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.”
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
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