Comment by mcny
4 days ago
> At Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, students dressed in black shouted “Long Live the Shah,” a reference to Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch, who has emerged as a leader of the recent protests.
This is unfortunate and gives the regime a chance to say "see, these people are puppets of the monarchy".
I feel like the people who want a monarchy installed are trying to fish in troubled waters.
Not puppets of the monarchy per se but at least some of them may be puppets of foreign actors who are backing the monarchy.
Honestly very hard to say, I don’t know what to believe about the Iran situation. I think it’s pretty much impossible to get a good understanding of it from a western country
> Honestly very hard to say
It really isn't. Inflation at a fraction of Iran's prompts governments to change in any democracy.
What I mean is two things are true at once:
1) Iran's government has not done a good job of running the country and is therefore genuinely unpopular among a significant percentage of the population.
2) Iran's current government has powerful enemies (US, UK and of course a country in the Middle East all really hate the Iranian regime) and those enemies are actively trying to destabilise it.
So it's really hard from the perspective of being in a western country to work out how much of the protests are genuinely endogenous to Iran and how much is an intelligence operation, because it's clearly not 0%
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> gives the regime a chance to say "see, these people are puppets of the monarchy"
Regime isn't the messaging target. Foreign actors are. And rightly or wrongly, desperate people will choose the icons they have, and the set to choose from is generally those that are helping and those the current regime despises. The first set is scarce. So we're left with the second.
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The points are valid, but why the personal insults?
Re: the grandparent comment.
"Javid Shah" is one of the main chants of the recent protests. It's not particularly specific. Reza Pahlavi is the main figurehead of the opposition. He's a likely candidate to preside over a transitional government if this new revolution succeeds.
The regime's positioning is largely irrelevant now. The people are liable to adopt the opposite position simply because they see the regime as their enemy.