Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/10/irans-mass-protests-were-tri.html
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So this is another excuse for the Trumpees to go to war with Iran?
I do of course hope that Iranians can achieve an actual democracy, without U.S. “help.”
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Meet Austerity Allah: reduced benefits for you, citizen, and generous funding for our religious thugs at home and abroad!
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Maybe there will be a legit revolution? I hope so…
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This is the course of action that tRump and the repubs will set us on with their budgets, cutting social programs, building useless walls, allowing CHIP to expire, cutting education funding in favor of charter schools and vouchers, etc., etc., etc.
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Right? Free Market Fundies are the worst!
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Sadly the American religious right will twist this into justification for Christian theocracy.
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So basically they weren’t willing to put up with foreign adventures of their government? Hah, if only more people outside of Iran were as willing to push back (here in the US especially).
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Well, quite.
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I find this to be one of the deepest fountains of intentional ignorance among Americans; the belief that American exceptionalism justifies the fact that, in the words of PK Dick, “the empire never ended”.
I’ve been thinking about the psychic trauma our ancestors inflicted upon this continent via slavery, the genocide of the Native American population and constant warmongering under the guise of protecting allies’ “interests” and wondering if that isn’t, at the core, why we feel (and have truly always felt) so divided as a nation. Geography and maturity play a big role, but can we ever truly reconcile our differences to a functional place when we refused to cope with the impact of these symptoms? We’ve never even had a national dialogue about the genocide that took place here. How could we possibly empathize with one another with all of these still-open wounds?
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Of course. That’s why it’s both amusing and sad to see that the average Iranian can push back against their own government but the average American feels absolutely comfortable not talking about the terrorism our government has inflicted on the world through its entire existence. It’s like there’s an unspoken rule that if you don’t name a thing then you can’t be responsible for it.
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Denial is a helluva drug.
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Precisely. The people of Iran have an extraordinarily long history of progressive civic development, fostering of the arts, sciences, engineering, architecture and just about every other aspirational human endeavor. It’s easy to forget all this in the context of the current regime, but Iran possesses a highly evolved culture that has been temporarily coopted by violent thugs. The will of the people is still strong. Perhaps that’s what gives them the perseverance to endure this current foolishness.
ETA: Contrast that with the continent of North America which, after eradicating any semblance of native culture is simply left with a juvenile, self important sense of their/our own place in the world.
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The sad thing is that Iran wouldn’t have turned into a theocracy if US oil companies hadn’t used the CIA and the British intelligence community to orchestrate a ‘revolution’ overthrowing a democratically elected prime minister and installing the Shah as their puppet. It took a quarter century but the Iranian people finally revolted successfully. Unfortunately the revolution was co-opted by the Shia Muslim clerics, much like the twists that installed the Communists in power during the 1917 Russian revolution.
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Don’t mistake Marxism-Leninism for the other forms of communism that were pushed out, usually in the direction of Siberia.
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That’s always been one of the odder things about Iran. They’ve long had a very educated, surprisingly progressive and weirdly pro American populace.
But their stuck with that regressive theocracy. They’ve been moderating in terms of their government and international relations for a while end this isn’t the first time the people have attempted to rise up recently. Maybe it’ll stick.
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Or maybe not so weirdly.
If they tend to distinguish between the American populace and its blundering, often abusive military industrial complex, they wouldn’t be the first country’s citizens to do so.
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I guess thousands of years of culture gives you a little bit more perspective.
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