatalities in the Iranian earthquake on the Islamic Government of Iran:

If the Mullahs had not grossly embezzled and mismanaged the economy to a point where people who have scarcely enough to eat could afford proper shelter, they would not die by the thousands at the slightest tremor.


If the Theocracy of the Ayatollahs had spent the amount of time, energy, and money in the last 25 years on enforcing building codes that it has on enforcing the strict dress code for Islamic women, so many would not have died.


If the government and its public servants were not so corrupt, if they had not accepted bribes to wave the very few building codes there are, this would not have happened. This, however, is still nothing compared to the catastrophe that is waiting to happen when a similar quake hits Tehran.

Yule begins and ends her commentary briefly: “Rigid ideology exacts its toll in every situation; are “we” in “the west” immune?”

We might draw these parallels in the United States:

• If the Bush government had not grossly embezzled and mismanaged the economy, we would not be leaving our children and grandchildren a humongous debt to pay off;
• If the Bush government had spent the amount of time, energy, and money it wasted pursuing the War on Drugs instead of listening to the Clinton administration’s warnings about Osama Bin Laden, the World Trade Center would still be standing today and our soldiers would not be dying in foreign debacles;
• If the government and its corporate cronies were not so corrupt, we would not be seeing jobs being lost overseas and the Dollar being replaced by the Euro.

Rigid ideology has seized the day in the United States. Our sacred cows are the free market, deregulation, right to work laws, and a military more than capable of erasing the earth’s peoples several times over. Jingoism and fear (plus probably more than a little ballot box stuffing) lead Americans to endorse programs of mass destruction against unarmed people, to allow those who draw the most from the economy without giving back to it the privilege (it is not a right) to hold more money than they need, to allow our public institutions — especially our schools — to decline, to sell off our public lands and forests, and to do nothing about corporate megathieves who have left tens of thousands of employees without jobs and investors with worthless stock portfolios. This list is not comprehensive or complete. What it reflects are foolhardy actions whose only justification is an ideology based on the polarization of the Judeo-Christian values that we claim as a basis for our morality and our laws. Our nation is dying: what are a People to do when they have lost control of their government?

I advise thoughtful participation in the free voting process and, if thwarted by corruption in that, thoughtful, nonviolent noncooperation.