Diaspora or Something Much Deeper

For 30 years we Iranians have abandoned our motherland in search of freedom and a better life for our families and have settled in all 4 corners of the globe. There are Iranians now in places where most had not even heard of before.>Obviously, religious minorities have been affected the most under the brutal regime of the clergy in Iran. So, it is no surprise that in the beginning the mass exodus following the 1979 so-called-revolution involved a lot of these minorities. It also involved a (thin) layer of society that was targeted by the theocracy because of direct or indirect involvement with the Shah’s regime. There were some who knew better and left early enough to escape the wrath of mullahs and their gallows. I know first hand that some folks in the previous establishment had knowledge of the Shah’s regime falling, and therefore left the country with their bank accounts way in advance of the revolution. Next was a somewhat thicker layer of the Iranian society that did not agree with the regime’s doctrine and did not want to relinquish their basic rights as human beings by subjecting themselves and their families to backward, fascist 7th century religious laws that were forced upon their culture and people many centuries ago. This included people like myself, students who had left the country prior to 1979, but felt like an outsider with the new regime and chose not to return to their motherland.

So, they left, or never returned.

None of this is news, I know. What puzzles me is that all of us (including myself) have chosen to give up our country, to simply offer her to these rapists and anti nationalist elements to do with her as they wish. And “as the wish” is what they have done. We’ve said “Here, I give up, take this land – I am leaving, you can have it all to yourself and your cronies”. I am not a historian, but to my knowledge nowhere in the Persian History has this happened before and to this scale. The trouble is while our country continues to produce young talents in various areas of economy and science; the rate of this production is far lower than one would need to elevate ones country to a level that can sustain itself once the oil wealth is gone. Our country needs young energetic secular blood to ensure her existence after we have extracted the last drop of oil from our oil reserves so that we do not become another Afghanistan. We can only do this by diversifying various industries so our dependence on oil revenues is less and less as the time goes by. We should also strengthen the little non-oil based industry we have to help the effort. We are doing neither.

As an example, look no further than places like Dubai true that UAE’s main wealth is oil, but they are diversifying. In 30 plus years they have done to a piece of desert what we could have done to our beautiful country had our government been made of patriotic elements instead of the current traitors. Look at an even more extreme example: Saudi Arabia as they diversify their industries using their oil wealth. They are buying different companies and industrial complexes all over the world as I write this piece. Here’s a totalitarian regime that, even though it practices brutal oppressive governance, their sense of patriotism is not clouded by their self-imposed agenda of putting religion in front of country, to export their brand of religion elsewhere, to “assist” those who do not even belong to their gene pool or culture. While Saudis repressive practices limit freedom and basic human rights, (after all it is their culture and religion that endorses these practices accepted by most of their population) their allegiances are still to their country as they strive to better their position in the world, build partnership instead of foes, for the present and the future.

>So, how do you destroy a nation, a culture and its hope for the future?

Follow the “Iran” model!

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Some numbers to review:

By most estimates, between two and three million Iranians live in North America, Europe, Persian Gulf States, Turkey and Australia (2008). A great majority of them left Iran after the revolution.

Their combined net worth is $1.3 trillion (2006 est.) In 2000, the Iran Press Service reported that Iranian expatriates had invested between $200 and $400 billion in the United States, Europe, and China, but almost nothing in Iran. In Dubai, Iranian expatriates have invested an estimated $200 billion (2006). Migrant Iranian workers abroad remitted less than two billion dollars home in 2006.

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