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.”
There’s no civil war because the Iranian regime kills everyone that poses a threat. People are taking to the streets to demand basic rights and they get shot in the head by the thousands.
How do you suggest the Iranian people get out of this situation?
Again, I ask, why does the responsibility always default to the US? Why?
Responsibility?
By coming together with their government to defeat the imperialists?
Start shooting protestors and hanging gays?
Find and expose the foreign spies operating in Iran, continue to advocate on the world stage for the end to the crimes against humanity that are the collective punishment of sanctions, and engage in mutual aid to reduce the suffering caused by the crimes against humanity that are the collective punishment of sanctions.
What they shouldn’t do is align their interests with the US and Israel for the violent overthrow of the anti-imperialist Iranian government.
Yeah but what if you want to help your government to ‘expose the spies’ and they tell you to go hang some gays first? Do you side with teh empire or hang the gays?
Fun thought experiment but the government is not asking average citizens to hang gay people.
But even if they did. The answer is you never side with the empire and you become a conscientious objector for anything you believe you should not do but are ordered to do. Conscientious objectors are not traitors. People who side with the empire are.
Would you consider it siding with teh empire if you intervene when they are hanging gay people?
Basically the government would lose time catching them again when they could be looking for spies instead
Of course not. Here have been plenty of protests in Iran over the last several decades and there has never been the situation that we saw in this most recent violent episode. It’s like you live in a world where there is no history, there’s only a collection of vague facts strictly formed into a Manichean moral framing and nothing is going to stop you from creating decontextualized trolley problems that make your vibes-based conclusion both obvious and vacuous.
That’s a weird response to my post, lol
I think you have whipped yourself into such a frenzy against the US that you’ve become unable to empathise with or even understand the plight of the common people in Iran