Do you remember the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s *1984*?
The task of the Ministry of Truth was to ensure that one and only one version of a way of life and thought existed within society: to ensure that everyone believed the same thing, accepted the same way of thinking and adopted prescribed behaviour aligned with the truth produced by governing power.

It does not matter whether you live in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, North Korea, Taliban Afghanistan or present-day Iran. In all these societies one thing is certain: ideology will concern itself with every part of your life.

Ideologies are fundamentally always engaged in producing one way of life, one type of human being, one discourse and one form of behaviour. Ideology wants your children to enter a process of standardisation from their earliest years. Standardisation is the process of producing cogs that turn without friction inside the machinery of ideology.

Cogs such as those directors-general and public-relations officials in ministries who dismiss people such as #Sadaf_Safarzadeh, a person described here as loving children, because she is not the standardised version, and replace her with a clerical brother who has been standardised.

Ideology loves to fill your children’s minds with its own voice so that they will never again need to think in life. It gives your children a standardised ideological identity so that they no longer need either self-awareness or human individuality. It fills them with itself in order to make certain they remain forever empty and hollow. Ideology gives you itself so that you may become nothing else.

It does not matter how calm and happy these students are beside their teacher, nor that a close emotional relationship and trust between teacher and students is among the most important factors sustaining learning. The only thing that matters to ideology’s little brothers is that this teacher and these students have not been standardised according to the obsolete and petrified operating system of their minds.

In my view, this single video and this single piece of news are enough to show why we cannot surrender our land, our children and future generations to such madness—and why, in every corner of this land, tens of thousands of people rise each day, in whatever ways they can, in defence of the realm of woman, life and freedom.

Aydin Areta