Opinion of Iran?

[Santander]

The only country that comes even close to rivaling China in terms of greatness.

[dead0man]

I hate the current government, but to say Iran didn’t grow exponentially without the Shah and the old system of aristocratic nobles dragging the country to hell isn’t good governance.

Well that’s what sanctions lead to you. On other indicators like HDI, Hospitals, life expectancy, literacy, and real employment—given that most stats made during the Shah are bull••••—Iran has improved tremendously. Even human rights have improved; the current regime is much more accepting of different ethnicities, labor rights are much better, and freedom of speech is much better outside of Communist and Atheist propagation.

why did they murder so many protestors a few years ago then?

[PSOL]

I hate the current government, but to say Iran didn’t grow exponentially without the Shah and the old system of aristocratic nobles dragging the country to hell isn’t good governance.

Well that’s what sanctions lead to you. On other indicators like HDI, Hospitals, life expectancy, literacy, and real employment—given that most stats made during the Shah are bull••••—Iran has improved tremendously. Even human rights have improved; the current regime is much more accepting of different ethnicities, labor rights are much better, and freedom of speech is much better outside of Communist and Atheist propagation.

why did they murder so many protestors a few years ago then?

Instability has risen mainly due to sanctions, and under the previous model under the same circumstances the situation would be much, much worse.

[dead0man]

Instability has risen mainly due to sanctions, and under the previous model under the same circumstances the situation would be much, much worse.

It must be nice to blame all their wrongs on sanctions.  They wouldn't have murdered their own people if it wasn't for pesky sanctions.  They wouldn't have blown up that bus full of Jews if they could import parts for their F4s.

Also, there were no financial sanctions on Iran until 1995 and those were only by the US.  The EU didn't get on board until 2006.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Like 30-40% of Iranian Jews hide their ancestry for social climbing reasons and write down Muslim on the census. Same with other religious minorities.

You're not helping your case here.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The pre-1979 regime in Iran was *incredibly* bad in almost all respects, and anyone who tries to say otherwise is not to be trusted. There are good reasons why the Revolution had the support of maybe 75-80% (if not more) of the population initially.

Sure, but there are also good reasons for why certain people of the older generation--, say, Jewish people and other religious minorities, and people who were more secular or even traditionally Muslim (read: not Khomeini-approved) in Iran (and in the region in general, indirectly)---might feel just a tad nostalgic for the pre-1979 era.

[PSOL]

Like 30-40% of Iranian Jews hide their ancestry for social climbing reasons and write down Muslim on the census. Same with other religious minorities.

You're not helping your case here.

I’m not defending the treatment of Jews by the regime, I’m just stating facts on what I know a significant amount of the population does and that there are generally a larger non-Muslim population than what the census lists.

[Make America Grumpy Again]

Interesting country with a lot of history but since 1979 and possibly beforehand, it has been a massive HC and Trump was correct to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

[S019]

Awful, the current government must be overthrown.

[TheReckoning]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

[KaiserDave]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

You came back to this thread for what, for one horrible take?

[TheReckoning]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

You came back to this thread for what, for one horrible take?

What’s so weird about saying those that led a revolution were revolutionaries? Isn’t that, like, the definition of a what a revolutionary is?

[KaiserDave]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

You came back to this thread for what, for one horrible take?

What’s so weird about saying those that led a revolution were revolutionaries? Isn’t that, like, the definition of a what a revolutionary is?

There is nothing "revolutionary" about the current ruling class of Iran, besides attempts at aesthetic and "Axis of Resistance" rhetoric, not sure how anyone could argue otherwise. What is there in the current Iranian regime but an attempt at an imagined Islamist pre-modern state of society enforced through increasingly violent social control?

I refer anyone interested to DFB's great post on how what initial revolutionary or somehow progressive force there was in the Iranian Revolution (which at one point there certainly was) was snuffed out.

It's worth mentioning that while many Islamist revolutionaries in Iran were clearly influenced by Marxism and leftism ~40 years ago, the "left-wing" of the revolution, hilariously enough, evolved into being its liberal reformist wing. To give an example, Mousavi's hero was Che Guevara and he was part of an "Islamic socialist" paramilitary organization. He, in many respects, was an architect of the IRI regime but, later in life, he, more or less, led a revolutionary movement to overthrow it.

By and large, supposed "moderates" in government like Hassan Rouhani are actually arch-conservatives. The old "left" of the revolution, which was once seen as being more radical, is dead. Various populist figures like Ahmadinejad, who were always seen as being radical, have evolved. Support for the government is near non-existent because any old impulses to redistribute income from Tehran to the rural hinterland is gone. Instead, we have a government committed to ultra-conservative social control and without any "popular" impulses. Any of the old "democratic" or "republican" aspects of Islamic Democracy are dead, have been dead.

This is all to say that while there was once a bit of truth to the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran as at least being influenced by socialism while also being near-genocidal against actual socialists, this is about its history. In its present, all hints of this past are gone. Its revolutionary energy is gone, its popular energy is gone and all that is left is cruel repression.

Also...

Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1400 years. You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom
-Ruhollah Khomeini

I mean if it talks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....

[Xing]

Horrible government, very good people.

[TheReckoning]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

You came back to this thread for what, for one horrible take?

What’s so weird about saying those that led a revolution were revolutionaries? Isn’t that, like, the definition of a what a revolutionary is?

There is nothing "revolutionary" about the current ruling class of Iran, besides attempts at aesthetic and "Axis of Resistance" rhetoric, not sure how anyone could argue otherwise. What is there in the current Iranian regime but an attempt at an imagined Islamist pre-modern state of society enforced through increasingly violent social control?

They overthrew millennia-old political structures in the favor of something wildly different, something that had never been seen before in Iran. That’s revolutionary.

[All Along The Watchtower]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

Yes and then Khomenei and his faction murdered them and established a brutal Islamist theocracy.

[TheReckoning]

A highly civilised and utterly fascinating country that has had the misfortune to be ruled for so long by a gang of ultra-reactionary lunatic murderers who hate everything about the country that has made it so great and for so very, very long.

*Revolutionaries. The people who led the Iranian Revolution were Revolutionaries.

Yes and then Khomenei and his faction murdered them and established a brutal Islamist theocracy.

A brutal Islamist theocracy… that was revolutionary.

Being brutal is fully compatible with being revolutionary. Being an Islamist is fully compatible with being revolutionary. Being a theocracy is fully compatible with being revolutionary.

That being said, if one wants to describe the current Iranian regime as being conservative (not reactionary, conservative), I can see that. But it was very inspired by revolutionary thought.

[KaiserDave]

Being an obtuse annoyance is fully compatible with TheReckoning.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

My host dad in Armenia was from Iran. We didn't have a language in common but according to my host mom the traffic in Teheran was terrible.