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Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

bbc.com

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Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#271

Post by apical_dendrite »

pessimizer wrote: post #233
don_esteban wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read a bit more about the fall of shah in Iran. At that time, there were two strong anti-shah factions in Iran. Islamists and communists. Guess which one was helped by USA? :-)

> Islamists and communists. Guess which one was helped by USA? :-) Neither was helped by the USA. The Shah was helped by the USA. What the USA did is the same thing it does in all of the Islamic dictatorships that it props up - it used its intelligence and its cash to help its dictator exterminate all of his secular opposition. Actually kill. What was left was religious fundamentalist opposition that it couldn't touc…

There's some truth to what you're saying, but it's a huge exaggeration. It's absolutely incorrect to say that the US helped the Shah kill all of his secular political opponents. It's generally true that SAVAK had neutered the communist opposition, but there were many secular opponents of the Shah who contributed to the Iranian Revolution. Many of them had been imprisoned at various points, but not killed. Take Shapour Bakhtiar or Mehdi Bazargan for example. There were many, many secular people or moderate Islamists who opposed the Shah during the Iranian Revolution.

What happened is that Khomeini consolidated power after the revolution and eliminated these people.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#272

Post by roysting »

Betelbuddy wrote: post #30

I cant imagine the courage that is needed to take part in these protests. Most here, the most revolutionary act they will ever participate on in their life, is criticizing their boss choice of Azure as cloud provider...

[flagged]

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#273

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Rover222 wrote: post #193
dataflow wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine > I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas activist Palestine ≠ Hamas Pro-Palestinian ≠ Pro-Hamas If you genuinely don't believe a significant number of people support the former but not the latter, I... don't even know what to tell you. It certainly says a lot that you can neither distinguish these two nor believe anyone else sees a distinction. >…

[flagged]

> Wearing the kaffiyeh is explicitly pro-Hamas

One, is it actually? (EDIT: I don't think it is [1]. This seems to be another case where American pro-Palestinian activist culture may be getting confused with actual Palestinian culture.)

Two, I'm going to be almost everyone in America wearing one doesn't know that. (We're not the most internationally-literate population. I can't even begin to imagine what fraction of #StopKony posters in the early 2010s could have placed Uganda on a map.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_keffiyeh#Appropria...

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#274

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#275

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

“To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast…

And if the state is slow to overreact the puppeteers that stage the thing will make sure the overreaction happens on time: they will try to provoke backfire or they just plain kill some protesters themselves and make it look as if the state was involved.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#276

Post by [deleted] »

fortzi wrote: post #230
pessimizer wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you want you elected leaders to save Palestinians I don't want that. I want them to stop paying Israelis with our money to kill Palestinians. If they want to do atrocities, they can do it on their own dime.

Sorry, but it sounds crazy to me, I don’t know what to make of that. Do you care about those people or not? Sorry, unless I’m missing something, what you said just sounds like a cop out.

[deleted]

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#277

Post by [deleted] »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #219
SilverElfin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the state’s supporters were actually very large in number and the dominant force in Iran. After all past protests, like about the woman who was disappeared and killed, were smaller and were suppressed quickly. What changed? Is it demographics - like are there larger numbers of young people who aren’t for a theocracy?

>What changed? Is it demographics - like are there larger numbers of young people who aren’t for a theocracy? Some internal factor opaque to western media. Their economy's in the shitter, perhaps. Or the so-called water shortage. Though what it could be exactly, that western intelligence wouldn't be willing to trumpet from the mountaintops, I could not say.

[deleted]

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#278

Post by pphysch »

fortzi wrote: post #188
pphysch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Iran is not an adversary of Israel, as much as the IRGC is.

Are Iranians supposed to believe that after Israel destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza? Insulting. The IRGC is under every brick and pebble.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#279

Post by martin-t »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #242
martin-t wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad. It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states. Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not mo…

> Don't say sadly...It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad It's not just a tool, it's also a human action. An action that exacts consequences on its victim and its wielder. Necessary and regrettable aren't exclusive.

Why "victim" and not "target"?

What are the input variables which dictate the morality of an action (generally or in this particular case)?

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#280

Post by remarkEon »

pessimizer wrote: post #201
nsvd2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, of course, to oppose the Ayatollah as a dictatorial regime and oppose excessive American intervention.

It's not, really, if you are now ignoring all of the dictatorial theocracies that we support enthusiastically, and focusing on the ones that America is looking for an excuse to intervene in. And this is not a "why focus on this thing when there are other things" fake argument. These protests were engineered by people with the intention of intervening, and a lot of that engineering the involved manipulation of western…

The case for intervention in Iran is much stronger, from the perspective of the United States, if you zoom out and realize that a larger fight in the Pacific is brewing and it would be wise to remove a player from the board who would happily provide access to fuel and refining capacity to PRC. Not saying I agree with this, necessarily, but it helps to steel man the more sophisticated cases when you are trying to understand complex geopolitical events.

To the extent that the protests are being "engineered", certainly there are elements of that, but why wouldn't there be and why would that be bad a priori? The regime is uniquely terrible in the world, and if you listen to Iranian ex-pats who fled it seems clear a lot of the kids that supported the revolution in 1979 quickly realized that it was a mistake, and that they underestimated the extent to which the new regime would prioritize regressive islamism over actually addressing what were at the time legitimate economic inequality issues.

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