I didn't say that this article is manipulation, just that most people see such countries only through the news. I'm just saying that many countries with cruel laws have interesting and colorful cultures worth exploring from a tourist's point of view. If someone is not comfortable with that, ok, I just don't thing people should be discouraged by that because in the end, it's not the politics that suffer but natives (current example: outage of tourism in Syria, and a few years ago, in Nepal).
Persepolis was great, check out other modern Iranian and Iranian/Kurdish productions, there's a bunch of awesome cinema there, to mention the most known ones: About Elly, Separation, Time of drunken horses, No One Knows About Persian Cats, Women without men, and lots of other. If you want to read something lightweight where culture and regime meet, check Lipstick Jihad.
> I've never subscribed to the "citizens are actually good, it's the governments who are evil" argument, it just shifts the blame, e.g. "the Nazis did it" by reification: governments are made of people and they, more or less, are populistic, following the majority's wishes. There are many parts of the society in Iran that back the current regime, don't think that everybody's against it.
(Godwin's Law alert)
No doubt, but such events as nazis comming to power or the islamic revolution are subjects too complex to discuss here in a comment (at least I don't have the intention at the moment).