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Comment by Herring

5 hours ago

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.

  • Crass bullshit. Democracy wont survive in iran until the govt want their oil to be depleted by western war hungry demons. We truly live in hell

    • > Democracy wont survive in iran until the govt want their oil to be depleted by western war hungry demons

      Yet somehow Brazil, Mexico, India and hosts of other non-European-origin-majority resource-rich democracies exist.

      That said, maybe the limiting factor on democracy is agency. If a culture blames outside forces for all of its woes, there is nothing it can–within that worldview–do to self improve. So it won't. If, on the other hand, it separates the factors it can control from those it can't (and nobody can control all of the factors, that's just reality), it has a hope.

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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

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...

    • 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.

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    • 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?

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