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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

Good luck to them. None of the Arab Spring revolutions have gone well. 0/6

> None of the Arab Spring revolutions have gone well

None of the Arab-Spring populations had democratic rule since, arguably, Carthage. Iran is different [1].

More importantly, Iran was recently a secular society. It has memory of education and freedom. Many Arab countries have been fundamentalist for their entire modern eras.

(To be clear, every first democracy arose from the ashes of a string of fallen autocrats. I'm arguing for Iran being different from Egypt, Tunisia or Gaza.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_classical_Iran

Iran had a parliament until they wanted Iran to control its own oil, whence the US and UK overthrew Mossadegh. They had ayatollah Borujerdi wreck the democracy. Also Kashani who helped oust Mossadegh, and then later supported Khomeini.

The US recently worked to oust the secular leader of Syria to replace him with an ISIS leader. Actually al-Sharaa was on the US wanted terrorist list, only removed three months ago. Many such stories.

Sure. Not sure what about any of that says Iranians are incapable of governing themselves as a democracy.

Iranians are protesting because their economy is collapsing from targeted attacks by the US/West.

Foreign media records them and says they are trying to depose the theocracy, propaganda to justify a military incursion.

Wild claims of civilians being killed by the regime, with zero evidence, manufactured from thin air. (WMD's in Iraq, White phosphorus in Syria)

Average person now thinks it's their duty to to send American sons to die in the sandbox for another generation.

The only winner here, israel.

It seems pretty clear civilian protests have been killed by the regime, even by the regimes own admission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres

There's a lot of uncertainty as to how many though.

No Iran had a parliamant until it was overthrown in a socialist revolution. Then the ayatollahs started killing people, taking power. The KGB, of course, was also involved, on the side of the ayatollahs, like all socialists (the socialist international supported Khomeini personally). I kind of agree that the CIA is not always on the right side, but in Iran, is it so hard to say that at the very least the CIA was a lot better than the alternative?

Hell, the ayatollahs even gave communist housing a shot. They failed, just like they failed at everything, but they gave it a shot.

So you can ask the direct question: just like Venezuela was way better off with oil extraction before Chavez/Maduro ... and also in Iran you can easily say the situation was better before ... so is oil extraction and participating in the global economy not a lot better, at least for anyone actually living there?

According to the book "A Convergence of Civilizations" from Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd [1], the Iran revolution actually happened at the end of the 70s. And indeed, the political situation is not stable yet. The authors argue in the book that historically, it can take from 30 to more than 100 years before a country gets a stable democracy after a revolution.

Notably, the book was written before the Arab Spring revolutions, and yet, it predicted them rather accurately. The main thesis of the book is that a revolution arises when most of the men and most of the women in a country can read.

[1]: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-convergence-of-civilizations...

maybe the fact that Persians != Arabs will improve their odds. Recent uprisings had more luck (i.e. Bangladesh), even if it’s too early to fully assess their success

Bangladesh hasn't become a "democracy" in any manner. Remember that a whole host of leaders were arrested, and the most popular political party banned from participating in the recent elections! You can claim that if they were popular there wouldn't have been any "revolutions" when they were ruling. But note that this is a country that has struggled with violence throughout its history, has seen many military coups, and struggled to be a democracy. If they weren't popular, why were these so-called revolutionaries so hell-bent in not allowing them to participate in the "first free and fair" elections organised by them? You don't become a democracy by deliberately excluding a political party that was instrumental in the founding of Bangladesh, and is supported by half the country - that's how you weaken your country's unity and lay the grounds for a civil war.

The status quo in Iran isn’t going well either; the economy is terrible and getting worse, and the government is slaughtering its own citizens.

> the economy is terrible and getting worse

we could always stop punishing the people of Iran for their government...

And the government could stop murdering people.

So could ours. But wishes were fishes there would be no room for water.

Right, a clearer way of saying this, as you do, is the West imposed crippling sanctions just prior to all of this, as Trump sends aircraft carriers to the Gulf.

> a clearer way of saying this, as you do, is the West imposed crippling sanctions

The world doesn't revolve around the West. Nobody in America caused the IRGC to engineer a water crisis. Nobody asked for them to murder students in an internet-connected age, like the single thing you do not do if you want to calm things down.

Sanctions have made Iranians poorer. But so has their gerontocratic theocracy pursuing autarky and misguided nuclear ambitions at any cost. Khamenei can't hold open elections because he knows he'd lose.

So why don't we apply the same reasoning to the other authoritarian theocracies in the region that are just as oppressive? This whole idea that Iran is somehow uniquely bad just stinks to high heaven, and we have caused the people of iran to suffer for decades for it. I don't think Iran is the uniquely evil state between the two of us. (Not that the US is the cause of all evil, of course, but we certainly have caused many orders of magnitude more harm to the iranian people...)

> why don't we apply the same reasoning to the other authoritarian theocracies in the region that are just as oppressive?

They're either our allies, aren't pursuing nuclear weapons and/or aren't actively destabilising everything in their vicinity.

America calling for regime change in the Middle East is fraught, and I'm honestly not yet on board with direct action (though that's about as influential as what shade the moon is tonight). But Iran is "uniquely bad." It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.

> It's also uniquely imperialistic in the region, up there with to Israel.

Iran hasn't had a direct conflicr with anyone but Iraq and Israel in the last fifty years, last I checked, and the conflict with Israel was in response to unproved aggression.

If you're talking proxy wars, how are Iran's proxies any worse than UAE's, or Turkey's, or the Saudi's? And Israel has certainly been orders of magnitude more destabilizing.

I'm entirely unconvinced.

Hiding behind proxies doesn't absolve the Iranian regime of culpability for their aggression. Hezbollah alone fired tens of thousands of Iranian rockets at Israel just in 2023-24. There's no mystery about who provided the weapons or for what purpose. Calling any Israeli action against Iran "unprov[ok]ed" is absurd.

Right and we could allow that government to continue to murder tens of thousands of it’s innocent civilians, build proxy armies that are larger than all the armies of Europe to kill all the Jews, to murder all of their minorities and anyone that remotely scares them while they build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that they could use to murder Americans in the east coast, I mean they so scream “Death to America!” at all of their pro Islamic regime rallies … Or was that not what you meant?

The Tunisian revolution was a success.

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