“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 between the unjust state and the just movement.
That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop.
As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.”
> the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.
This interpretation reeks of Western naivete. Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals. They were provoked by the U.S. president, who promised support to take on the institutions, but that support never materialized. The likely endgame of this current gunboat diplomacy is similar to Venezuela: the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down. In other words, nothing changes for the people demanding reform.
Even setting aside my disagreements with the current President, the US has an atrocious track record when it comes to following through with support. Why on earth would they believe him?
The author is "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1].
> Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals
Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful.
People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Phillipines' People Power Revolution. Each of their leaders were gunned down, and the last won in an autocracy. (Even if you only read the blurb, the state's violent overreaction is part of the parcel.)
> They were provoked by the U.S.
Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.
> the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down
Which opposition figure is being hunted down in Venezuela under Rodriguez?
This article is on my to-read list and I am a great fan of Mr. Devereaux's work. But I also feel like promoting non-violence outside the context of western democracies is misleading and potentially dangerous. Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it so forgive me if he does.
But how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
My understanding of social dynamics is that being peaceful only works as long as it gains you more supporters than you lose by government action against the movement. Some governments give in but if not, at some point, the scale tips and violence or surrender are your only options.
In Belarus, I knew they were fucked as soon as I heard that police support the protests by putting down their guns and joining the protesters.
They gave up their ability to use violence and therefore became as irrelevant as the other protesters. They should have kept their guns. They should have tried to use their openly armed protest to incite other armed people to also join. At some point, the potential violence would materialize but hopefully at that point, enough of the armed people would be on the side of the protest.
Maybe the dictator would give up if he saw the situation spiraling out of control (and hopefully be executed as punishment anyway).
Maybe the dictator would try to flee and get caught and executed ("gunned down"). Maybe his bunker would get overrun.
Maybe someone close to him would try to get favor from the protesters and kill him.
But all of those potential outcomes were closed off if people opposing him didn't have enough guns.
> feel like promoting non-violence outside the context of western democracies is misleading and potentially dangerous
The article discusses "efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’)1 and non-violent approaches (protest)" (Id.).
> Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it
"The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war" (Id.).
> how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian.
Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).
One of the most memorable details is how James Lawson trained in nonviolence under Ghandi and came over to train protestors in nonviolent tactics. They gathered in church basements to scream insults and spit on each other to prepare for the restaurant sitins and other ops.
What, since released, internal memos or journals from mid-century civil rights leaders have revealed that destroying the constitution was their objective? Seems like a stretch.
I believe the civil rights leaders themselves were mostly genuine. I think they were used as useful idiots on a couple instances to support the two most destructive policies of the US.
(1) Secession. This was used for evil in the form of slavery. But it is the most powerful check of federal power by the states we had. The fact it could be used for evil did not mean it is better to get rid of it.
(2) Expansion of the interstate commerce clause to mean basically anything. A main argument for why this can't be reversed is that it would destroy the civil rights acts, which acts upon even intrastate business. Rather what should have happened is 15th amendment should have been written to apply to private entities as well, instead of blasting away the interstate commerce clause.
Im certainly sympathetic to #2 being one of the greatest unconstitutional practices of the modern US government, but is its genesis really the civil rights movement? There were many settled cases about interstate commerce before the Civil rights act, like Gibbons v. Ogden.
You're absolutely right -- it's not really the genesis per se on #2, just one of the modern weapons used. Civil rights act is one of the main weapons used today to explain why we can't wind back interstate commerce clause, creating a sort of legal suicide pact where the interstate commerce clause interpretation is held hostage if you want to keep your civil rights. That is, the CRA was arguably one of the most important things for double sealing the deal on progressive era expansion of the ICC.
Many times here on HN I have debated people who were well versed on constitutional law, and when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it. And they're right -- a nearly identical on many points CRA happened in 1875 as the one passed in 1964. The 14th and 15th amendment existed at both times, and the relevant points of the constitution stayed the same. Yet the latter was found constitution and the former was not, in large part due to the change in the meaning of the interstate commerce clause.
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Overturning of CRA of 1875 ruled equal protection under 14th amendment doesn't bind private actors, that's why the CRA of 1964 depending on expanded ICC.
> when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it
I'll be honest, I've literally never seen this argument in any hall of power. And I know quite a few folks who believe in overturning Wickard.
The CRA, as currently interpreted, is more than fine on equal-protection grounds.
(2) is not a problem if you enact equivalent civil rights acts in every state. There would be plenty of political support for doing this today, including in the Sunbelt - which there wasn't in the 1950s.
I think “equivalent” would be the challenge here. When people need to know at all the nuances of what bathroom and restaurants they’re allowed to use, and what train cars when business or pleasure takes them across state lines it becomes a pretty large tax both for the individual and for interstate commerce at large
The bathroom issue is especially silly. Just mandate that public restrooms have to also include gender-neutral single-occupant bathrooms, that anyone can use as they desire.
Yes, but then achieving that mandate across the country becomes O(N) of states, all within the low bandwidth legislation process of state houses. Much simpler to just do it at the federal level, and still legitimately justifiable wrt interstate commerce imo
With that framing, aren’t those two outcomes detrimental side effects of achieving the objective, rather than the objective itself per your original comment?
Freedom means freedom to exclude and alienate at the government level? Is that your argument? I can see your hypothesis, but I don't see your evidence.
This seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition. Some dictators have figured out you can just imprison and kill the opposition, and keep doing this until there is no more opposition.
The Khomeini government is not going to just say "oh, you're right" and change. Neither will the Kim or Putin governments. Sometimes - sadly - violence is the least worst answer.
> seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
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 moral, concerns.
Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.
Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.
This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).
> 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.
Some tools are definitely better than others. Also some tools are not "the right tool" for the job.
Fundamentally though I'm not sure I agree with you. Violence is often an emotional reaction. When violence is used as a tool it is usually (always?) used by bad people.
If it helps you reconcile my worldview, I absolutely oppose the existence of states.
> normal Iranian people who just want to leave their life?
Like the ones who are protesting? Idk, when people put themselves in front of a gun I'm inclined to listen to what they're demanding, not folks in their armchairs a world away.
Hitler was so bad that anybody is willing to publicly talk about killing him, there are movies glorifying it, people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. He was so bad that the very strong taboo against killing does not work on him.
So, when _exactly_ did it become OK to kill him? Think about it.
What cumulative sum of his actions between 1889 and 1945 tipped the balance?
Now, do those same rules apply to current dictators or people in the process of becoming dictators even if the taboo is still strong there?
This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.
I’m glad it didn’t work in 1989 because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded. At the same time I don’t want China to succeed and export its brand of capitofascism purely because I don’t think most other countries can find their benevolent dictator. The cognitive dissonance is wild right now.
Armed Baloch and Kurdish groups have been boasting of firing on Iranian police. The police are firing back. Hard to call them non-violent when they openly boast about armed attacks. Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran.
But also weird to say that the tens of thousands of student protestors are actually violent because totally different people in a different part of the country are armed.
Two things that can both be true: the Iranian regime is fundamentalist and authoritarian and massively abusive to its people, and also western countries are continuing their long history of meddling and funding separatist and terrorist groups with the goal of regime change and establishing a client state (because that worked out so well with the Shah).
> Armed Baloch and Kurdish groups have been boasting of firing on Iranian police
“…it is important to note that while the overall framework of these two approaches is the same their tactics are totally different and indeed fundamentally incompatible in most cases. Someone doing violence in the context of a non-violent movement is actively harming their cause because they are reducing the clear contrast and uncomplicated message the movement is trying to send. Likewise, it is relatively easy to dismiss non-violent supporters of violent movements so long as their core movement remains violent, simply by pointing to the violence of the core movement. It is thus very important for individuals to understand what kind of movement they are in and not ‘cosplay’ the other kind” (Id.).
The core protest is strategically and factually a non-violent protest. It is ringed by armed insurgencies. They undermine each other.
> Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries
Nobody has a monopoly on weapons supply to the Middle East. If you want to seriously interrogate this line of questioning, try to learn what weapons they’re using.
The key part is that there are multiple insurgencies going on simultaneously. There are separatist movements that are looking to create new nations states, while simultaneous there are non-violent protests ongoing, generally looking for regime change and a move away from extremists religious tendencies. Both can be true simultaneously.
Kurds are getting abandoned by the west on a weekly basis for the past like century. It's insane what these people have have gone through,still no resolution.
Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.
>The Kurds had their own state at the end of World War II - the US and UK forced them to dissolve and integrate with Iran.
The Kurds were also supposed to have their own state at the end of World War 1, but western countries abandoned them and didn't force Turkey to honour its obligations, leaving Turkey free to genocide them just like it did the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.
They effectively had their own state in Rojava up until a few weeks ago, and KRG (Iraq) is pretty damn close to a state, it's basically a state in everything but recognition as the immigration, defense, and law system is almost entirely separated. When I lived Rojava, Assad had zero influence, the military and police and borders were entirely separated, there was zero chance you were going to experience the force of law ofthe state of Syria anywhere you went. The state of Rojava dissolved due to tactical loss of alliance with Arab militias when the rebels retook Damascus. I would characterize their recent loss of state in Syria had more to do with being surrounded by Turkey and dependence on wish-wash arab allies than it had to do with the US or UK.
> with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran
As opposed to standing idly by when the regime 'stabilizes' the country by murdering thousands of people? It's well past the stage where non violent protest or resistance stopped being a viable option..
Dear American, kindly solve your own internal issues first and then - maybe - you can talk on how to "help" some other countries on the literal other side of the world TYM.
I'm cool with that. Let them fight their own battles...but also don't ever ask or expect the US to help.
The problem with your stance is that too many people want it both ways: They don't want the US to intervene, but then also want support in terms of money and special treatment for people emigrating from these countries (and blame the US for the deaths that occur for a terrible government).
> your moral principles seem to demand an invasion and subjugation of Israel
There is absolutely no requirement for consistency in geopolitics. Advocating for a position on e.g. Gaza or Iran isn't undermined because that person isn't expending equal efforts on injustice in another theatre.
Not really. We absolutely have the option to let things play out in Iran and refuse to intervene. There are many regimes in Africa that are as bad or worse than Iran. We seem to have little interest in "regime change" there. You should think about why not.
Well it's not black and white. Sometimes doing the right thing even if you have ulterior motives is better than doing nothing.
Africa is tricky due to historical reasons, though. Any western power that would intervene there without the explicit invitation of the local government would be accused of neo-colonialism etc.
Those African regimes don't spend billions a year to promote and fund terrorism in other countries. Remember kids, you can kill millions of your own people (Stalin, Mao, etc) and nobody will care. Heck, some will even celebrate you. But don't mess with people in another country, otherwise outsiders will get involved. Iran is the main source of violence and terrorism in the most violent part of the world. Maybe, just maybe your fake moralizing isn't helping.
Iran has committed or contributed to virtually zero terrorism in America. The American people have no legitimate beef with Iran, America is just acting as Israel's rabid attack dog.
Because those countries are not trying to become a global power, with potential nuclear weapon, ICBM and drone capabilities along with a strategic location?
And all while making "death to america" part of their national slogan.
Iran occasionally attacks Americans in the region or abroad generally, but they don't attack Americans in America despite all of their "death to America" rhetoric (which they are more than entitled to.) If you add up who's fucking with who and who's being fucked with, the imbalance between America and Iran is enormous.
Just think about would have happened if protesters in USA shot and killed 150 policemen. Protesters which foreign states (China or Russia) openly boasted they are supporting, and provided them with weapons and communication technology.
So there are no circumstances where armed rebellion is justifiable and the only legitimate type of resistance to state violence is literally trying to drown the state forces in bodies of non-violent protestors?
At a certain point there ceases to be a middle path between violent resistance and complete surrender.
> Protesters which foreign states (China or Russia)
This type of relativism is dishonest. Of course US is speed running the path to authoritarianism but its not quite there. e.g. morally it would be perfectly acceptable to support weapons to protestors in Russia and not the other way around.
The Iranian regime is objectively evil, period. Regardless of what honest or dishonest motives foreign actors might or might not have.
Uh, sorry, no. At the moment you start arguing by 'The Iranian regime is objectively evil, period', you have totally lost the plot.
The statement 'The USA regime is objectively evil, period' is much more justifiable. Measured, e.g. by the number of people it has killed (both directly, and indirectly by sanctions and support for brutal dictators - e.g. Pinochet, but also Saddam while he was waging war with Iran).
Meddling in internal affairs of other countries has a terrible track record, the world would be so much better off without it.
Armed resistance most often leads to a damn bloody affair in which everybody is worse off, unless the state is already so rotten that it has no will to fight for itself. Supporting such resistance just means more life losses, both on the resistance and on the state side (typically, much more on the resistance side). Hence, the true aim is not to help the resistance, but to weaken the state. No consideration for the life of the local people, the show (the grand game) must go on!
> Meddling in internal affairs of other countries has a terrible track record, the world would be so much better off without it
Wishing away "meddling" is on par with wishing away war. Nice in theory. Practically impossible in practice. (Sovereignty has a Schrödinger's element to it. You really only know you have it when you test its boundaries. And the only test of sovereignty is against another sovereign. The world is littered with sovereigns meddling in each others' affairs and those who aren't sovereign.)
The US is evil because it meddles in the affairs of other countries? Uh huh. Tell me about Iran.
The US is evil because of who it supports? Tell me about Iran.
And at least the US didn't murder thousands of anti-government demonstrators so far this year.
You're right in this: The US is not the shining example of goodness and purity that we wish it to be. But when you condemn the US compared to Iran, using those metrics, it looks suspiciously like motivated reasoning.
Economic collapse, failed infrastructure, lack of human rights, ruthless religious dictatorship? All while spending 25% of their budget on military ventures.
My principals is that a government should do what's good for the people of their country.
Are your principals that a government should only focus on self preservation?
What would be better for the people of Iran, sinking an American aircraft carrier or just disbanding their nuclear and long range ballistic missile programs?
US intelligence assessments on the question of whether Iran is building one keep publicly coming out as negative. People who keep repeating that Iran is building one are people who want to see Iran torn apart. Had Iran ACTUALLY been working on one all these decades, we wouldn't be at war with them now because they would have the ultimate deterrence and we'd be too scared. The very fact that we are bombing them every now and then, and are about to launch another massive regime change war campaign against them, is the best confirmation that they are in fact NOT close to having nuclear-armed missiles. Otherwise it would be too risky to start bombing a country that is going to have them in a week, and that is going to also then be VERY pissed that you just bombed the shit out of them, and will want to show you once and for all never to mess with it again. Iran's government is actually REALLY stupid for not having got nuclear weapons already, and they may be about to pay for that mistake with their country's devastation.
Sanctions-wise... When you sanction a society to the degree that Iran has been sanctioned, you force that society to turn to smuggling, black markets, and forces operating outside of usual law and norms, in order for the society to prevent its collapse. That naturally causes corruption to spread because you are involving outlaws in fundamental processes of your economy. This is one of intended consequences of such harsh sanctions, in order to maximize the negative sentiment of the general populace of the targeted country towards their government. It impoverishes the country and makes the populace more likely to accept when approached by foreign agents offering monetary rewards for help in bringing the government down.
Obviously the commenter I responded to is not arguing in good faith so I don't expect anything but an NPC talking point response, so I wish to note that my answer is for a curious passerby.
Not quite at the level, but Jan 6 is similar. 174 officers were hospitalized, protesters were coordinating over Telegram, and Russian state owned media employees actively ran influence ops to support maga, though especially after the event (not quite “openly boasted”)
The result: nothing of consequence happened because the faction they supported eventually won and was/is legitimately popular
The US and Iran are very different countries. You can't just fix one variable to be the same in a hypothetical and expect us to nod along as if this reveals any insight. It's a shitty rhetorical tactic.
The Baloch movement is orthogonal to the students movement.
Jaish al-Adl would continue bombing Iranian police stations regardless of who's in power in Tehran as long as India maintains operational control of Chabahar Port, Chabahar-Zahedan Railway, and INSTC.
Similarly, the BLA and BNA would continue bombing Pakistani police stations regardless of who's in power in Islamabad/Pindi as long as China maintains operational control of Gwadar Port, the Western Alignment expressway, and CPEC.
Iran is de facto non-existent in much of Sistan-ve-Balochistan. Heck, Urdu/Hindi fluency remains the norm in much of Iranian Balochistan as a large portion of Iranian Baloch continue to have family ties across the border in Pakistan, work with their brethren in the Gulf as migrant workers, or travel to Karachi, Quetta, or India for medical, religious (most Iranian Baloch are Deobandi), and education services.
Heck, one of our old neighbors growing up was a Iranian Baloch-Pakistani Baloch couple and according to them Baloch marriage across the border was extremely common. And Uzair Baloch had ties to both Iranian and Indian intelligence [0].
The Iran-Pakistan and the Iran-Afghanistan border is very porous because of how isolated Sistan-ve-Balochistan and much of Khorasan is from the rest of Iran.
Haha yep, that documentary was wild - very old school Vice before they all got poached.
But anyhow, the entire thing has become a quagmire after CPEC was announced in 2015, because that forced India to confront the very real possibility of being enricled by China during a war.
This is what lead to India's quiet and now overt diplomacy with the Taliban, continued investment in Iran despite the sanctions, and building Saudi and UAE cofinanced megaprojects on the Indo-Pak border in GJ and RJ as well as in JK.
I don't think it's as simple as the Kurds starting the violence, though, except in KRG where they now have autonomous territory that's mostly left alone, the other 3 nations Kurds lived in have lived with systemic violence against them (sometimes to the extent of banning their languages, sometimes more like genocide). Like most of the ME engagements, untangling who is firing back at who ranges from difficult to impossible to untangle depending on what situation you are looking at.
> Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran.
When I fought in the YPG (Kurdish militia in Syria), almost all the weapons were Russian / USSR block type weapons, though the AK were stamped with the symbol of many soviet block countries.
According to betting exchanges air strikes on Iran are quite unlikely in the very near term, but become more likely than not by this summer or the end of the year. So this doesn't seem to be a matter of near-term attention, more of a prediction that the Iranian government will not manage to shift their stance in a more favorable direction.
There's been a massive movement of air assets towards Iran over the last week or so. That doesn't necessarily mean a strike will happen but it's clearly a threat.
> With the possible exception of getting Trump's attention
Or Tel Aviv, Rihyadh, New Delhi or any other one of the hosts of Iran’s adversaries and enemies.
> the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people
I find it helpful to decompose states as monoliths in these cases. Besides attracting an intervention, the purpose of such a protest would also include motivating state elements to attempt a coup.
Riyadh (along with the rest of the Gulf) and New Delhi are quietly lobbying against some sort of American action, as could be seen with India very recently choosing to switch their UN vote on Israeli settlements from abstaining to against. And the KSA+UAE quickly signing mutual defense pacts with Pakistan+India (reduces their risk of being striked during a US-Iran War as well as forcibly prevents Pakistan and India from entering another war after Operation Sindoor).
TLV (already know) and Islamabad are lobbying the US in favor of striking the regime, as can be seen with the prominence Asim Munir, Muhammad Aamer, and Asim Malik in acting as a backchannel and unofficial advisers to the US on Iran under the Trump admin as well as Netanyahu's continued lobbying for a stronger response to Iran for decades.
> Nobody wants missiles flying over their homelands. At the same time, both goverments have been supportive of America's non-proliferation work in Iran.
Absolutely
> My broad point is there are plenty of folks who may be open to covertly supporting the protesters beyond America blowing blowing god knows what up.
Makes sense. And yes that's true!
Also, despite all the bots on this page and any other Iran page on HN (pro-protest accounts in Iran please, please, please follow OpSec best practices and remove any personal references of yourself on HN), the reality is a large portion of Iranians do want the regime to end.
They most likely do not want the Shah, but they are tired of the incumbent regime as well. And unlike during the Green Movement, Iran is much more isolated.
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.
The theory is always easy. The role of agitators since the beginning of times was to preempt the premise of “non-violence”. They will infiltrate a protest and fire the first shots in the most visible way possible to justify a reaction in force. The controlled media will focus on those images, protesters throwing molotovs, firing guns, attacking law enforcement.
That recipe is the theory of the ideal case. If it were that simple authoritarian regimes would be a thing of the past. But those regimes have played the game longer than most protesters have been alive. That’s why these movements barely make a dent even with covert outside support.
> As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.
Public support for the Iranian state has been around zero among the population for years now, the problem is that the Iranian government has probably 2-3 million of armed governmental agents (from police over regular military to IRGC/Basij) [1] and is just about as willing to compromise as the CCP was and is ever since Tiananmen.
In fact, I would say what we've seen from Iran the last weeks (credible sources say around 35k deaths) is even more deaths than in the 1989 China protests which had a death toll of (worst case estimated) 10k.
Against that level of fanatical, money- and religion-driven bloodlust, there is no chance of successful protests, not without serious external aid shifting the power balance. And in the case of Iran, that is the US and Israel wiping the mullahs out of this world, or causing them enough trouble so that the leadership accepts an offer to escape to Moscow alive.
Let me be clear: I despise both Trump and Netanyahu. But this is, IMHO, the one and only chance these two men have to assist a just and rightful cause for once.
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...
I couldn’t do it. Much respect for them. In the 80s when Korea was under quasi military regime, there were many street protests. Molotov cocktails and tear gas being exchanged. Some killed, many beaten down by riot police. Most were led by students.
Yep. I think in America most would be scared of what ICE and DHS would do to them. Hard to imagine facing off an authoritarian militaristic government.
Courage to fulfil Israel's wishes, and then be bombed out of existence by Israel once they have served their purpose.
Iranians are related to Arabs at the end of the day and we've seen how they get treated in Gaza/West Bank heck even Epstein and co said the quiet part out loud.
Iranians are not "just" Arabs. They speak their own language called Farsi, which has Indo-European roots. Their culture is overall very different and goes back before Islamic conquest of Iran.
Iranians aren't Arabs at all. Most Arabs are Muslims but even then, they are a different type of Muslim. KSA and Iran go at each other all the time. The GP is really off base here.
Arabs are about 2% of Iran’s population [1], and most of the rest will be insulted if you called them arabs to their face. Many see themselves better than arabs, and many more are mad about the arab occupation that brought Islam to take over the then-dominant faith of Zoroastrianism.
The average Israeli doesn’t hate the average Iranian. Israeli social media is full of posts about how people hope to one day visit Tehran. No, not as an occupier, get over yourself.
Is it courage or desperation? There obviously is no liberal democratic utopia waiting for them on the other side. Iran will be turned into another Libya, Syria, or Gaza, like the rest of Israel's adversaries. Enormous human suffering so that a fake biblical prophecy can be fulfilled.
I applaud their bravery in remaining non violent, but I'm not sure that is the best strategy as the state showed their willingness to just kill everyone.
Would organising an armed resistance be more effective? The state dissappears people. Have them organise and dissappear the leaders of the revolutionary guard or at the very least help another state (like Israel) to target them.
Non violence works only in democracies and other systems where the rulers care about what people think.
Protest of any kind only works in systems where the rulers aren’t insulated from the sentiment of their populace by a steady stream of natural resources money.
Nonviolence works where the rulers have a conscience (or at least where those who carry out the rulers' will do).
Would armed resistance be more effective? How many guns can they get their hands on? I don't know the answer to that, but my expectation is, not many. (I am open to correction.)
I mean, with dictators, that's usually what it comes down to. But it often takes years or decades of unrest and repression before someone with enough guns decides they want to be on the right side of history.
It's a fascinating if morbid process we go through every now and then... sort of, building consensus by sacrificing livelihoods and lives.
Iran is one of the most oppressive regimes remaining on this planet, so I really hope this does it. The problem is that revolutionary governments are usually not dumb and do their best to make sure that another revolution can't overthrow them too easily - hardline loyalists with benefits in the military, etc. So this probably ends with a military intervention by other countries or some other sequence of events that will spell even more misery.
The whole history of the Iranian revolution is pretty wacky. It's easy to take a knee-jerk position that "the West did it", and we definitely set some pieces in motion, but Iran wasn't really hurting prior to the revolution, which is why it caught everyone by surprise. The shah made a number of political missteps, there was some sentiment against the UK and the US, and people wanted change... but almost no one wanted a theocratic dictatorship instead. And yet...
Based on independent journalists in Iran, the protests were related to economic problems. The violence came from people with smuggled weapons who organized with satellite telephones. These people were planted by Mossad and CIA.
This was promoted by Israel and the US itself. So even if we do not trust those other journalists, there is strong evidence that we are seeing propagandized news.
We also know that Iran has been a target of Israel and the US since 2001. The political situation has become far less extreme over time. But the news is manipulated to make us think that it is as bad as Saudi Arabia.
Israel is far more extreme. They do have nuclear weapons. Their president is kept in power with eternal war. And they have an Apartheid system. And they are actively depopulating the original population. Israel is openly manipulating politicians and creating fake news to start this war with Iran.
The irony of this submission’s proximity to another titled “Attention Media ≠ Social Networks” cannot escape me.
Balance cannot be restored until a whimsy Show HN appears Monday afternoon followed by an LLM EDC by a high profile FOSS developer the following day and then rounded out by a “cozy web elegy” come Hump Day.
May Iranian Islamic regime fall one way or another, and let the true Persian culture flourish again.
Not that I'm a political activist, but I'm constantly disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime.
I get that they were in theory protesting the US support of Israel, and the Iran situation is different, but... it seems like western liberals refuse to speak up against any Islamic regime. Or something like that.
Why are they always taking the side of the most oppressive, conservative cultures? I say this as a disaffected democrat, not a MAGA person.
> Not that I'm a political activist, but I'm constantly disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime.
There are many extremely significant differences between the situations Iranians and Palestinians have been in. The only similarity you're looking at is the number of deaths, it seems. But Iranians and Palestinians have emphatically not been in even remotely comparable situations for the past half-century.
Not claiming a bias is necessarily absent or present. Just that there are many rather obvious explanations for the discrepancy you're noting besides that.
Re: Myanmar, a large part of the reason "people seem to care about" what happened in Myanmar appeared to be the role Facebook played in it. How often did you hear about it in a context that wasn't about tech and the role of social media?
Activists tend to care most when it is their government participating in inflicting the suffering.
The people taking a dump on those activists for how they "allocate" their activism not only dont care about the suffering their government participates in, they usually cheer it on.
This can be seen the most clearly in the case of the gazan genocide.
We (the US) just bombed Iran last summer. We are moving the largest buildup in decades of armament and materiel to Iran's doorstep RIGHT NOW, and it seems extremely likely we are about to bomb them again.
What exactly do you want to happen here? In your view, am I taking the side of the Ayatollahs because bombing isn't enough and we should be nuking Tehran instead?
It's telling that perceived tacit support of an Iranian regime — which America is more hostile to perhaps more than any other nation on the planet — is more disturbing to you than the deaths of 20k+ children in Gaza.
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 media narratives and the creation of fake organizations to become sources of information. It's not coincidence or luck that you're focused on Iran; people were sitting around planning an invasion of Iran and part of their planning was "How can we get the public to focus on Iran enough to give Congress cover to ignore another Executive war?"
The actual narrative, undisputed by even the people involved, is that
1) a currency crash was intentionally instigated in Iran by the West, which caused protests. We have bragged about this.
2) Many of the educated Iranian middle class joined these protests to argue against the regime in general, which they always do.
3) US and Israeli-supported terrorist organizations took advantage of those protests (like a black bloc) to start burning down buildings and burning cops alive, armed by the west and networked through smuggled Skylink terminals,
4) the US and Israel bragged that the protests were materially supported by covert western intelligence in order to push the crackdown to atrocity levels, and to eliminate even the general public's support for the protests (which would be some restraint to the government.) They literally said that many of the protesters were Mossad agents. You might as well be saying "please kill them." It's as if Al Qaeda announced that they were materially supporting and completely infiltrating BLM protests, and when many BLM activists were arrested, they were carrying Al Qaeda satellite terminals and arms smuggled from Pakistan.
(The Iranian middle class was even out, because they aren't traitors, they just don't want to live in a theocracy. The West are who turned Iran into a dictatorship by replacing Mossadegh with the Shah. The West helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. We care nothing about Iranians, we just want to steal from them. We're thieves, and we're consciously moving to a economic strategy of piracy in order to take advantage of our navy.)
5) The US moved as much navy to bear on Iran as it did when it invaded Iraq, and said that unless some magic words were said that nobody knows, it would invade.
You might be comfortable being manipulated like this, but I am not.
I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas activist, but have not made a peep about the thousands of Iranians recently murdered by their regime, that's disturbing to me.
That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration. They don't consistently care about any particular type of human suffering. Just opposing Zionists, colonizers, capitalists, and whatever current keywords are activated.
> 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.
> They don't consistently care about any particular type of human suffering. Just opposing Zionists
People are not numbers for your narrative.
Whether on a population chart or on a death chart.
Again: you're ignoring more than half a century of history and extremely relevant differences regarding how each got into their current situations, whom the involved parties were, what the current situations even are, and what their futures might look like... and more.
Just because the number of deaths appears to have reached a similar order of magnitude that does not mean anyone who fails to display the same reaction to the situations the two groups of people have been in is a hypocrite.
Maybe you should ask a few Palestinians before making such statements.
Polls made by respected Palestinian surveyors show immense support for Hamas by Palestinians [1]. If you dig inti the polls, you’ll find great support in continuing the armed conflict. I’ll add: to the last man standing.
While I agree with you that Hamas and the Palestinians are not one thing, Hamas would not be able to operate the way it did (and still does to an extent), without broad support from the population.
Even still, that data does not refute the parent's point that you are making a false equivalency.
Polling Israeli or US citizens on the extremist groups they support would be similarly dishonest; organizations like ICE, Blackwater and Irgun cannot be fairly conflated with their respective populations regardless of how the majority feels.
> all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine
> very vocal pro-Hamas activist
> Wearing the kaffiyeh is explicitly pro-Hamas and Genocidal towards Israel. It's pretty simple.
OK, simple enough. And you said you are friends with such pro-Hamas, pro-genocidal people?
> I know know why you insist on acting
You clearly neither know what I'm doing (certainly it's not acting), nor why, but feel free to believe as you wish.
> like that's not happening.
Nobody said that's that's not also happening. What I said is there are many, many pro-Palestinians who emphatically do not support Hamas, and you're lumping them together with people who support both (yes, they also exist).
If anyone is insisting on anything, it's you insisting on not making the distinction between these positions or groups, for some reason. And apparently on keeping said pro-Hamas/pro-genocide people as as your friends (?!) but I'll avoid speculating why; I imagine you must have your reasons.
People were angry at the world allowing a genocide to occur and at their own countries actively supporting that genocide.
It was also a genocide going on for several years allowing momentum to build and anger to grow. The most recent Iranian uprising lasted a few weeks.
I would be more upset that Trump told the poor Iranians to protest and that he would support them if violence was used against them - and he let them die by the thousand. He told them "help is on the way". It wasn't.
>I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas activist
"Pro hamas activist" has become the calling card of deeply committed western and israeli islamophobes.
Much like their close cousins, the holocaust denying anti semite, they almost universally refuse to recognize the UN recognized genocide in gaza.
>That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration
Im sure if the current administration backed a genocide in another country they would passionately oppose that too. Unlike dedicated islamophobes, anti racists are consistent.
Typical hijacking of words and their meanings. The was no Genocide in Gaza, just a brutal war that could have been stopped any day had Hamas given up the hostages.
Which are the actual groups calling for genocide? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. (basically Iran and their proxies)
How would releasing the prisoners stop the settlers and other issues?
What Israel has been doing for decades at this point is completely unacceptable. Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, but in context they are the inevitable outcome of Israel's continuous mistreatment and ongoing antagonism against all of their neighbors stretching on for fifty years.
You really have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Israelis that they can't stop being aggressive towards literally everyone around them.
>That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration
Can you think of any motivating reasons for the crowd to focus on Israel specifically? Last I checked, the American government isn't sending billions of dollars of weaponry and political cover to the Iranian government, so that is one massive reason why protesting Israel makes more sense.
>have not made a peep about the thousands of Iranians recently murdered by their regime
I don't protest to signal my moral outrage, I do it to effect change in my elected leaders. It's not my responsibility to devote an equal amount of attention to every injustice — ignoring the cause and effects in that injustice with direct connection to politicians beholden to me — because people like you will find it "disturbing".
That's projection. Because it is nearly impossible in practice split support as you claim you are. HAMAS is the government in Gaza. They intercept any and all aid that isn't administered directly to Palestinians. Also the questionable version of the history of the region that you have to believe (or be completely ignorant of the history) to support the Palestinians is entirely a HAMAS narrative. If you actually knew the history, you would know that while all Palestinians moved to the Levant voluntarily in the last 150 years, most of the Jews in Israel were moved by force by Muslims. If Palestinians were upset by lots of Jews in the Levant, they should be mad at other Muslims countries as they were the ones who moved most Jews there.
You just make these claims to avoid any accountability of your actions. That tracks because the HAMAS narratives completely do the same, so its easier for you to accept.
PS Most of the videos that swayed you were AI generated.
So you want you elected leaders to save Palestinians (perfectly reasonable), but don't want your elected leaders to consider doing something out when thousands are being massacred in the street?
You really think if the US wasn't supporting Israel, no one would have cared about Gaza?
> 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.
My impression is that protests in the West are largely MAGA aligned and focused more on regime change. Totally different target audience. Observe “MIGA” slogans and Trump’s face in this video from Los Angeles
Inside Iran the message is similar: get Donald Trump’s attention. And the stated goal of the action is to reinstall the Shah as the head of a caretaker government who pinky swear promises to let the people choose how they want to be governed. This is problematic for civic minded Westerners for obvious reasons.
I think if Biden was taking a lot of the same actions the Trump admin is taking, people would support it a lot more (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, maybe even Gaza).
Of course then the right would be protesting foreign interventions.
> I think if Biden was taking a lot of the same actions the Trump admin is taking, people would support it a lot more (Venezuela,
If Biden repeatedly shot boats that he alleged carried drugs without evidence and then shot survivors again for good measure until he eventually went and captured Venezuela's de facto head of state, people would support him a lot more? Really?
Idk, I’ve never seen any left wing folks actively support the Iranian regime. I think the difference is what you noted, the US support for Israel vs. intervention in Iran.
I, and many I know, would love to see the Iranian regime fall, just not via US regime change which tends to make things worse.
Yeah I see anyone actively supporting the Iranian regime, just that they're apparently not interested in the cause of the people protesting and being massacred.
I think it's just an instinct to oppose anything the current administration supports. Same with Cuba and Venezuela.
But it consistently aligns them with some of the most suppressive regimes.
Venezuelans are glad Maduro is gone. Iranians want the US to do something. Lots of Cubans as well.
One big thing your missing is that there simply is no way imaginable that a regime change can happen without the US, it's simply impossible at this stage. I can certainly understand why many if not most Iranians want the US to intervene, it's simply the only way regime change is ever going to happen.w
I don’t necessarily contest that, but I also wouldn’t trust the current administration to be the ones to succeed in that undertaking in a way that promotes lasting peace in the country/region. And no, I wouldn’t trust Biden/Obama/Bush either.
I have lived through regime change in Eastern Europe in 1989.
A year before the change, one cannot imagine the regime change. And yet, it did happen. Bloodlessly (except Romania).
Any external meddling would have probably made it much bloodier.
You can be assured most Iranians do NOT want US to intervene. How many Americans want China/Russia to intervene to 'help' you get rid of Trump?
Get off your high horse and use a bit of empathy and common sense.
Empathy in this case apparently meaning allowing continued funding of terrorism across the ME and continued killing of any and all political opposition inside of Iran. So empathetic you are. Also, I'm totally sure your memories of what life was like when you were 5 are totally and completely accurate and captures the entirety of the geopolitical realities of the situation.
Equating Trump to the systems in China/Russia is absurd. You have no concept of what losing free speech really means if you think that's an accurate comparison.
Not saying that what's happening with ICE is okay. But it's a very sheltered view to think that is at all equivalent to what happens in those countries if you actively protest against the govt.
That's because most left wing Americans don't support the Iranian regime.
People that ask "where are all the students on campus that were protesting Gaza" do so because taking action on injustice, in a way that demands accountability from their leaders, is an uncomfortable idea. For them, the purpose of taking action is largely to signal moral outrage, and making an aggrieved post on social media is the beginning and end of praxis on an issue. And if that is your mindset, why wouldn't you make an equal amount of posts about Iran as you would for Gaza? Since they are both Things That Are Morally Bad.
What they don't understand is that for people that e.g. protest in person, protesting isn't a quaint, feckless action merely meant to signal one's care about an issue to the right people. Rather, it is an action with a goal to effect specific change of behavior on a particular issue from a specific group of people (usually leaders in power that are beholden to the protesters). If you are American and protesting US military support for Israel based on the conflict in Gaza, there are practical, material, direct cause-and-effect reasons to make that argument towards your elected representatives; the same is simply not true for the Iran situation (which the majority of the US government is already aligned with bombing yet again).
It's just such a strange point of view to interpret lack of action on a particular issue as tacit support.
"Regime change" here refers to coup d'états. Meanwhile those were declared(!) wars. In response to existing wars dragging the US into them. Involving countries that were in very different places both politically and geographically.
A coup is... not even remotely the same thing. How many coups do you know of that helped the local population?
Well of course it’s not black or white, it’s nuanced as everything in life is.
But my larger point is that I don’t trust the current US administration to engage in regime change in a beneficial way as perhaps the US admin in 1945 did. You’re right that those examples and some others are good ones. But I believe the odds are that this situation would be one of the worse ones.
Do I support the Iranian regime? Hell no! I just also don’t think the US invading is a solution that would bring long term peace and prosperity.
"any western country would have already folded long ago"
How do you know that? Is it just your general assumption "Westerners weak, must fold, third-worlders stronk, they endure"?
Under what conditions would you say that sanctions are OK? Or are they never? In that case, there still might be white minority rule in Rhodesia or South Africa.
The US just helped overthrow, with US troops on the ground, a secular government in Syria, to replace it with an al Qaeda leader who was on the US wanted terrorist list until two months ago. What are you talking about, the US has supported Islamic fundamentalists for decades.
I believe you're referring to Syria, not Iran. And I don't think you're describing the situation accurately at all. The Syrian civil war is incredibly complex, and there are many parties involved. The groups that led the offensive were supported by Turkey at various points, but not by the United States. US forces in Syria didn't really have much to do with that offensive.
> 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 touch, and that the Shah himself partially relied on to stay in power. That meant that when the general population was finally at the point of exasperation, the only institutions that were 1) prepared to be the vehicle of that exasperation and 2) had an government in waiting that could take charge after the government had fallen were the religious ones.
Same thing that happened in Egypt after decades of helping Mubarak kill members of the secular opposition and destroy their organizations. When the government was overthrown spontaneously by a public driven to their limit, the only people prepared to take over, and supported by the public, were fundamentalists. The US saw another Iran coming and quickly stepped in to destroy the popular will and install another dictator that they could control.
I've actually read quite a lot about the fall of the shah and what you are saying is bullshit. See, for instance, Scott Anderson's recent book King of Kings which goes into a great deal of detail about the US government's understanding and decision-making during the Iranian Revolution.
You don't know that the current, US supported leader of Syria is an Islamic fundamentalist Al Qaeda terrorist who it previously had a massive bounty on the death of?
Turns out, however, that he really enjoys money. And that the US has a lot of it.
I think he meant Syria. And the more cogent interpretation is that the US has supported parties who perform as Islamic fundamentalists than they do actual ‘fundamentalists’.
A reminder that American economic sanctions are a primary cause of the situation that causes protests against the Iranian government. Our government is attempting to destroy Iran, an independent nation that is not our enemy.
When will American students stage a large scale anti-government protest against the regime? Oh right, the billionaires and zionist lobby cracked down on the encampments with the (violent) help of police and by firing three Ivy League Presidents to coerce the entire educational system to abandon whatever liberal principles remained.
Hopefully the Iranian government doesn't take a page out of the US Epstein regime playbook and start trampling on students free speech for daring to speak against their mass Holocaust and baby bloodletting in Gaza and shooting protestors dead on the streets.
This article is made for a certain crowd, with a certain type of gullibility. Since the nypost has a different audience, we get to see a bit of comedy like this “Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse: report” (1). Babies in ovens (2) will be next right?
When we speak about gullibility, under what conditions would you accept the idea of atrocities committed by a non-Western regime as real?
You seem to have a massive prior for "everything is a Western/Zionist conspiracy full of puppets". Which is its own sort of gullibility, readily exploited by propagandists from the other side.
Probably it would be more convincing if it wasn’t part of a months long campaign to bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and regime change Iran.
Are you arguing the protests did not happen? That they did not happen as reported? That they did happen as reported, but it should not have been reported?
I always found it kinda tragic (in the greek literature sense) how Ike's ability to partner well with the British was both the source of his ascent and the biggest black mark on his legacy.
Nuland confessed to spending 5 billion USD on Ukraine. She was caught on camera distributing cookies and sandwiches to the rioters. She was caught on tape discussing the next Ukrainian govt. And dissing the EU.
Sorry about the whataboutery but it's "funny" how chaos in non Western-allied countries gets so much coverage, even when it doesn't affect us, but shit like the people of France's New Caledonia trying to get independence doesn't:
I didn't even know about that, just that it was a beautiful place and looked it up one day to fantasize about a potential future vacation, and saw that news.
So Iran may have nukes and is beating up its own people.. If the coverage keeps ramping up, the news cycle echoes of Iraq and Libya all over again. Maybe Trump's planning to make it a trilogy
You mean France's New Caledonia who already had three! referendums, and three times voted to remain part of France and has a new one planned for 2026? That one?
Saying that the actions of the Iranian regime doesn’t affect western nations is like being in a burning building, saying that the fire in the floors below doesn’t affect you.
The country that’s a pillar of the Russo-Chinese axis, which controls vast amounts of oil, which can cripple a shipping channel that moves 20% of the worlds natural gas, which supplies high end drones to Russia and North Korean, which funds terrorist faction across the entire Middle East (that closed the Red Sea shipping lane), which operates terrorist cells in Europe.
Iran is the major cause of political instability in the the ME. They are the primary funders for the 3 most active terrorist groups in the ME if not the world. Every single westerner pays more for things because of the instability Iran funds.
They are the only supporters of majority Shiite populations who live under western-supported Sunni and Wahabi dictators. They are a Shiite theocracy surrounded by hostile Western-supported Sunni theocracies.
> Every single westerner pays more for things because of the instability Iran funds.
This is simply a lie. Every single Westerner pays vastly more for things because they spend trillions propping up illegitimate middle eastern dictators in order to keep their natural resources cheap and accessible for sleazy western middlemen to mark up.
You know Venezuela, Iran, Kuba. I wonder what all these countries that western Media tells us have "oppressive regimes" have in common.
Funny how they all have spoken out against the genocide in Gaza. One would think that would be the link on why they are targeted. Maybe the problem is not humanitarian but that they are opposing US imperialism?
Just like all the times before. You know when Iraq was preparing weapons of mass destruction. When Libya needed to be bombed for the good of its people so that Islamist warmongers could destroy the country. When the US brought the Taliban into power to fight the Soviets and then invaded Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban again. And then left and now the Taliban are fine again.
Many are protesting because of the sanctions, considered war crimes, imposed by the west onto them.
The US and its allies have attacked the currency and the availability of goods for the common Iranian. This is how regime change works. This is what is happening in Cuba as well. You starve and disenfranchise the average person to make regime change by internal bad-actors more successful.
Therefore many citizens protest against their conditions, not against their government. The misconstruing of this reality is intentional and an essential part of war mongering.
We understand this and we are smarter than the BBC thinks we are. Now ask yourself why must young Americans in the armed forces put their lives on the line for this?
I think it's right and honest to admit that this is one of the methods that sanctions are supposed to work. But it's also not the only method - and framing the intent as inducing "regime change by internal bad-actors" is also a very slanted way to articulate intent, as well as what is happening on the ground.
On the other hand, without being on the ground, we cannot really say what the real balance of grievances are.
"Sanctions" are just a sanitized way of saying "forced starvation" and "denying basic medical care" because that's what happens. For Cuba, this has been going on so long that the CIA documents about the effect of sanctions and a blockade itself has been declassified (in 2005) [1]. When faced with a UN report that estimated 500,000 children had been killed by US sanctions in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later US Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously said "the price was worth it" [2].
And sanctions don't actually work. Not against enemies anyway. Just like Cuba has endured 60+ years of sanctions and Russia has endured Ukraine-related sanctions, enemies have or build an economy to be resilient to the sanctions to the point that the regime survives, even thrives in the face of perceived exteranl threats.
Probably the only successful use of sanctions was South Africa. Why? Because apartheid South Africa was an ally so the BDS movement crippled the economy.
And most of the time sanctions have no other reason than the affected country dared to not be exploited by the West and Western companies.
Funny that this is downvoted. I guess its not fitting the mainstream 'feel good about ourselved, bad, bad, Iran' narrative. Just have a look at Besson's Davos interview.
You only think that because your political partisanship overwhelms your geopolitical knowledge. But sure, a country that is the primary funder of terrorism in the ME is doing nothing wrong.
They didn't, for instance, mess up the building of water infrastructure which is causing the taps to run dry in their capitol. Oh wait, they did. But since that has nothing to do with sanctions, you didn't hear about it because it doesn't fit a specific political narrative.
Also, apparently everyone in the world has the right to trade with the west, even if they are doing everything in their power to destroy the west.
So the mods at HN allow us too read about other countries protests, but not in the U.S.? I guess if all those illegal immigrants had oil, it'd be okay?
99% of the moderation at HN is just the accumulated actions of your fellow readers who upvote, downvote, flag and vouch for stories and comments. If you don't like their choices or their politics, maybe try Bluesky?
> So the mods at HN allow us too read about other countries protests, but not in the U.S.? I guess if all those illegal immigrants had oil, it'd be okay?
> Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.
There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking how HN is run. It’s just weird to complain about it, on HN no less, when there so many other sites already run by people who share your politics, sites where you would feel welcome and you wouldn’t have to invent scary stories about the ulterior motives of moderators.
HN’s attempt to focus makes it special, unique and valuable. Turning it into a general political free for fall like every other site would destroy that.
95% of the moderation at HN is just the accumulated actions of your fellow readers who upvote, downvote, flag and vouch for stories and comments. If you don't like their choices or their politics, maybe try Bluesky?
Israel wants Iran destroyed so badly, interesting it suddenly loves Iranians now after it bombed them indiscriminately killing many civilians just last year.
HN'ers hopefully arent stupid to fall for obvious propaganda?
That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop.
As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.”
https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...
This interpretation reeks of Western naivete. Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals. They were provoked by the U.S. president, who promised support to take on the institutions, but that support never materialized. The likely endgame of this current gunboat diplomacy is similar to Venezuela: the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down. In other words, nothing changes for the people demanding reform.
The author is "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1].
> Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals
Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful.
People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Phillipines' People Power Revolution. Each of their leaders were gunned down, and the last won in an autocracy. (Even if you only read the blurb, the state's violent overreaction is part of the parcel.)
> They were provoked by the U.S.
Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.
> the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down
Which opposition figure is being hunted down in Venezuela under Rodriguez?
[1] https://acoup.blog/about-the-pedant/
But how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
My understanding of social dynamics is that being peaceful only works as long as it gains you more supporters than you lose by government action against the movement. Some governments give in but if not, at some point, the scale tips and violence or surrender are your only options.
In Belarus, I knew they were fucked as soon as I heard that police support the protests by putting down their guns and joining the protesters.
They gave up their ability to use violence and therefore became as irrelevant as the other protesters. They should have kept their guns. They should have tried to use their openly armed protest to incite other armed people to also join. At some point, the potential violence would materialize but hopefully at that point, enough of the armed people would be on the side of the protest.
Maybe the dictator would give up if he saw the situation spiraling out of control (and hopefully be executed as punishment anyway).
Maybe the dictator would try to flee and get caught and executed ("gunned down"). Maybe his bunker would get overrun.
Maybe someone close to him would try to get favor from the protesters and kill him.
But all of those potential outcomes were closed off if people opposing him didn't have enough guns.
The article discusses "efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’)1 and non-violent approaches (protest)" (Id.).
> Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it
"The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war" (Id.).
> how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).
One of the most memorable details is how James Lawson trained in nonviolence under Ghandi and came over to train protestors in nonviolent tactics. They gathered in church basements to scream insults and spit on each other to prepare for the restaurant sitins and other ops.
(1) Secession. This was used for evil in the form of slavery. But it is the most powerful check of federal power by the states we had. The fact it could be used for evil did not mean it is better to get rid of it.
(2) Expansion of the interstate commerce clause to mean basically anything. A main argument for why this can't be reversed is that it would destroy the civil rights acts, which acts upon even intrastate business. Rather what should have happened is 15th amendment should have been written to apply to private entities as well, instead of blasting away the interstate commerce clause.
https://www.britannica.com/money/commerce-clause/Interpretat...
Many times here on HN I have debated people who were well versed on constitutional law, and when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it. And they're right -- a nearly identical on many points CRA happened in 1875 as the one passed in 1964. The 14th and 15th amendment existed at both times, and the relevant points of the constitution stayed the same. Yet the latter was found constitution and the former was not, in large part due to the change in the meaning of the interstate commerce clause.
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Overturning of CRA of 1875 ruled equal protection under 14th amendment doesn't bind private actors, that's why the CRA of 1964 depending on expanded ICC.
I'll be honest, I've literally never seen this argument in any hall of power. And I know quite a few folks who believe in overturning Wickard.
The CRA, as currently interpreted, is more than fine on equal-protection grounds.
The Khomeini government is not going to just say "oh, you're right" and change. Neither will the Kim or Putin governments. Sometimes - sadly - violence is the least worst answer.
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
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 moral, concerns.
Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.
Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.
This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not 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.
Fundamentally though I'm not sure I agree with you. Violence is often an emotional reaction. When violence is used as a tool it is usually (always?) used by bad people.
If it helps you reconcile my worldview, I absolutely oppose the existence of states.
The least worst for whom?! For normal Iranian people who just want to leave their life?
I hate my current government. Do I think an armed uprising or a USA bombing campaign would would improve things? Heck NO!
Like the ones who are protesting? Idk, when people put themselves in front of a gun I'm inclined to listen to what they're demanding, not folks in their armchairs a world away.
Hitler was so bad that anybody is willing to publicly talk about killing him, there are movies glorifying it, people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. He was so bad that the very strong taboo against killing does not work on him.
So, when _exactly_ did it become OK to kill him? Think about it.
What cumulative sum of his actions between 1889 and 1945 tipped the balance?
Now, do those same rules apply to current dictators or people in the process of becoming dictators even if the taboo is still strong there?
Armed Baloch and Kurdish groups have been boasting of firing on Iranian police. The police are firing back. Hard to call them non-violent when they openly boast about armed attacks. Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran.
Two things that can both be true: the Iranian regime is fundamentalist and authoritarian and massively abusive to its people, and also western countries are continuing their long history of meddling and funding separatist and terrorist groups with the goal of regime change and establishing a client state (because that worked out so well with the Shah).
“…it is important to note that while the overall framework of these two approaches is the same their tactics are totally different and indeed fundamentally incompatible in most cases. Someone doing violence in the context of a non-violent movement is actively harming their cause because they are reducing the clear contrast and uncomplicated message the movement is trying to send. Likewise, it is relatively easy to dismiss non-violent supporters of violent movements so long as their core movement remains violent, simply by pointing to the violence of the core movement. It is thus very important for individuals to understand what kind of movement they are in and not ‘cosplay’ the other kind” (Id.).
The core protest is strategically and factually a non-violent protest. It is ringed by armed insurgencies. They undermine each other.
> Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries
Nobody has a monopoly on weapons supply to the Middle East. If you want to seriously interrogate this line of questioning, try to learn what weapons they’re using.
The Kurds had their own state at the end of World War II - the US and UK forced them to dissolve and integrate with Iran.
Actually the US just abandoned the Kurds in Syria two weeks ago as it signed deals with Syria's former al Qaeda leader.
Kurds are people the West foments to armed rebellion, and then quashes, for decades, depending on western material needs at the minute.
The Kurds were also supposed to have their own state at the end of World War 1, but western countries abandoned them and didn't force Turkey to honour its obligations, leaving Turkey free to genocide them just like it did the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.
As opposed to standing idly by when the regime 'stabilizes' the country by murdering thousands of people? It's well past the stage where non violent protest or resistance stopped being a viable option..
The problem with your stance is that too many people want it both ways: They don't want the US to intervene, but then also want support in terms of money and special treatment for people emigrating from these countries (and blame the US for the deaths that occur for a terrible government).
Do you demand an invasion of Israel? Because your moral principles seem to demand an invasion and subjugation of Israel.
There is absolutely no requirement for consistency in geopolitics. Advocating for a position on e.g. Gaza or Iran isn't undermined because that person isn't expending equal efforts on injustice in another theatre.
There is in morality, though. The US is a state, but you are a person.
Africa is tricky due to historical reasons, though. Any western power that would intervene there without the explicit invitation of the local government would be accused of neo-colonialism etc.
And all while making "death to america" part of their national slogan.
At a certain point there ceases to be a middle path between violent resistance and complete surrender.
> Protesters which foreign states (China or Russia)
This type of relativism is dishonest. Of course US is speed running the path to authoritarianism but its not quite there. e.g. morally it would be perfectly acceptable to support weapons to protestors in Russia and not the other way around.
The Iranian regime is objectively evil, period. Regardless of what honest or dishonest motives foreign actors might or might not have.
The statement 'The USA regime is objectively evil, period' is much more justifiable. Measured, e.g. by the number of people it has killed (both directly, and indirectly by sanctions and support for brutal dictators - e.g. Pinochet, but also Saddam while he was waging war with Iran).
Meddling in internal affairs of other countries has a terrible track record, the world would be so much better off without it.
Armed resistance most often leads to a damn bloody affair in which everybody is worse off, unless the state is already so rotten that it has no will to fight for itself. Supporting such resistance just means more life losses, both on the resistance and on the state side (typically, much more on the resistance side). Hence, the true aim is not to help the resistance, but to weaken the state. No consideration for the life of the local people, the show (the grand game) must go on!
Wishing away "meddling" is on par with wishing away war. Nice in theory. Practically impossible in practice. (Sovereignty has a Schrödinger's element to it. You really only know you have it when you test its boundaries. And the only test of sovereignty is against another sovereign. The world is littered with sovereigns meddling in each others' affairs and those who aren't sovereign.)
The US is evil because of who it supports? Tell me about Iran.
And at least the US didn't murder thousands of anti-government demonstrators so far this year.
You're right in this: The US is not the shining example of goodness and purity that we wish it to be. But when you condemn the US compared to Iran, using those metrics, it looks suspiciously like motivated reasoning.
What circumstances has Iran created that demand armed rebellion?
Just to name a few.
This would seem to suggest that sinking an aircraft carrier and frigate or two would actually be justified according to your principles?
Are your principals that a government should only focus on self preservation?
What would be better for the people of Iran, sinking an American aircraft carrier or just disbanding their nuclear and long range ballistic missile programs?
Which were imposed for work on atomic bomb. These sanctions didn’t come out of the blue.
Sanctions-wise... When you sanction a society to the degree that Iran has been sanctioned, you force that society to turn to smuggling, black markets, and forces operating outside of usual law and norms, in order for the society to prevent its collapse. That naturally causes corruption to spread because you are involving outlaws in fundamental processes of your economy. This is one of intended consequences of such harsh sanctions, in order to maximize the negative sentiment of the general populace of the targeted country towards their government. It impoverishes the country and makes the populace more likely to accept when approached by foreign agents offering monetary rewards for help in bringing the government down.
Obviously the commenter I responded to is not arguing in good faith so I don't expect anything but an NPC talking point response, so I wish to note that my answer is for a curious passerby.
There is no reason whatsoever to enrich uranium beyond like 20% if its not for military purposes in such quantities.
Saying that others are NPCs is interesting. How do you know that you are not an NPC?
I dunno. Is the United States required to bake them a cake if it offends our religious principles?
The result: nothing of consequence happened because the faction they supported eventually won and was/is legitimately popular
Jaish al-Adl would continue bombing Iranian police stations regardless of who's in power in Tehran as long as India maintains operational control of Chabahar Port, Chabahar-Zahedan Railway, and INSTC.
Similarly, the BLA and BNA would continue bombing Pakistani police stations regardless of who's in power in Islamabad/Pindi as long as China maintains operational control of Gwadar Port, the Western Alignment expressway, and CPEC.
Iran is de facto non-existent in much of Sistan-ve-Balochistan. Heck, Urdu/Hindi fluency remains the norm in much of Iranian Balochistan as a large portion of Iranian Baloch continue to have family ties across the border in Pakistan, work with their brethren in the Gulf as migrant workers, or travel to Karachi, Quetta, or India for medical, religious (most Iranian Baloch are Deobandi), and education services.
Heck, one of our old neighbors growing up was a Iranian Baloch-Pakistani Baloch couple and according to them Baloch marriage across the border was extremely common. And Uzair Baloch had ties to both Iranian and Indian intelligence [0].
The Iran-Pakistan and the Iran-Afghanistan border is very porous because of how isolated Sistan-ve-Balochistan and much of Khorasan is from the rest of Iran.
[0] - https://herald.dawn.com/news/1153754
But anyhow, the entire thing has become a quagmire after CPEC was announced in 2015, because that forced India to confront the very real possibility of being enricled by China during a war.
This is what lead to India's quiet and now overt diplomacy with the Taliban, continued investment in Iran despite the sanctions, and building Saudi and UAE cofinanced megaprojects on the Indo-Pak border in GJ and RJ as well as in JK.
Like for example supporting Russia genocide in Ukraine? As far as I know Ukraine had no qualms with Iran, why is Iran helping it's destruction?
> Who knows where they are getting their weapons, with western countries also openly declaring their intent to destabilize Iran.
When I fought in the YPG (Kurdish militia in Syria), almost all the weapons were Russian / USSR block type weapons, though the AK were stamped with the symbol of many soviet block countries.
It seems like a consequence is that publicity outside Iran is only going to be effective to the extent that it mobilizes people inside Iran?
(With the possible exception of getting Trump's attention, but I don't think air strikes are going to do it?)
And the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people.
I don't see this ending well.
Or Tel Aviv, Rihyadh, New Delhi or any other one of the hosts of Iran’s adversaries and enemies.
> the government of Iran seems very willing to kill people
I find it helpful to decompose states as monoliths in these cases. Besides attracting an intervention, the purpose of such a protest would also include motivating state elements to attempt a coup.
TLV (already know) and Islamabad are lobbying the US in favor of striking the regime, as can be seen with the prominence Asim Munir, Muhammad Aamer, and Asim Malik in acting as a backchannel and unofficial advisers to the US on Iran under the Trump admin as well as Netanyahu's continued lobbying for a stronger response to Iran for decades.
Nobody wants missiles flying over their homelands. At the same time, both goverments have been supportive of America's non-proliferation work in Iran.
My broad point is there are plenty of folks who may be open to covertly supporting the protesters beyond America blowing blowing god knows what up.
Absolutely
> My broad point is there are plenty of folks who may be open to covertly supporting the protesters beyond America blowing blowing god knows what up.
Makes sense. And yes that's true!
Also, despite all the bots on this page and any other Iran page on HN (pro-protest accounts in Iran please, please, please follow OpSec best practices and remove any personal references of yourself on HN), the reality is a large portion of Iranians do want the regime to end.
They most likely do not want the Shah, but they are tired of the incumbent regime as well. And unlike during the Green Movement, Iran is much more isolated.
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.
That recipe is the theory of the ideal case. If it were that simple authoritarian regimes would be a thing of the past. But those regimes have played the game longer than most protesters have been alive. That’s why these movements barely make a dent even with covert outside support.
Public support for the Iranian state has been around zero among the population for years now, the problem is that the Iranian government has probably 2-3 million of armed governmental agents (from police over regular military to IRGC/Basij) [1] and is just about as willing to compromise as the CCP was and is ever since Tiananmen.
In fact, I would say what we've seen from Iran the last weeks (credible sources say around 35k deaths) is even more deaths than in the 1989 China protests which had a death toll of (worst case estimated) 10k.
Against that level of fanatical, money- and religion-driven bloodlust, there is no chance of successful protests, not without serious external aid shifting the power balance. And in the case of Iran, that is the US and Israel wiping the mullahs out of this world, or causing them enough trouble so that the leadership accepts an offer to escape to Moscow alive.
Let me be clear: I despise both Trump and Netanyahu. But this is, IMHO, the one and only chance these two men have to assist a just and rightful cause for once.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884956
Iranians are related to Arabs at the end of the day and we've seen how they get treated in Gaza/West Bank heck even Epstein and co said the quiet part out loud.
The average Israeli doesn’t hate the average Iranian. Israeli social media is full of posts about how people hope to one day visit Tehran. No, not as an occupier, get over yourself.
Your hate blinds you.
[1] https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2014/sep/24/report-arab-min...
EDIT: Nvm.
Would organising an armed resistance be more effective? The state dissappears people. Have them organise and dissappear the leaders of the revolutionary guard or at the very least help another state (like Israel) to target them.
Non violence works only in democracies and other systems where the rulers care about what people think.
Would armed resistance be more effective? How many guns can they get their hands on? I don't know the answer to that, but my expectation is, not many. (I am open to correction.)
I mean, with dictators, that's usually what it comes down to. But it often takes years or decades of unrest and repression before someone with enough guns decides they want to be on the right side of history.
It's a fascinating if morbid process we go through every now and then... sort of, building consensus by sacrificing livelihoods and lives.
Iran is one of the most oppressive regimes remaining on this planet, so I really hope this does it. The problem is that revolutionary governments are usually not dumb and do their best to make sure that another revolution can't overthrow them too easily - hardline loyalists with benefits in the military, etc. So this probably ends with a military intervention by other countries or some other sequence of events that will spell even more misery.
The whole history of the Iranian revolution is pretty wacky. It's easy to take a knee-jerk position that "the West did it", and we definitely set some pieces in motion, but Iran wasn't really hurting prior to the revolution, which is why it caught everyone by surprise. The shah made a number of political missteps, there was some sentiment against the UK and the US, and people wanted change... but almost no one wanted a theocratic dictatorship instead. And yet...
This was promoted by Israel and the US itself. So even if we do not trust those other journalists, there is strong evidence that we are seeing propagandized news.
We also know that Iran has been a target of Israel and the US since 2001. The political situation has become far less extreme over time. But the news is manipulated to make us think that it is as bad as Saudi Arabia.
Israel is far more extreme. They do have nuclear weapons. Their president is kept in power with eternal war. And they have an Apartheid system. And they are actively depopulating the original population. Israel is openly manipulating politicians and creating fake news to start this war with Iran.
Balance cannot be restored until a whimsy Show HN appears Monday afternoon followed by an LLM EDC by a high profile FOSS developer the following day and then rounded out by a “cozy web elegy” come Hump Day.
Not that I'm a political activist, but I'm constantly disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime.
I get that they were in theory protesting the US support of Israel, and the Iran situation is different, but... it seems like western liberals refuse to speak up against any Islamic regime. Or something like that.
Why are they always taking the side of the most oppressive, conservative cultures? I say this as a disaffected democrat, not a MAGA person.
There are many extremely significant differences between the situations Iranians and Palestinians have been in. The only similarity you're looking at is the number of deaths, it seems. But Iranians and Palestinians have emphatically not been in even remotely comparable situations for the past half-century.
Not claiming a bias is necessarily absent or present. Just that there are many rather obvious explanations for the discrepancy you're noting besides that.
But Central Africa, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, etc? Extreme suffering. But the activists don't activate.
Did they? It was occasionally in the news but that's about it.
The people taking a dump on those activists for how they "allocate" their activism not only dont care about the suffering their government participates in, they usually cheer it on.
This can be seen the most clearly in the case of the gazan genocide.
What exactly do you want to happen here? In your view, am I taking the side of the Ayatollahs because bombing isn't enough and we should be nuking Tehran instead?
It's telling that perceived tacit support of an Iranian regime — which America is more hostile to perhaps more than any other nation on the planet — is more disturbing to you than the deaths of 20k+ children in Gaza.
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 media narratives and the creation of fake organizations to become sources of information. It's not coincidence or luck that you're focused on Iran; people were sitting around planning an invasion of Iran and part of their planning was "How can we get the public to focus on Iran enough to give Congress cover to ignore another Executive war?"
The actual narrative, undisputed by even the people involved, is that
1) a currency crash was intentionally instigated in Iran by the West, which caused protests. We have bragged about this.
2) Many of the educated Iranian middle class joined these protests to argue against the regime in general, which they always do.
3) US and Israeli-supported terrorist organizations took advantage of those protests (like a black bloc) to start burning down buildings and burning cops alive, armed by the west and networked through smuggled Skylink terminals,
4) the US and Israel bragged that the protests were materially supported by covert western intelligence in order to push the crackdown to atrocity levels, and to eliminate even the general public's support for the protests (which would be some restraint to the government.) They literally said that many of the protesters were Mossad agents. You might as well be saying "please kill them." It's as if Al Qaeda announced that they were materially supporting and completely infiltrating BLM protests, and when many BLM activists were arrested, they were carrying Al Qaeda satellite terminals and arms smuggled from Pakistan.
(The Iranian middle class was even out, because they aren't traitors, they just don't want to live in a theocracy. The West are who turned Iran into a dictatorship by replacing Mossadegh with the Shah. The West helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. We care nothing about Iranians, we just want to steal from them. We're thieves, and we're consciously moving to a economic strategy of piracy in order to take advantage of our navy.)
5) The US moved as much navy to bear on Iran as it did when it invaded Iraq, and said that unless some magic words were said that nobody knows, it would invade.
You might be comfortable being manipulated like this, but I am not.
That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration. They don't consistently care about any particular type of human suffering. Just opposing Zionists, colonizers, capitalists, and whatever current keywords are activated.
> 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.
> They don't consistently care about any particular type of human suffering. Just opposing Zionists
People are not numbers for your narrative.
Whether on a population chart or on a death chart.
Again: you're ignoring more than half a century of history and extremely relevant differences regarding how each got into their current situations, whom the involved parties were, what the current situations even are, and what their futures might look like... and more.
Just because the number of deaths appears to have reached a similar order of magnitude that does not mean anyone who fails to display the same reaction to the situations the two groups of people have been in is a hypocrite.
While I agree with you that Hamas and the Palestinians are not one thing, Hamas would not be able to operate the way it did (and still does to an extent), without broad support from the population.
[1] https://www.pcpsr.org/
Polling Israeli or US citizens on the extremist groups they support would be similarly dishonest; organizations like ICE, Blackwater and Irgun cannot be fairly conflated with their respective populations regardless of how the majority feels.
I don't know why you insist on acting like that's not happening.
> very vocal pro-Hamas activist
> Wearing the kaffiyeh is explicitly pro-Hamas and Genocidal towards Israel. It's pretty simple.
OK, simple enough. And you said you are friends with such pro-Hamas, pro-genocidal people?
> I know know why you insist on acting
You clearly neither know what I'm doing (certainly it's not acting), nor why, but feel free to believe as you wish.
> like that's not happening.
Nobody said that's that's not also happening. What I said is there are many, many pro-Palestinians who emphatically do not support Hamas, and you're lumping them together with people who support both (yes, they also exist).
If anyone is insisting on anything, it's you insisting on not making the distinction between these positions or groups, for some reason. And apparently on keeping said pro-Hamas/pro-genocide people as as your friends (?!) but I'll avoid speculating why; I imagine you must have your reasons.
You've let your true colors show through...
People were angry at the world allowing a genocide to occur and at their own countries actively supporting that genocide.
It was also a genocide going on for several years allowing momentum to build and anger to grow. The most recent Iranian uprising lasted a few weeks.
I would be more upset that Trump told the poor Iranians to protest and that he would support them if violence was used against them - and he let them die by the thousand. He told them "help is on the way". It wasn't.
"Pro hamas activist" has become the calling card of deeply committed western and israeli islamophobes.
Much like their close cousins, the holocaust denying anti semite, they almost universally refuse to recognize the UN recognized genocide in gaza.
>That crowd only seems to care if they can actively oppose Israel or the current administration
Im sure if the current administration backed a genocide in another country they would passionately oppose that too. Unlike dedicated islamophobes, anti racists are consistent.
Which are the actual groups calling for genocide? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. (basically Iran and their proxies)
What Israel has been doing for decades at this point is completely unacceptable. Hamas is a bunch of terrorists, but in context they are the inevitable outcome of Israel's continuous mistreatment and ongoing antagonism against all of their neighbors stretching on for fifty years.
You really have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Israelis that they can't stop being aggressive towards literally everyone around them.
Can you think of any motivating reasons for the crowd to focus on Israel specifically? Last I checked, the American government isn't sending billions of dollars of weaponry and political cover to the Iranian government, so that is one massive reason why protesting Israel makes more sense.
>have not made a peep about the thousands of Iranians recently murdered by their regime
I don't protest to signal my moral outrage, I do it to effect change in my elected leaders. It's not my responsibility to devote an equal amount of attention to every injustice — ignoring the cause and effects in that injustice with direct connection to politicians beholden to me — because people like you will find it "disturbing".
> I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas...
See how quickly things have turned from the first post manufactured to seem reasonable? No more "Curious" and "just asking questions".
How many pro-Hamas friends can a person have?! I don't know a single pro-Hamas person myself.
I believe you are being taken for a ride friend.
You just make these claims to avoid any accountability of your actions. That tracks because the HAMAS narratives completely do the same, so its easier for you to accept.
PS Most of the videos that swayed you were AI generated.
How'd that work out for you?
You really think if the US wasn't supporting Israel, no one would have cared about Gaza?
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.
Do you care about those people or not?
Sorry, unless I’m missing something, what you said just sounds like a cop out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20T6XrrLdiA&pp=ygUYbG9zIGFuZ2V...
Edit: Also, the Left seems to more often pick sides when its one ethnic group oppressing another, as identity politics is prominent in their messaging
Of course then the right would be protesting foreign interventions.
If Biden repeatedly shot boats that he alleged carried drugs without evidence and then shot survivors again for good measure until he eventually went and captured Venezuela's de facto head of state, people would support him a lot more? Really?
Same goes the other way of course. Republicans would be much more against it.
I, and many I know, would love to see the Iranian regime fall, just not via US regime change which tends to make things worse.
I think it's just an instinct to oppose anything the current administration supports. Same with Cuba and Venezuela.
But it consistently aligns them with some of the most suppressive regimes.
Venezuelans are glad Maduro is gone. Iranians want the US to do something. Lots of Cubans as well.
Any external meddling would have probably made it much bloodier.
You can be assured most Iranians do NOT want US to intervene. How many Americans want China/Russia to intervene to 'help' you get rid of Trump?
Get off your high horse and use a bit of empathy and common sense.
Not saying that what's happening with ICE is okay. But it's a very sheltered view to think that is at all equivalent to what happens in those countries if you actively protest against the govt.
People that ask "where are all the students on campus that were protesting Gaza" do so because taking action on injustice, in a way that demands accountability from their leaders, is an uncomfortable idea. For them, the purpose of taking action is largely to signal moral outrage, and making an aggrieved post on social media is the beginning and end of praxis on an issue. And if that is your mindset, why wouldn't you make an equal amount of posts about Iran as you would for Gaza? Since they are both Things That Are Morally Bad.
What they don't understand is that for people that e.g. protest in person, protesting isn't a quaint, feckless action merely meant to signal one's care about an issue to the right people. Rather, it is an action with a goal to effect specific change of behavior on a particular issue from a specific group of people (usually leaders in power that are beholden to the protesters). If you are American and protesting US military support for Israel based on the conflict in Gaza, there are practical, material, direct cause-and-effect reasons to make that argument towards your elected representatives; the same is simply not true for the Iran situation (which the majority of the US government is already aligned with bombing yet again).
It's just such a strange point of view to interpret lack of action on a particular issue as tacit support.
A coup is... not even remotely the same thing. How many coups do you know of that helped the local population?
Then you will say things like: but it was 80 years ago!!
But my larger point is that I don’t trust the current US administration to engage in regime change in a beneficial way as perhaps the US admin in 1945 did. You’re right that those examples and some others are good ones. But I believe the odds are that this situation would be one of the worse ones.
Do I support the Iranian regime? Hell no! I just also don’t think the US invading is a solution that would bring long term peace and prosperity.
It is always the same story: Look how poorly the regime manages the country!
Never said: The country is under such sanctions/blockade that any western country would have already folded long ago.
How do you know that? Is it just your general assumption "Westerners weak, must fold, third-worlders stronk, they endure"?
Under what conditions would you say that sanctions are OK? Or are they never? In that case, there still might be white minority rule in Rhodesia or South Africa.
At that time, there were two strong anti-shah factions in Iran. 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 touch, and that the Shah himself partially relied on to stay in power. That meant that when the general population was finally at the point of exasperation, the only institutions that were 1) prepared to be the vehicle of that exasperation and 2) had an government in waiting that could take charge after the government had fallen were the religious ones.
Same thing that happened in Egypt after decades of helping Mubarak kill members of the secular opposition and destroy their organizations. When the government was overthrown spontaneously by a public driven to their limit, the only people prepared to take over, and supported by the public, were fundamentalists. The US saw another Iran coming and quickly stepped in to destroy the popular will and install another dictator that they could control.
Turns out, however, that he really enjoys money. And that the US has a lot of it.
When will American students stage a large scale anti-government protest against the regime? Oh right, the billionaires and zionist lobby cracked down on the encampments with the (violent) help of police and by firing three Ivy League Presidents to coerce the entire educational system to abandon whatever liberal principles remained.
No war on Iran.
Iran regime already does that, they gunned-down thousands just last month, including 100's of public hangings.
1. https://nypost.com/2026/02/20/world-news/imprisoned-iranian-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
You seem to have a massive prior for "everything is a Western/Zionist conspiracy full of puppets". Which is its own sort of gullibility, readily exploited by propagandists from the other side.
The opinion of its 'allies' is regularly ignored in Washington...
Every protest, every independent action, literally every single news story ... is directly due to British, American or Israeli action.
What is your point?
Nope, folks, people really do not like being oppressed or lied to, and will on occasion let you know that in dramatic fashion.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2013/dec/218804.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbjNJbjEy04
https://youtu.be/L2XNN0Yt6D8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE
I didn't even know about that, just that it was a beautiful place and looked it up one day to fantasize about a potential future vacation, and saw that news.
So Iran may have nukes and is beating up its own people.. If the coverage keeps ramping up, the news cycle echoes of Iraq and Libya all over again. Maybe Trump's planning to make it a trilogy
Or is it something else going on there?
When China knocks at the door of New Caledonia - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-ca...
That Iran is irrelevant?
> Every single westerner pays more for things because of the instability Iran funds.
This is simply a lie. Every single Westerner pays vastly more for things because they spend trillions propping up illegitimate middle eastern dictators in order to keep their natural resources cheap and accessible for sleazy western middlemen to mark up.
They had 3 referendums since 2018. So it seems nobody is stopping them from leaving if they wanted to...
Funny how they all have spoken out against the genocide in Gaza. One would think that would be the link on why they are targeted. Maybe the problem is not humanitarian but that they are opposing US imperialism?
Just like all the times before. You know when Iraq was preparing weapons of mass destruction. When Libya needed to be bombed for the good of its people so that Islamist warmongers could destroy the country. When the US brought the Taliban into power to fight the Soviets and then invaded Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban again. And then left and now the Taliban are fine again.
War. War never changes. It is the same old lies.
Now they want to destroy Iran.
The US and its allies have attacked the currency and the availability of goods for the common Iranian. This is how regime change works. This is what is happening in Cuba as well. You starve and disenfranchise the average person to make regime change by internal bad-actors more successful.
Therefore many citizens protest against their conditions, not against their government. The misconstruing of this reality is intentional and an essential part of war mongering.
We understand this and we are smarter than the BBC thinks we are. Now ask yourself why must young Americans in the armed forces put their lives on the line for this?
On the other hand, without being on the ground, we cannot really say what the real balance of grievances are.
And sanctions don't actually work. Not against enemies anyway. Just like Cuba has endured 60+ years of sanctions and Russia has endured Ukraine-related sanctions, enemies have or build an economy to be resilient to the sanctions to the point that the regime survives, even thrives in the face of perceived exteranl threats.
Probably the only successful use of sanctions was South Africa. Why? Because apartheid South Africa was an ally so the BDS movement crippled the economy.
And most of the time sanctions have no other reason than the affected country dared to not be exploited by the West and Western companies.
[1]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R00904A0008000...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iFYaeoE3n4
They didn't, for instance, mess up the building of water infrastructure which is causing the taps to run dry in their capitol. Oh wait, they did. But since that has nothing to do with sanctions, you didn't hear about it because it doesn't fit a specific political narrative.
Also, apparently everyone in the world has the right to trade with the west, even if they are doing everything in their power to destroy the west.
PS Iran funds the Russian war in Ukraine.
This is false, and even the moderators admit it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396613
> Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.
There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking how HN is run. It’s just weird to complain about it, on HN no less, when there so many other sites already run by people who share your politics, sites where you would feel welcome and you wouldn’t have to invent scary stories about the ulterior motives of moderators.
HN’s attempt to focus makes it special, unique and valuable. Turning it into a general political free for fall like every other site would destroy that.
95% of the moderation at HN is just the accumulated actions of your fellow readers who upvote, downvote, flag and vouch for stories and comments. If you don't like their choices or their politics, maybe try Bluesky?
HN'ers hopefully arent stupid to fall for obvious propaganda?