As details of the death toll for January’s protests continue to emerge, three students explain why they are resisting a return to normality
More than 45 days after a brutal January crackdown that left thousands of Iranian protesters dead, students across several universities are protesting again. As Iran’s new academic term began on Saturday, students in Tehran gathered on campus, chanting anti-government slogans, despite a heavy security presence and plainclothes officers stationed outside university gates.
The Guardian spoke to protesting students about why they were rallying despite the fact that thousands had been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the January demonstrations.
“Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full,” said Hossein*, 21, a student at the University of Tehran. “It’s for them – our friends, classmates and compatriots, who were gunned down in front of our eyes, that we decided to boycott the classes.”
Whipped myself into a frenzy? Like a blood frenzy? Like the US killing 500k children in Iraq and then saying they’d do it again? Like forming Zero Units in Afghanistan with child soldiers trained to rape, torture, and murder civilians, families, and other children? Like using white phosphorus against civilians which bonds to the water in flesh and burns people to death in the most gruesome way you can imagine? Like funding and facilitating a genocide in Gaza where soldiers literally mass murder families in their refugee camps or people coming to aid trucks for food and water?
That kind of frenzy?
The common people in Iran are not a single bloc. There are millions protesting on behalf of the government and millions protesting against the government. What I do know about the common people of Iran is that US intervention is absolutely going kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and result in neocolonial dominance of the land and the people that will last for years until the empire is pushed out by whatever force necessary.
Maybe you should channel all of this anger into a book or something.
As I said, you’re so focussed on what you recently learned about the US that you’re unable to see the Iranian regime for what it is. They’re what would happen when you let the conservatives have full control over the US for 40 years. Progressives: murdered. Socialists: murdered. Anyone who dares to speak up: murdered.
And here’s you saying they should ‘come together with their government’
You think the litany I went through is anger and not just historical fact? That’s on you.
Shitty propagandist technique to emotionally rile up your discursive partner. I see you.
You don’t get to be the arbiter of reality. I see it for what it is.
This is so obviously false. US religious racists have had full control over the country starting from the founding, for far longer than 40 years. It resulted in completely different conditions, because it started from completely different conditions. I can’t even enumerate all the ways in which this is wrong.
First off, Iran is not a settler colony founded fundamentally on indigenous genocide, land theft, and chattel slavery.
Second, Iran does not use religion as a justification for a globe-spanning military empire. It is an indigenous culture on its homeland. It is defending against imperial incursion, not engaging in the management of the contradictions of empire, which is what the Christian conservative movement in the US is doing.
I will stop there because I don’t think I’ll ever convince you of anything that contradicts your preconceived notions
Book #2!
I chuckle once more and, as you seem at least somewhat interested in history, serve you this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelver_Shi'ism & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Iran
Ugh. I promise this is the last time I will rise to your bait.
It is literally impossible for religions themselves to be “original” to a land. Religions develop among indigenous cultures and they compete for mindshare. All religions emerge from the activities of humans in social contexts and religions winning or losing mindshare is not enough to conside them indigenous or colonizing. It is the PEOPLE who are of the land or not of the land. At the cutting edge of indigenous social science there is research and analysis going on about the process of becoming indigenous to place since nearly all place with humans on it received humans through migration. Your shallow analysis of the history of Islam is useless in navigating this terrain.
The people of Iran, including the people who form the government, the people who support the government, and the people who oppose the government, are indigenous to the lands that they occupy. Their development and use of religion is [edit] not [/edit] genetic - ideas are not indigenous to lands, people are.
And now that that’s been dealt with, we return back to your statement that the Iranian government is what would happen in the US if conservatives had unopposed power for 40 years. Your own references to Wikipedia show that position to be completely at odds with reality.
But you don’t read sources to understand. You read sources to reinforce your already preconceived positions, cherry pick the smallest facts that you can vibe with, draw incorrect conclusions, and then assume everyone else is less educated than you are and operating purely from irrational positions of emotion and ideological fervor.
Bye.
Thanks!
btw I think this is your best sentence in there: