Comment by ajsnigrutin
5 hours ago
But what can you do for iran? I mean... we can type text on forums and sites like this, that no one in iran can see... and in the meantime, EU will push for another chat control, some new "think of the children" thing will happen, suddenly the "show your real-identity ID to watch at porn" will turn into "show your ID to register on reddit".
On the other hand, there are many people from EU here who need to hear it, that EU is doing the same as iran... censoring websites and more (IDs, chat control,...). Yes, maybe not at the same level, less sites are censored here, but censorship is still censorship, and the trend is going towards more control and more censorship.
United states, israel (and palestine), etc. are different. Are we bothered by what israel is doing in palestine? Yes! (some of us). Can we actually do something about it? Sure... the germans can tell their government to stop selling weapons to israel [0], we can implement sanctions, tarrifs, etc. This is something that we can do "at home", something that can make some change. We did that for russia, we did that for iran, north korea etc (at various times and various levels), but we did something. We didn't really do that (at least not at scale) for isreal. US is doing that to us (EU) with tarrifs every two weeks, but we didn't really properly respond, even under the threat of an invasion on greenland.
Yes, restricted internet in iran is bad, but we can't stop it. Sadly, changing back EU rules is similarly hard to do, which again, is something that should be fixed, by us, at home.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...
> I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there
(Just a reminder that the above is what I responded to)
> But what can you do for iran?
You can encourage your governments to take action against Iran as well. Further sanctions, diplomatic pressure, providing support to the Iranian people, &c. In my case as an American I am encouraging my government to take the toughest action possible to stop Iran. Much of the blood of dead Palestinians can be placed at their feet too since they arm and support Hezbollah and Hamas who are doing what they can to keep killing people and keep the conflict active.
Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.
Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.