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Iran: the police and protestors — 12 Comments

  1. I seem to recall that in 2009, the Iranian government sent the police units composed of native Iranians back to their barracks, and allowed the mostly foreign-born Basij to commit the necessary atrocities.

  2. Trump doing exactly what the President of the United States is supposed to do – stand up proudly for American values and interests. And exactly what Obama disgracefully refused to do for eight long years.

  3. I would love to see the mullahs kicked out in Iran. We then find out the full depth of Obama’s corruption on the Iran deal. Val and Barack making plans for Cuba now.

  4. “The whole world is watching.” Indeed we see the disaster of obama/jarret Iranian kissy face with the tyrants of Persia.

  5. I am praying for their deliverance, but I’ve seen evil triumph too many times in my life to get my hopes up that this is Iran’s turn for deliverance.

  6. For me, the point of reference is becoming a choice between a Berlin Wall moment or a Romania moment. Or I suppose the mullahs could win.

    But what about these questions I’m hearing about in some quarters concerning who really the demonstrators are or might be? That is to say, is there some force behind the scenes? Communists or something? I suppose we can’t look on these developments with too much rose tint on the specs. Maybe it’s possible that the demonstrators are not just mere freedom-seeking patriots, though I’d prefer them to be that.

  7. Philip: “Maybe it’s possible that the demonstrators are not just mere freedom-seeking patriots, though I’d prefer them to be that.”

    Some years back I read a book (Can’t recall the title off the top of my head.) by a travel author who traveled around Iran in about 2000. His impression was that few people supported the theocracy, but he also found that most truly hated the U.S. The average Iranian does not have a thirst for Jeffersonian democracy. His opinion was that they wanted something more like Communism with Islam as the state religion. Contradictory? Oh yeah. Realism and good sense have little to do with tyrannized people’s desires. I don’t expect anything pro-West to emerge from a failed Iranian theocracy. Maybe a little less “Death to America,” but not very friendly either.

  8. J.J. (and Philip):

    If he wrote in in 2000, that book is already outdated in terms of what the younger generation wants today. Perhaps it’s still what he described, but perhaps something quite different.

    By the way, in the original Iranian Revolution, the left was fully on board and thought it would win out over the mullahs. Didn’t happen that way, of course.

  9. Quite the contrast between Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump, with the former’s silence during previous protests, and his general attitude of Islamophilia, and his apparent desire to set up Iran as a regional hegemon in the Middle East, with his executive agreement with them and so on.

    Iran has natural geographic advantages anyway, dating back to ancient times, and modern industrial advantages with its oil and gas fields.

    The clerics have been successful in maintaining their power since 1979, coming up on 40 years since the unique events of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. But to maintain that, they have to deliver on some general level of prosperity to the population, and based on what we know of how the Iranian people live, they are finding it harder to do that in recent years.

  10. Philip and Neo, I did some looking and found the book – “Shadow of the Silk Road” by Colin Thubron, published July 3, 2007. More recent than I believed, but a lot has transpired in the ME since then. Maybe social media has driven the young further towards democratic ideas. Maybe not. We’ll see.

  11. Hi, J.J. Thanks for that. If I can remember that name long enough to look for it, I may. I’m a little sad about the idea of people there having such dislike for us even so long after the Shah – Iran is one of the few places in the whole Muslim world that I’d actually like to visit sometime, but I’d rather do it without running too many risks.

    Colin Thubron, hmmm… reading a precis of his writing career makes him sound interesting. Hopefully not as much of a jerk as Theroux, I think it was, appeared to me to be from time to time as it came across in the latter’s own writing.

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