Yeah, absolutely, it is a minority. But I don't think it's entirely irrelevant. The clergy used religion to twist and conform the will of the people, turning their views into Sharia treacle. Human suffering is relevant in an empathetic way, but it's also good to know that human society can look like Iran with the majoritys support. Western society could end up in as bad a spot as Iran, all it takes is a revolution. There is a growing christian theocracy movement in every western country. Disillusionment with western capitalism and democracy is as high as ever and as things get worse, theocratic dictatorships become more and more appealing to more people. There is a non-zero chance we could have our own Iranian style revolution in just a few generations.
I agree mostly. It's like North Korea, I can't really do anything to change the situation. My government can't change the situation. We can try to push some buttons to help foster change but we can't force it. Change has to come from within.
Have you listened to the it could happen here podcast? The first episodes(the story ones) are pretty good.
Edit specifically this episode but you should start with episode 1 for more background.
If you listen to anti-imperialist analysis by Iranians, it's never been "Western disillusionment". The West has always brutalized Iran, stolen from them, murdered them in droves, and destroyed their national self-direction. Nothing saved Iran from the West until the theocracy emerged and purged all of the Western influence. Iranians have the benefits of their own labor and their own resources for the first time in centuries because of the theocracy. And I don't think any of them think theocracy is the pinnacle of Iran's potential, but neither are they ready to liberalize until the West falls.
Edit: Frankly, your whole contribution to this thread reeks of orientalism. In your world view, the Iranian people have all had their brains wrecked by authoritarian religious freaks and they've become disillusioned with the former vision for a civilized West. This implies that Westoids are normal people with functioning brains and that the problem is limited to some "bad guys" in the West that ruined it by being greedy.
The reality is so different from the delusion your worm-eaten brain conjures up. The West has been mushing the brains of its people for centuries and the entire Western project has been to destroy, murder, pillage, and extract everything it can get its hands on with zero respect for life, dignity, truth, culture, or anything that makes life what it is. The West has been a fanatical death cult for centuries. There is literally no way to criticize a country like Iran the way you do without exposing yourself as a completely propagandized subject of said death cult.
I don't like the oppression of women nor the elevation of religion either, but that doesn't mean I regurgitate Western propaganda.
I think calling the west a fanatical death cult is a bit romantic. Let's not pretend that much of the rest of the world isn't the same but has historically just lacked the means to do it at the scale the west has.
And nobody is regurgitating western propoganda, we're talking about the protests in Iran and you start spouting this shit. Way to project.
The West literally subjugated 80% if the world's population and invented religious, scientific, economic, political, and cultural justification for it. There is no death cult larger or longer living in the world today than the west. The only way to do what they did was to get their population on board. They propagandized their people the most thoroughly to do the most atrocities in the most effective ways possible in order to achieve that 80%. It's not merely that they had steel. They also needed millions of people to believe that death was life, slavery was liberty, god is good and also god says we must kill, rape, and enslave all of these people. It is literally an understatement to call the West a fanatical death cult.
And y'all are regurgitating Western propaganda in this entire thread when you parrot the bullshit that the theocracy has turned Iranian brains into mush. It's straight up orientalism.
Projection is when I accuse you of doing something I am already doing. I am not eating Iranian propaganda every single day from the day I am born to now. I am not educated by Iranian propagandists. My movies are not rewritten by the Iranian military. My TV is not owned by Iranian oil magnates. Instead you and I live in the West and our entire lives have been soaking in the most vile, most effective, and most pervasive propaganda in the history of the world. When you accuse Iran of making Iranians believe garbage, that's projection. When I tell you your brain is rotten with Westoids worms, that's not projection.
You try so hard to sound smarter than you really are. Also, you don't think that what's happening in China, N.K and Ukraine isn't worse than what's happening in the west? Lol. The West are no angels, but you seem to have a personal vendetta.
And you are projecting. You are spouting the exact shame rhetoric, just from a different perspective. Extremist, media-inspired dribble.
Do I think what's happening in China, NK, and Ukraine is worse than what's happening in the West? Absolutely not. Turtle Island is under a 500 year occupation by European settler colonial structures that killed hundreds of millions of people in a program to make extinct all non-European ways of life.
The occupation of the world by Western white capitalist men is still ongoing and still threatens to end cultures, national self-direction, biodiversity, and sometimes even all life on earth through nuclear escalation. The US has pulled out of so many weapons treaties, has poisoned multiple generations of Vietnamese, Japanese, Yugoslavians, Iraqis, etc. The man who designed and engineered the mass murder of generations of Southeast Asians, Kissinger, literally just went to China as a representative of the US. It's non-fucking-stop extreme violence by white men.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea have all been bombed to shit by Americans, specifically. The amount of unexploded US ordinance in these regions is mind boggling. The amount of ordinance dropped by the US defies human cognition.
Then we have the US-trained death squads using US-guided tactics to terrorize families and indigenous communities throughout the "Americas", literally torturing and beheading entire families. The US torture program. The long history of Euro-US apartheid in the Americas, the support for South African and Israeli apartheid, the explicit opposition to ending South African apartheid. The emergence of Euro fascism replicating the US program of apartheid. The industrialization of mass murder.
The US leaves open uranium waste pits in Indian territory, poisoning generations of native families. They destroy water and food supplies, on purpose, to maximize extraction and maintain genocide. The mass murder of the US buffalo was committed by the US military to be explicitly take advantage of a treaty clause that would strip the indians of the lands the US displaced them to. Canada is subject to many of these same critiques.
And it never stops. It hasn't stopped in 600 years. Name a country that isn't part of Europe and it will have a centuries-long history of brutal domination by white people replete with genocide, torture, slavery, and theft in the billions. Haiti is still suffering under the debt the West levied on them for freeing themselves under the shared recognition by the West that slaves who revolt stole the property of their own bodies from their owners. The famines caused by England killed millions of subjects. All of the Western touting of poverty reduction has backslid and is built on the total subjugation of billions. If you take China's poverty alleviation numbers out of the UN total count, the backsliding in Western-held territories leaves almost nothing to speak of.
Yes, what's happening in the West is many many many times worse than what's happening in China, DPRK, and Ukraine. And we haven't even talked about Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, the Berlin Conference, nuclear weapons testing in populated areas, environmental devastation by Western oil companies and the millions they kill, the must brutal embargo regimes inflicting collective punishment on hundreds of millions of innocent people for almost a century. The 600 global military bases. The predatory lending. The disgusting medical experimentation. The role of religion in all this.
And despite all of this, you still think you have a leg to stand on. And that's the icing on the cake - the amount of Western propaganda and indoctrination that enlists little children in propagating structural racism and violent extremism from a very early age. Indoctrination so thorough that 20 years of schooling are all completely and thoroughly aligned with the violent lies that perpetuate genocide and no one bats an eye. Where all mass media reinforces the dominant narrative and when people speak up millions shout them down. Where sex is worse than violence. Where violence is so normalized that children commit mass murder in their school on a regular basis. Where you and I can have a real conversation and you think it's somehow logical to claim that what's happening in China is worse than what's happening in the West.
It's a terrifyingly powerful indoctrination, so it's not surprising that you hold the position you do, but it is a position without a single shred of basis. It is 100% a set of false beliefs that perpetuate the centuries-long genocidal extraction and accumulation of wealth.
Go learn history. The fact that you think I'm spouting "the exact same rhetoric" is fucking mind blowing. The fact that you think this is "media inspired" leaves me completely dazed and confused. What media do you think I have access to that pushes this? You think I watch Chinese TV? Russian TV? Iranian TV? You think they have the time and inclination to put out media programs that explain 600 years of global domination by white people? Motherfucker I am studying history and have been for years now and this is literally what happened. Nothing I detailed above is media hype. It's literally YOUR history. Go fucking learn it.
Relax dude. You let the baby out with the bathwater. What are you trying to accomplish, you really think I'm going to change my mind and NOT think you're some nutjob with these walls of text? You do you.
Also, you haven't changed my mind. I still think that other cultures are equally bad if not worse. I could provide examples and explain it, but it's not like you'd listen anyway.