:geordi-yes: defunding the police
:geordi-yes: defunding the morality police
Damn, imagine living in a country where protesting actually results in material change
Don't think you gotta hand it to em considering the amount of people that have been killed so far.
Yeah I dont want it to seem like I'm trying to endorse the actions of the Iranian government, I'm just used to protests here being coopted and neutered before they can get real results.
The tiktok videos of protesters making improvised weapons like flamethrowers in their backyards probably played a role in this decision.
Remember kids, morality police are flammable.
These protesters risked a lot more and went a lot harder than any western protesters in recent memory, due to how much higher they feel the stakes are compared to Western activists and how much more community solidarity they have with each other.
Almost every protest anywhere not in the West goes harder because there's US government people pushing them to literally get themselves killed as a propaganda tool for the West, or generally in service to overthrowing the government. There a video interview with a protest leader from the 1980s Tienanmen Square protest who was on US payroll who basically admitted as much. And people can get away with more in other countries because they don't have the same degree of control that the US government has in the US.
this is fake news, they didn’t :vote: so nothing actually happened
It worked because Iran is already heavily sanctioned and at odds with much of the rest of the world.
So you are saying only the west cares about women's rights and gay people's rights? Sounds like lib brain :^)
some of the qatar discourse is like that actually. the west uses those ideals as a cudgel while being massively hypocritical about it so it just makes it super free for reactionary theocrats to oppose both imperialism and minority liberation simultaneously and to tie up those ideas rhetorically.
Only the West would insert itself into it publicly to use it as regime change propaganda, and fund people to agitate for US interests (regime change) at protests.
It would own so much if the theocracy collapsed and the remnant socialists from the OG revolution took power. I'd love to come to find out that the US dumped millions of dollars into destabilizing the theocracy, only to have it replaced by a power structure that was more hostile to the west, and cut off the CIA's main route of infiltration.
I'm not sure there are many remnants left. Pretty sure the theocratic government started executing communists shortly after taking power.
True, I asked my partner's Iranian boss his thoughts a few weeks ago at a big company dinner they were having. His parents still live near Tehran, and I thought he would be a good resource. Turns out his aunt and uncle were both socialists and involved in the revolution. Her boss's uncle was captured and executed by the theocracy and his body dumped on his parents doorstep. His aunt was imprisoned for six years, tortured and sexually assaulted during that time, but eventually released. I was worried I had killed the whole vibe by asking about it, but her boss was surprisingly chill about it.
If the Iranian government collapses they will be replaced by US comprador reactionaries who will sell out the Iranian people. There is no communist movement in Iran powerful enough to take power, it would be the 2nd most powerful seizing the opening and that would be US backed libs (who we know enable fascists and use fascists as their militant arm)
If the IR falls, you can wave goodbye to the Axis of Al-Quds. There's a reason why the PFLP has parades with giant portraits of Soleimani.
Good insight. Iran has piss poor foreign intelligence services since the sanctions hit. They used to be able to operate freely in much of the West, but their operations have been largely shut down. These are the services a country needs to detect deep infiltration, and Iran is pretty much blind right now. I suspect that not only Western governments but every regional government is receiving offers from high level Iranian officials at this very moment. Iran is falling, and anyone with power or knowledge that is valuable to intelligence agencies is weighing their options. Life for their family in another country or stay while the house of cards falls down.
The CIA went whole hog for the neoliberal institutionalists in Iran ignoring the Greens and other more pragmatic politicians who many Iranians actually supported. The politicians who were preaching a return to the Iranian Nuclear Deal and opening up those sweet, sweet natural resources are all out of power now, the CIA's decade+ long operation failed.
The CIA could give af about human rights, and they always want the business friendly folks in charge, and about half of the time they win. I fully expect another CIA coup in Iran after the people take back power if they dare do something like nationalizing their natural resources. Which is the main reason the US cares about Iran at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Iran
The Iranian Left was so successfully crushed by the Islamists that I consider a Socialist Iran pie-in-the-sky. It's hard to even hope for an anti-NATO bourgeois republic a la Syria or Russia, since a military coup (which is necessary for such a thing to happen) is unlikely due to how powerful and politically-reliable the IRGC is. Even in that event, the US would pounce on any instability and install their own toadies.
Didn't that kind of happen with Cuba? Someone who knows more than me on this let me know.
Could've spared a lot of people if they started off with this.
"CIA is trying to overthrow us based on us doing objectively bad thing how can we stop this?"
What's amazing is a government that concerns itself with a popular movement.
A few weeks of protest have reversed out decades of national policy. In the West, they'd just pass a bunch of new anti-protest laws and double the size of the police budget.
In Authoritarian Iran...
Same thing in China recently too. People got upset at zero covid implementations and the government responded. Westoid media now stuck between the rock of having to acknowledge the CPC as being responsive to the people and the hard place of not being able to gloat at the "end" of zero covid.
I mean in China it didn't take weeks and who knows how many dead protesters.
That's fair to a point but like, they could've do this right away, this way it smells to me more like "well we couldn't force our will on the people so we are going to let them have this one."
I mean there's room for both to be true to a certain extent.
The CIA does take advantage of legitimate protests lol
But yeah, people shouldn't be jumping to gun and completely assuming the whole thing is a falsehood
I mean, the protests definitely had MEK goons running around, so how's the news megathread wrong in any way?
They're still seething Putler haven't ran out of missiles yet like what NYT had been saying for the past 9 months.
Color revolution doesn't mean that the protests were illegitimate or involved paid actors. It only means that they were exploited as a pretext for western efforts (Elon activating starlink in the region this is obviously because he respects women so much! or recent EU sanctions and US sanctions) to undermine Iran's policies abroad that happened to have a progressive impact like opposition to Israel or diplomatic relations with the PRC (Russia also has certain policies relating to other countries that create this certain impact, I am not pro Putin but this is a fact). "Leftists" who can only think of this in the black and white sense (think, you) of protests that either cannot be exploited or are being performed entirely by paid agents are the weakest kinds and could not form any coherent analysis if they tried. I am sure there was this or that person who claimed the protests were illegitimate but this kind of nonsense presents just as stupid of an analysis.
but in seriousness if you want to hurt your psyche go back to the news mega about a week into it starting to see the terrible things here people were saying about them people were calling them violent paid actors performing violent terrorist riots being controlled by nefarious western bbc propaganda, etc. etc.
???
I was there and I didn't see any of that. Though I guess that's hard to prove as the comments don't go back too far.
The main argument being made, at least by me, was: "The protests are beyond reasonable doubt being fueled by American intelligence, thus making it an attempted colour revolution, but that doesn't make the demands of the protestors invalid, and I hope that Iran can find a way of achieving reform without succumbing to regime change as that would simply involve the neoliberals taking everything in Iran that isn't nailed down under the guise of human rights etc etc, like in every other country the US has gotten involved with in that way"
which seems perfectly in line with every reasonable left-wing analysis of the situation that isn't terminally America-brained
like, the most controversial thing I ever said about them before they dropped off my radar was that every large protest in a country that America hates likely has some nefarious motive behind it, but again, that doesn't mean that hating America = god's angels on earth who can do no wrong, it just means that the government must find a way to address legitimate grievances while not letting the "My country is a totalitarian evil state who hates the concept of freedom itself, we yearn for freedom Mr CIA, please send in a neoliberal stooge to harvest all our oil" views that are Definitely Things That Normal Protestors Say dominate the protests
No investigation no right to speak. I never investigated, never spoke, and hopefully I was wrong the whole time. Nice
Does anyone have any good protest/riot footage to share? I wanna show my lib friends that riots work with visual evidence
edit: found some myself, but def link more if you have more
Community Public Safety > Moral Police
Mental Health Service Wellness Officals > Moral Police
Litterally any actual harm reduction team or group > Any form of modern policing
