Comment by RiverStone
12 hours ago
I didn’t really know much about Iran as a typical American until I married an Iranian woman. And then I met her family and her friends and I came to love Persian people. They’re some of the kindest people I’ve ever met.
What hasn’t come up enough in this thread is the currency crisis that triggered the protests. The economy is in shambles and they’re still simmering anger about the Mahsa Amini killing.
There Iranian people are tired of being under the thumb of the mullahs. They don’t want to live under an Islamic theocracy.
Millions of Iranians all over the world and inside Iran are cheering us on. They’re done. Yes, they’re scared and they don’t know what will come next, but they know what they have now is intolerable.
it’s possible this could all go badly, but what the Iranian people have now is worse. We have to try. Every Iranian person I’ve met is hopeful something better will come.
A similar scenario to this played out in Yugoslavia and overthrowing of the previously proven, and definitely not 90% manufactured "evil, genocidal and dictatorship regime" of Slobodan Milosevic. A lot of people cheered, including many expats, and "democracy" and "freedom" were finally gifted to the people. To be clear, I, in no way, justify any atrocities committed in war by any party - but "evil" and "savage" was used to describe a lot of legitimate reactions of the country, in a very similar way to how Iran is now "savagely attacking" innocent countries around them.
What happened afterwards in reality was 20+ years of escalating corruption and sale and systemic destruction of any valuable assets - culminating in the government of Aleksandar Vucic, member of Milosevic's regime, who in the recent years pumped out absolutely incredible amounts of money out of the country and is a de-facto dictator.
If you ask people who remember living under Milosevic about how it was, they all say the same thing - bad in some ways, but certainly better than this, and that he was a "little kitten" compared to the current fully criminal organisation.
Ironically, Iranians right now are saying the same thing about the Shah. They’re saying that, while the Shah wasn’t perfect, things were better back then than they are now.