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Comment by shwaj | Hacker News Reader

Why not both? No need to be so disparaging.

We should be disparaging of fear mongering conspiracy theories that have no facts to back them up. Just like if you told me Democrats in the US are controlling hurricanes, or that 5G caused covid.

Just like those? Those examples are highly improbable, whereas the CIA is almost certainly active in Iran right now (that’s their job!), even if there isn’t evidence that they are behind these particular protests.

> whereas the CIA is almost certainly active in Iran right now (that’s their job!)

This is true of every intelligence agency. Reflexively reaching for the CIA to explain all geopolitics is lazy conspiratorialism.

People are disparaging of dumb conspiracism. This notion that any protest in a dictatorship is a CIA plot is bullshit. The whole “CIA color revolution” concept is bullshit meant to delegitimize and demoralize legitimate grassroots movements against shitty dictatorships. Even the Iranian leadership is publicly acknowledging their legitimacy shortfall and the economic catastrophe, and that’s saying something.

If you don’t believe in protests within dictatorships then you don’t believe in democracy. As simple as that.

"A CIA plot" goes too far, true. But to believe the CIA isn't involved at all in fomenting revolution in a country whose current government is the result of the CIA having done so in the past, and which the US considers part of the "Axis of Evil," and which is an ally to a country the US is currently waging a war of aggression and plunder against (Venezuela) seems naive.

> to believe the CIA isn't involved at all in fomenting revolution in a country

Yes, it’s possible to believe in an incompetent CIA. Particularly when Iran is directly an adversary to multiple countries in the Middle East and further that it’s been fucking with more recently than the 1970s.

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