[AugustusCrunch]

I'm following the protests. I'm not sure why a cruel and sadistic minority can run a country, but it happens. I'm inclined to wonder why the US military, pulling out, didn't arm every woman and intellectual in the country. I won't forget his name.

[tdeck]

> I'm inclined to wonder why the US military, pulling out, didn't arm every woman and intellectual in the country. I won't forget his name.

Because the US wants to back something it can control, not a popular movement. The US government backed Iran's prior cruel and sadistic minority.

[Barrin92]

because it wasn't a minority. The Iranian revolution had wide backing, the Shah was an absolute monarch who came to power in a coup. Women and students featured pretty prominently as well. Lots of the tactics today like women opposing the military directly were used back then too.

[paledot]

The revolution had a wide backing, but - importantly! - it was a revolution against the Shah, not in favour of Islamic fundamentalism. The hard-liners were merely the most prepared to step into the power vacuum that followed.

Calling it the "Islamic Revolution", as state-sponsored history books do, is crass revisionism.

[vinaypai]

When did the US pull out of Iran?

[yieldcrv]

1979

The prior government was installed by the US because the government before that wanted to audit BP - the oil company - and cant have that!

The only citizens extreme enough to correct this happened to also be religious extremists and now they run the country ever since

[pessimizer]

> The only citizens extreme enough to correct this happened to also be religious extremists

That's not what happens; it's that in these neo-colonialist situations, all secular dissidents can be imprisoned and murdered (with US help), but religious dissidents can't safely be. So when the revolution succeeds, the religious take over. Same thing happened with Morsi in Egypt.

[tgma]

It's not exactly that simple: Islamists (and religion in general) is also perceived to be an antidote to Marxism. At the height of the Cold War and bordering Soviet Union, the west resorted to creating and supporting religious groups "Mujahedin" in Afghanistan (Taliban v0.1) and Khomeini in Iran.

The Late Shah of Iran is on record constantly warning about "Red regression" (referring to Communists) and "Black regression" (referring to Islamic fundamentalists) as threats of the nation and the 1979 revolution succeeded by them joining forces (and the commies got the axe afterwards). Funny that in the western world, we are seeing the extreme left/woke anti-Americans and the Islamists join forces again too, despite being cut of very different clothes: the general American left narrative is silent on issues of Islam (particularly bad when it comes to women and LGBT) as it contradicts their own narrative of fighting "Islamophobia". I doubt this ends well.

[consumer451]

> Funny that in the western world, we are seeing the extreme left/woke anti-Americans and the Islamists join forces again too

Going to need a citation there good sir.

[mehrdada]

Look no further than Ilhan Omar: Islam, anti-imperialism (BDS), LGBT-activism (mostly T-activism these days), and radical feminism have joined forces.

Or the extreme lack of coverage of Iran protests in the major US newspapers despite their unprecedented scale and spread across the world (dare it looks anti-Hijab and exposes Islam as a threat) as another example.

I'm surprised you see this as a controversial claim. Here's how an Iranian women's right activist discusses how she's alienated by the Feminist crowd because she is against forced Hijab in Iran, making Islam look bad: https://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bill-maher/season-20/29-s...

This behavior is par for the course of the contemporary western left narrative. A western country behaving like France restricting Hijab to some degree gets many times more exposure than Taliban and Islamic Republic mandatory Hijab.

[daemoens]

Yeah there an incident of Muslims protesting LGBTQ+ content in Dearborn schools/libraries just a week or two ago. The left protects groups like Muslims because it's the right thing to do, regardless if that group can be hateful towards certain groups. The majority of Muslims used to vote for Republicans until 9/11, because Republicans continued to generally be against them while the Democrats stopped after realized hating a whole group over the actions of less 0.1% of them was actually bad. The Muslims I know mostly vote Republican locally, and Democrat nationally.