Protests in Iran against Islamic government
The protests in Iran continue, fueled by the admitted shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing everyone on board, as well as what appears to be a clear opposition to the Islamic government and the terrorists its supports.
The link has good video of both the protests and the government’s violent reaction. However, the best and most illustrative video indicating where these protesters stand is the one that shows Iranian protesters refusing to walk on the American and Israeli flags, painted on the ground by the government in the hope that they would be trampled.
Meanwhile, other protesters have been ripping down posters of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds forces and master Iranian terrorist leader whom Trump killed last week.
It is unclear what will happen next. The situation in Iran today reminds a great deal of the protests that took place in the Soviet bloc shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, and helped bring that communist empire down. They also remind me of the same protests in China at the same time, which were met with vicious force, killing thousands, which allowed that communist dictatorship to maintain power.
We don’t know which route the Islamic leadership in Iran will take. They have clearly shown themselves willing to kill thousands. At the same time, they are presently as economically weak as the Soviet communists were, which doesn’t give them the resources needed for resisting an aggressive revolt.
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The protests in Iran continue, fueled by the admitted shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing everyone on board, as well as what appears to be a clear opposition to the Islamic government and the terrorists its supports.
The link has good video of both the protests and the government’s violent reaction. However, the best and most illustrative video indicating where these protesters stand is the one that shows Iranian protesters refusing to walk on the American and Israeli flags, painted on the ground by the government in the hope that they would be trampled.
Meanwhile, other protesters have been ripping down posters of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds forces and master Iranian terrorist leader whom Trump killed last week.
It is unclear what will happen next. The situation in Iran today reminds a great deal of the protests that took place in the Soviet bloc shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, and helped bring that communist empire down. They also remind me of the same protests in China at the same time, which were met with vicious force, killing thousands, which allowed that communist dictatorship to maintain power.
We don’t know which route the Islamic leadership in Iran will take. They have clearly shown themselves willing to kill thousands. At the same time, they are presently as economically weak as the Soviet communists were, which doesn’t give them the resources needed for resisting an aggressive revolt.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
The weak strategy of appeasement: Obama sells out and ignores the Iranian population as they demonstrate in the streets against their governments oppression, while Solemeni directs them to be shot down in the streets, and the people of Iran stomp on the American flag.
The strong strategy: Trumps blows up Solemeni, deserved, reinstructing the Mullahs of Iran and supports the people of Iran protesting their oppression in the streets, and the people refuse to stomp on the American flag.
HMM.
Which strategy does anyone with a pulse and a registering IQ think is the better and more productive and secure strategy? The Democrat leadership continues to think that the weak strategy is the way to go. Stupid is as stupid does, but this is something else altogether and it borders on sinister and of course Anti and Un American.
In any mass protest that I can remember, the real determinant is whether the military is willing to fire on their fellow citizens. In Russia and Eastern Europe, as communism fell, they couldn’t. In Tiananmen Square, they did. In Hong Kong, the police did, but the government blinked, at least for a bit; time will tell on that one. In Venezuela, so far, the military still has control.
Iran must be unstable at this point. The truth is out about the airliner attack. The IRGC and Quds must be deeply demoralized. TV newscasters have begun apologizing for lying on behalf of the government. The economy is a wreck.
We do live in interesting times.
@Cotour… Strangely enough, I kinda agree with you…
Iran is still a highly educated and enlightened … ( By the way , before you decide to bomb for real, check out the bloody size and population of the place!
Regime change would not be so hard… Prediction of the aftermath… A little harder..
The vast majority of the population is under 40, they just want to make babies and work for a living wage… As didn’t ( or don’t ) we all? Regardless of the strange syncronisity between a plane loaded with professers and students of nuclear physics being shot down by accident… Coincidence???
Or it could be that your crazy president ( don’t shoot me… That’s how he is perceived here in Europe!) Decided to kill an Iranian general in an extra judicial attack….
I personally, am sitting on the fence right now…. Perhaps trump is a genius,.and got his timing just right… Or perhaps it’s absolutely sheer blind luck we are not in WWE…..
Lee S:
Congratulations!
I doubt very much that the Mullahs have any intent or stomach for really squaring off with “Crazy” Trump, call me crazy.
“Crazy” is a strength in a president, being weak, predictable and an appeaser in a president is only a reason for an American voter to correct that faulty situation in the next election.
To all:
It should not be forgotten that in 1953 the United Kingdom and the United States overthrew a democratically elected president (Mohammad Mossadegh) in Iran and then installed a military dictatorship, followed by Shah’s autocratic regime, whose regime of violence also killed thousands of political opponents. Search for CIA / MI6 operation “Ajax”. So much for America’s bigotry.
Operation TPAJAX: CIA Admits Staging 1953 Iran Coup d’état 60 Years Later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wZzpXG2wJs
Your preaching to the choir Questioner.
Like I have said before, you do not understand the exercise of power, I.E. S.O.M. (Strategy Over Morality).
Are you morally outraged? Good luck with that, and now we understand why you do not properly understand what it is that you are arguing about.
All right we won’t forget it. -next.
Not to be argumentative, but Mossadegh was actually appointed by the Shah, not elected. When an election was actually held, he suspended it as soon as he had enough votes to win a quorum. Whatever the US and the UK did, they weren’t working against a liberty loving democrat.
Q said: “It should not be forgotten that in 1953 ,…..”
Tell me, …will this same excuse for Khomeinist violence be used in 2120 as well?
IMHO, the Mossadegh excuses for Khomeinist Caliphate Revivalism palled a long, long time ago. Khomeini just wanted a revival of Fatimid-style Caliphate, instead of a Salafist Caliphate. The Khomeinists ruling in Tehran’s Council of Guardians have no more use for representative government than ISIS did. They just put a slightly thicker veil over the truth, and started it long before ISIS ever existed.
That veil does not change their strategy, of getting nuclear weapons *before* they declare a Caliphate, instead of after, as ISIS did. It would not change their intent of an imperial Caliphate. It would not make their imperium any more tolerant of the freedoms of action needed to maintain and grow the networks of industrial society around the world. This particular version of anti-industrial reaction is no better than that offered by aristocrats before WW1, the racists before WW2, the socialists during WW3 (a.k.a. “The Cold War), or any other attempt to break industrial society.
Here is another example of the Iranian regimes tactics: A journalist and camera man shot dead.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/iraqi-journalists-assassinated-anti-government-protests
If Hillary had of been president, would Soleimani have committed suicide?,
Phill O:
Good stuff.
Patricia Smith:
“‘I blame Hillary Clinton for death of my son in Benghazi”
July 2017
https://youtu.be/2cLxOTPtYuA
1:19
Lee S,
There are parts of Iran that are educated and enlightened and parts that are neither. Only about half of Iran’s provinces are even majority Persian. The peripheral provinces are each dominantly of some other ethnicity/linguistic group. Among the more significant of these are Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and Baluchi.
The size and population of Iran place it 17th and 18th in the world, respectively. In population it is a peer of Germany and roughly 1/4 as populous as the United States. It’s not obvious how either Iran’s size or population relate to American ability to bomb the country. Perhaps you would care to elucidate further.
The majority of the Iranian population is indeed under 40 but, despite their wishes, a very sizable fraction of these have no work nor any real prospect of any. Times being as tough or tougher than in the U.S. of the Depression-era 1930’s, the Iranian interest in making babies has also taken quite a hit, just as was true here in the hardest of times. This birth dearth, which has been going on for awhile now, is having an effect similar to the One Child Policy’s effects in China – a rapid rise in the average age of the population and a proportionally declining younger cohort buckling under the burden of caring for the growing ranks of oldsters. This is a formidable source of social unrest in Iran just as it is becoming in China.
I can find no information as to just who the 176 people were aboard the ill-fated Ukrainian 737 other than the pilots and cabin crew. If you have such information from a source that is not a Russian troll or some part of the worldwide tinfoil hat-wearing brigade of conspiracy theorists, please post a link.
European impressions of things American are frequently at severe variance anent reality, the supposed “craziness” of Trump being simply one more such data point. When one is operating from a fundamentally defective grasp of reality, it is unsurprising that one reaches farcical conclusions. Grass-skirted tribesmen, when failing to comprehend something, typically fall back on magic or evil spirits as explanations. Europeans, often barely better able to understand current events than primitive tribesmen, have their own culturally convenient bag of stock explanations among which the “craziness” of Americans figures prominently. The history of Europe these last 150 years, of course, has been a model of logic and rationality compared to that of we street-corner loonies here in the U.S.
Characterizing the killing of Iran’s chief terrorist as “extra-judicial” is complete bollocks. The Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, has regarded itself as having been in a state of war with the U.S. since its founding a bit over 40 years ago. It has committed numerous aggressions against U.S. property and citizens during that time. At various times, including this most recent episode, the U.S. has chosen to treat Iran as though it is in a state of war with the U.S., at least for long enough to dole out some much-needed smackdowns aimed at encouraging more temperate future behavior. So killing a senior military officer of a hostile regime when he was incautious enough to leave his country’s territory was no more “extra-judicial” than were the killings of Bin Laden and Baghdadi or the shooting down of Adm. Yamamoto during WW2.
At this point it would appear that Iran has decided that discretion is the better part of valor, at least for the nonce. That would suggest that Pres. Trump’s timing, as well as the severity of the delivered blow, were quite well chosen and modulated.
Had Iran chosen a less circumspect response, it would have been quickly subjected to yet more chastisement of an even more painful nature – up to and including actual invasion and occupation should that have proven necessary. But a war with Iran would simply be a brief bit of violence followed by a significant improvement in the general Middle Eastern situation. It would not have been any sort of World War as the rest of the world would have little or no involvement in it.
Jocko Willink / Akira the Don
“The Enemy”
April 2019
https://youtu.be/4UgpgZApLs4
5:27
Dick wrote: “European impressions of things American are frequently at severe variance anent reality,”
This also applies to Canadian perspectives due to the one sided journalism there, for the most part. One friend who holds both Australian and American citizenship indicates the Australian perspective is worse than the Canadian.
As a retired ski instructor (Canadian Rockies) I can say the American tourist (on the ski hills) is kinder and more respectful than those from Australia, New Zealand, England and especially Europe. Living (6 months) in Southern New Mexico (close to the AZ border) gives a completely different perspective than the Canadian TV news.
As a retired scientist, of the chemical persuasion, I can say that the Trump administration is closer to the truth (on scientific issues) than the general European.
What is needed is journalism which reports the truth. I see where some Iranian journalists have quit and apologized for reporting lies! They may be seeing the turning of the tide of popular opinion and want to escape repercussions.
Trump and his evangelistic warriors of God (= Christian Mullahs?) in action.
Good performance, but will God be impressed? What do you mean? I don’t believe, their pride and showing off are sins.
Christian Leaders Pray Over Trump During Launch Of Evangelicals For Trump Coalition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrBvMFJ_drs
Questioner,
When has a Christian “warrior” pledged to kill or enslave people for not believing in the last couple of centuries?
In Christianity, it’s a metaphor. I haven’t seen any virulent Southern Baptists running around with suicide vests blowing up children on school buses.
Your continued attempts at comparison are misguided at best, and utter poison at worst.
commodude: I say utter poison. Questioner increasingly appears to me to be a neo-Nazi troll, based in Germany, whose only purpose in commenting here is to spread disinformation and to hopefully slander what this website represents.
If he or she is sincere about what he or she writes, then they are incredibly ignorant of the very evils that came out of Germany less than a hundred years ago, and are attempting to reincarnate them in this century, for the same evil ends.
When I was in Germany, shortly after the wall fell, the US started announcing the “victory dividend.” While out one night I had a very stark conversation with a woman who was a child at the end of WW2. She was worried that with the US leaving, the Nazis would return to power.
Thankfully, so far, they remain a fringe group, however, they’re obviously growing bolder.
And “Nick The Knife” Fuemte will lead them.
(But he will have to ask his mother first, he has chores and he promised to wash the car)