from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 23 Feb 12:45
https://lemmy.world/post/43485627
As details of the death toll for January’s protests continue to emerge, three students explain why they are resisting a return to normality
More than 45 days after a brutal January crackdown that left thousands of Iranian protesters dead, students across several universities are protesting again. As Iran’s new academic term began on Saturday, students in Tehran gathered on campus, chanting anti-government slogans, despite a heavy security presence and plainclothes officers stationed outside university gates.
The Guardian spoke to protesting students about why they were rallying despite the fact that thousands had been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the January demonstrations.
“Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full,” said Hossein*, 21, a student at the University of Tehran. “It’s for them – our friends, classmates and compatriots, who were gunned down in front of our eyes, that we decided to boycott the classes.”
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Very real protests, everyone. Protesters can be seen with signs in perfect English that read, “please save us, oh righteous Israeli Mossad.”
The AI generated protest images are pretty spot on as well
After 40 days, as expected. Trump now has his public excuse to attack. I don’t know what to think of all this.
William Spaniel, Lines on Maps on YouTube, tried to break it down in a couple of videos.
Recently asked some Triad lemmings whether it would be preferable to let the Iranian people remain surpressed or give them a chance through US (and Israeli) attacks against the regime
Why is it the responsibility of the US? I’m old enough to remember being (rightfully) shunned for doing the same fucking shit in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Why did the US invade Afghanistan? Why did they invade Iraq?
Do you believe the US is considering a ground invasion of Iran?
(ps I don’t advocate it’s their responsibility, mainly arguing about opposing any intervention)
because of lies and oil as always. there wasnt any us intervention in the middle east in history that left the country better. evil fucking empire.
How do we improve things for the people of Iran?
by keeping your grubby arrogant hands off of it and stop lying about it. huge improvement already.
We don’t. Stop being a chauvinist. The Iranian people, together, improve things for themselves. Our responsibility is to dismantle the Western imperialist machine that has killed almost 40 million people in the last 50 years through sanctions alone
Why would I need to dismantle the Western machine and not the Iranian one?
Because you don’t live in Iran and it’s not your responsibility. Your responsibility, depending on where you live, is to dismantle the closest link to you in the chains that hold the world in imperial bondage, which is the Western machine helmed by the USA.
Why would these be exclusive?
Because toppling the Iranian government is aligned with empire’s goals and creates positive reinforcing outcomes for the empire. So either you fight the empire and frustrate its goals in Iran, or you support the empir by bringing about its goals in Iran even if your heart is pure.
So these people should teach their children that they should give up on hoping for a better life, because that would somehow help teh empire?
I hope you teach your kids something different
You’re such a bad propagandist. Hope for better life doesn’t help the empire. Hope for a better life comes from hoping for the death of the empire, the end of sanctions, the end of neocolonial oppression and extraction. When the empire dies, Iran will flourish for all Iranians. That is what Iranians hope for. No one hopes for American bombs.
Do you think they’ll drop their religious oppression when the empire dies?
Why don’t they drop it now?
It’s literally the only thing that has worked for them. They had a liberal democracy and the US and UK murdered their way to a coup and took over the country for years while extracting wealth and killing dissidents. The theocracy has thus far maintained Iran’s autonomy against the West for the longest period of time in modern history.
Yes, when the empire dies regressive theocracies will slowly fade. As we see literally all over the world, a reduction in violent oppression and an increase in economic prosperity reduces religious fanaticism and regressive social attitudes.
So you’re arguing that some interventions by the US that led to hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian deaths, long-term cancer and birth defects, total destruction of civilian infrastructure, and decades of neocolonial extraction are somehow justifiable?
Am I?
Disgusting sentiment
As an American I’ve long supported assisting rebels, but going to war is just as likely to backfire as it is to succeed.
Well you can give the small arms but then they’re up against an advanced military. They basically don’t stand a chance without at least air support
If you let them get nukes it’s basically game over
The US does that when it wants to create a civil war where previously there was no civil war. Civil wars are great for neocolonial intervention. You pump arms into the weaker side. They start killing. The whole defense complex now has to manage its existing counter-intelligence program against the US but now they also have an active hot conflict domestically. Lots of military-capable people die. Then the neocolonial empire comes in once the chaos has weakened everyone and they save the day!
There’s no civil war because the Iranian regime kills everyone that poses a threat. People are taking to the streets to demand basic rights and they get shot in the head by the thousands.
How do you suggest the Iranian people get out of this situation?
By coming together with their government to defeat the imperialists?
Start shooting protestors and hanging gays?
Find and expose the foreign spies operating in Iran, continue to advocate on the world stage for the end to the crimes against humanity that are the collective punishment of sanctions, and engage in mutual aid to reduce the suffering caused by the crimes against humanity that are the collective punishment of sanctions.
What they shouldn’t do is align their interests with the US and Israel for the violent overthrow of the anti-imperialist Iranian government.
Yeah but what if you want to help your government to ‘expose the spies’ and they tell you to go hang some gays first? Do you side with teh empire or hang the gays?
Fun thought experiment but the government is not asking average citizens to hang gay people.
But even if they did. The answer is you never side with the empire and you become a conscientious objector for anything you believe you should not do but are ordered to do. Conscientious objectors are not traitors. People who side with the empire are.
Would you consider it siding with teh empire if you intervene when they are hanging gay people?
Basically the government would lose time catching them again when they could be looking for spies instead
Of course not. There have been plenty of protests in Iran over the last several decades and there has never been the situation that we saw in this most recent violent episode. It’s like you live in a world where there is no history, there’s only a collection of vague facts strictly formed into a Manichean moral framing and nothing is going to stop you from creating decontextualized trolley problems that make your vibes-based conclusion both obvious and vacuous.
Edit: an interesting thing to note, Iran allows transgender people who have undergone gender-affirming surgery to change their legal gender markers, something the empire is actively working to fight against. In fact, in the US, the ability to legally change your sex on official records was only partially admitted in some states and only became a more generally accepted law in the last 20 years. So even while Iran is quite possibly the most hostile government towards the queer community in the entire world right now, they still have this one area where they are actually more progressive than the US.
That’s a weird response to my post, lol
I think you have whipped yourself into such a frenzy against the US that you’ve become unable to empathise with or even understand the plight of the common people in Iran
Whipped myself into a frenzy? Like a blood frenzy? Like the US killing 500k children in Iraq and then saying they’d do it again? Like forming Zero Units in Afghanistan with child soldiers trained to rape, torture, and murder civilians, families, and other children? Like using white phosphorus against civilians which bonds to the water in flesh and burns people to death in the most gruesome way you can imagine? Like funding and facilitating a genocide in Gaza where soldiers literally mass murder families in their refugee camps or people coming to aid trucks for food and water?
That kind of frenzy?
The common people in Iran are not a single bloc. There are millions protesting on behalf of the government and millions protesting against the government. What I do know about the common people of Iran is that US intervention is absolutely going kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and result in neocolonial dominance of the land and the people that will last for years until the empire is pushed out by whatever force necessary.
Maybe you should channel all of this anger into a book or something.
As I said, you’re so focussed on what you recently learned about the US that you’re unable to see the Iranian regime for what it is. They’re what would happen when you let the conservatives have full control over the US for 40 years. Progressives: murdered. Socialists: murdered. Anyone who dares to speak up: murdered.
And here’s you saying they should ‘come together with their government’
Again, I ask, why does the responsibility always default to the US? Why?
Responsibility?
Did your conversation also cover the fact that the CIA/MI5/the Mossad intentionally put those Islamic radicals in power?
npr.org/…/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-i…
Well, your copypaste doesn’t really say what you say it does but, yeah, even if that was the case how does it help the people of Iran?
Now that’s A+ gaslighting. It ABSOLUTELY says what I say it says.
We shoot a hole in a bucket then decades later engage in handwringing with gullible libs that would believe ANYTHING about why we need to intervene to shore up the leaks we caused in the first place.
There aren’t too many sentences there. You can do this.
I get where you’re clumsily aiming at but the current situation is what it is. The Iranian people don’t gain shit when we limit ourselves to reciting history to eachother
At least I’m not clumsily implying that for some odd reason, we suddenly need to go act as world police as a response to what amounts to our own outrage-farming bullshit. Hilarious that you (or whoever you’re an unwitting or paid dupe for) think anyone would fall for this at all.
“People” are genuinely trying to argue the US is just as bad or even worse.
The US killed 500k children in Iraq and when asked about it our political leadership said they would do it again because it was worth it
As tragic as that is, I’m referring to US treatment of its own citizens.
The US has done more global damage to the world than any other nation in history, except maybe Israel because they are working together.
Why are you referring to the US’s treatment of its own citizens when its entire history has been the history of limiting its definition of “in-group” so that it can commit mass murder of everyone else? Why not refer to the US treatment of the country’s inhabitants, like the indigenous populations, the migrant workers, the asylum seekers?
By limiting your frame to only the predominantly white, predominantly “middle class”, you are playing into the narrative that allows the US to go around killing millions. Because you think the US is not as bad as Iran, you create the political conditions for the US to be considered a legitimate nation with real interests and intentions that matter. The truth is that the US is built on genocide and slavery, has always been built on genocide and slavery, and continues to engage in genocide and slavery. The US is far and away worse than Iran.
Ignored.
I want the privilege to ignore the US imperialism
You should stop ignoring your English teachers.
The protests are good and justified, all power to the Iranian people. Iran deserves a second revolution, after the first one was taken over by the Mullahs for their own goals.
But it’s genuinely disheartening how readily nominally progressive spaces are jumping abord the manufactured consent for an imperialist military intervention by Israel and the US.
How, exactly, will bombing Iranian cities help their liberation? Or even if they succeed with deposing the Mullah regime, is anyone really expecting self determination by the Iranian people afterwards? We’re seen how the Shar’s son is pushed as the next US puppet government by US- and Israeli media (and their European allies).
The Iranian people, not just the current regime, are supportive of Palestine, and Israel and the US absolutely cannot accept that. Don’t cheer for imperialist intervention.
I think most people are hoping for an attack on military targets like last year. No-one is calling for “bombing cities”. That’s a tankie fantasy. A fantankasy
at this point I’m don’t understand it but I can see it as a possible future for a lot of Latin America
we are watching in real time how Venezuela is transforming into a US colony
right now Fidel’s grandson is allegedly making deals with the US gov (while the US asks Mexico to stop any deals involving gas with Cuba)
and here in Mexico the state is so corrupt and the US propaganda is running strong for an intervention like the one in Venezuela (and what happened yesterday just made it worse)
Please provide evidence where this generally left-of-centre british reporting is “manufacturing consent”. Which text lines do you think are trying to make us readers agree to that kind of action by these two states?
weapons of mass destruction ass consent manufacturing excuse. they meaning to tell me more people died in iran rn than gaza.
i don’t believe a word from murderous us media or their nazi leadership.
What? You don’t believe “Hossein, 21”, they named him and everything! You want to see actual evidence! You can’t believe that I’m 2026 not a single person recorded a video of said massacres on their phone?
It’s insane. Gaza is over two years of bombing turning it into a parking lot. Like, many people have been killed in Iran during the recent months. It’s just gross to report numbers that are not physically possible.
I saw one report that MORE than 80,000 in 2 days. The last time that many people died in such a short amount of time was when we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. Did Iran nuke itself? Like, how can anyone print that number?
Not to mention, the solution to this is apparently for the US and Israel to do exactly what Israel did to Gaza to Iran.
Where did you get that report? Most I saw was 30k over 3 weeks
To be clear. I wasn’t saying it was credible.
x.com/i/status/2014484450315293173
This was the one going around at the time I was talking about. I know there were articles at the time citing this as evidence as well. But, it looks like that’s been purged from most articles.
I know that number was spoken on Fox News as well at some point. But I’d have to dig for the clip. Just the usual, “some reports saying as high as 80,000” vague propaganda from a guest interview.
Ok but you said you saw a report and now you’re linking me a tweet
Can you link us the actual report?
I’m not sure why you are acting like I’m the one that said there was a valid verifiable report of this. My initial comment was literally talking about how people were lying about the numbers and saying it was “reported as 80,000”
This was the propaganda going around Twitter. A “report” can literally just be someone from inside Iran reporting on it. Which is exactly what that tweet was.
Maybe I worded my comment poorly? I was pointing to the absurdity of a number like 80,000 being taken seriously. And now for some reason you want a verified report of that? I’m so confused.
Why would you say
when no one printed it?
You’re using it to back up someone saying we can’t “trust the murderous media” but it’s just lies
The Guardian is british.
and manufacturing consent for a us invasion of iran, yes.
That’s a claim you’d need to provide evidence for. Really, really good evidence.
no, you are the one who has to stop inventing shit to invade countries in your fascist crusade.
I am doing nothing. You are claiming bullshit and don’t even know jackshit about the news outlets you’re making up shit about.
Also, I’m not even from the US.
you are literally inventing shit to justify another genocide. burden of proof rests on you.
we are very aware of the guardian’s propaganda AND us terror campaigns (that begin with exactly this sort of lie).
What did I invent, exactly?
Evidence or GTFO.
Fuck the Mullah dictatorship!!!
It is a terrible situation for everyone.
Why do these idiots in authoritarian dictatorships always think that protesting the government will remove it? No, they’ll kill you. Learn your lesson. And by that I don’t mean giving up.
That’s literally how eastern Germany got rid of their government. And yes, people got killed. But in the end they succeed. There was absolutely no chance for a violent coup if this is what you’re implying. The government and the Soviet Union would have crushed that immediately.
Eventually, they will succeed. If you understand Iran’s demographics and the history behind those demographics, this is the logical conclusion. The mullahs’ days are numbered.
… All the more reason an invasion is all the more stupid. Iran is a problem that will deal with itself.
Your classrooms are empty because your teachers were being paid by Mossad to instigate riots and have now been extracted.