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Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

iranintl.com

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Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#181
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to. The point i was responding to was whether such protests [for Iranians] are pointless, and i asserted there can certainly be a point to them. Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests becau…

> That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible. > If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights? I don't really see how you reached that conclusion from the quote. He's not saying it would be inconvenient, he's saying such an action could l…

Well to take it literally the quote is "policies I don’t agree with".

It raises the question, is it really because he cares about the people of Iran, or is it because he has preconcieved notions of what policies he likes and dislikes and is trying to post hoc justify his views.

It seems a really hard position to justify on the facts. The death toll from these protests has already surpassed most armed conflicts. And the human rights abuses are hardly limited to just the deaths. I think at some point if you just stand around and do nothing while gross violations occur, you become complicit.

Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#183
post #54

The source (Iran International) is backed by Saudi money and has a bias to dunk on Iran. That said, I'm sure the death count numbers from the Rasht Massacre are staggeringly higher than the initial tallies of 2-5k.

It is a source run by expatriate Iranians of the diaspora.. the fact that so many people just discount their point of view it's pretty frustrating. If you speak to Iranians that you work with it's pretty illuminating

The “Iranians that you work with” in the west are highly self-selecting. They’re like Cubans in Florida or Vietnamese—people who fled in the aftermath of the revolution and are extremely antagonistic towards the regime. My family left Bangladesh the year after the dictator made Islam the official religion. My dad is apoplectic about the Islamist parties being unbanned recently after the government was overthrown. By contrast many of my extended family, who came much later for economic reasons, are happy about that. The people who disliked the Islamization of the country and had the financial means to do so left while the people who were fine with it stayed.

My daughter’s hair stylist is Iranian (she was an accountant in old country). When Jimmy Carter’s wife died, she said “I’m happy she’s dead.” I’ve never seen anyone else say a negative thing about the Carters personally. Even die hard Republicans who think he was a weak President don’t hate him as a person. But this is not an uncommon sentiment among the Iranian diaspora.

Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a ton of philosophy and something I don't really understand is that one nation killing another is more immoral than when a nation does this to their own domestic population. Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct. But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much. What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence…

Historically there was sometimes the idea that citizens are the property of the sovereign to use or dispose of as he sees fit. A lot of historical international law had the view that states have absolute feeedom to conduct their internal affairs however they saw fit. Luckily we have largely moved past that view. I think as a purely practical matter, moral outrage is shaped by who controls the information space. If yo…

>Luckily we have largely moved past that view.

Have we? I don't think the UN is going to invade Iran over this, especially after it went so well the last time with the US. And sanctions for Iran are already at the "you don't get anything" level, i don't think they can be ramped up any more. Morally sure, people now believe this is wrong while in the distant past they may have not cared, but practically not much has changed. The best we can hope for is an organized resistance that other large nations can funnel money and arms to.

Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#187

How is this possible without explosives? Even with vehicle mounted machine guns it seems like a crazy high number. Did the protestors get boxed in somehow? And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.

The IRGC[0] and Basij[1] are not small organizations, deliberately targeting large crowds of unarmed civilians with automatic weapons will create massive casualties in a very short period of time, no explosives needed.

> Did the protestors get boxed in somehow?

That did also happen.[2]

> And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.

The IRGC's primary purpose is to protect the regime, I'm sure they would have plans in place for suppressing protests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/25/ira...

Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#189
post #21

This is certainly the end of peaceful Iranian protests. Whether it leads to a violent revolution or a static police state like North Korea remains to be seen.

Seems the regime is OK shooting their way out of this problem. How big are these protests? 30K isn't exactly a small number of protestors.

> How big are these protests?

Very likely in the millions.

Re: Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

#190

hm, I think we should re-evaluate sanctioning or civilian pressure campaigns, since the guise is for them to coax or turn on the government for regime change, but the government can just hire mercenaries from outside the country. don't know a solution but this one isn't it

How about plain civil disobedience? Like just stop working? It would need to get pretty extreme before the government had the audacity (and even capacity) to actually track you down to your home and arrest (or kill) you. Although this kind of coordination might be difficult with government control of communication media.

Part of the motivation for these protests was the inflation making it hard to afford everyday living. Not working means even less money.
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