I can still feel the shock that jolted me to my all-too-human core when I learned for the first time that my country, The United States of America, has acted in grievously antidemocratic ways. It was mid-November 1979. I was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). I sat reading in a library.
Days earlier, Iranian revolutionaries had overrun the United States embassy in Teheran. Fifty-three Americans were being held hostage inside. National and international news media focused upon masses of angry Iranians assembled in their nation’s capitol expressing an all-consuming rage against my country. Americans had responded in kind. Middle Eastern Americans and Middle Eastern students attending colleges in the United States, including my own, were attacked physically and verbally in the days and weeks following the audacious Iranian action.
A few months before, I had taken to heart the libertarian philosophy: Every person has the right to lead the life they choose so long as they do not infringe upon the same right of others. Libertarianism reminded me of the Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and Love thy neighbor as you would love thyself rules of conduct that I had come to accept during my childhood. (I would soon realize libertarianism’s primary deficiency—a lack of any social consciousness other than an ideological devotion to unfettered capitalism.) So I started a chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society at UCSB shortly after the 1979 academic year had begun. From a folding table set up in front of the school’s student union center, I engaged my fellow academics in conversations about our country and the world.
By mid-November student groups—my own included--began to organize public debates and demonstrations on campus in response to the Iranian seizure. I thought it prudent to learn more about my country’s history of relations with Iran before I dared to speak publicly on the subject. So I began to study.
I came across a brief history of U.S.-Iran relations--in Time Magazine, I believe. I read that in 1954, my country had participated in a military coup in Iran that had successfully overthrown Mohammed Mossadeq, the country’s democratically elected president.
My country? I remember asking myself after the shock of this revelation jerked me into an upright position. The United States of America, the leader of the Free World, played a role in the overthrow of another democratically elected government? Wasn’t that, I sputtered internally, . . . impossible?
Sadly, I learned that it was not. That same Time article may also have
mentioned The United States’ role in the overthrow of democratically-elected
Guatemala President Jacobo Arbenz in 1955, one year after the coup in Teheran.
I sat immobilized, pondering the implications of this discovery. After three decades of life under a U.S.-backed “benevolent” dictatorship, the Iranian people had finally commanded the attention of the American public. Iranians were now demanding that The United States of America answer for the crime against democracy that it had committed in their country a quarter of a century earlier.
If I or any other American had lived in the U.S. in the 1950s, and Iran had helped to overthrow our government, how would we hope to respond—as fighters for our own democracy or as enablers of the corruption? I knew then that if I began to make excuses for my country’s tragic misconduct, I would no longer be able to espouse in good faith the human principle of democracy to myself or to a single other human being.
So what was I, an idealistic and patriotic American citizen, to do? I dropped out of school, moved to Washington, D.C., and became a professional political activist. I tried to change my country’s misbegotten ways with every nonviolent resource I could muster.
As the Twentieth Christian Century has transitioned into the Twenty First, I have watched the people of my country continue to contribute to humanity’s suffering to an apocalyptic degree. Such a democracy is a disgrace to its good name. The Age of Antidemocracy in The United States of America must come to a long overdue and yet well-considered end.
How best to liberate the American people from the fear and loathing of other human beings that have been instilled in us by our own imperfect society? How best to awaken the spirit of humanity in a people seemingly democratic by virtue of their national form of government only? Such questions have troubled me throughout my adult life.
Although I left the world of political activism long ago, I have continued to research the past and present conduct of my country. The result of such labor has been, at times, altogether too bitter. But my resolve to accept responsibility for all of my country’s actions, and my desire to change those with which I disagree, has never wavered.
