"Iran under the mullahs is a totalitarian dictatorship, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and communist North Korea. Dictatorships, by their nature, have no claim to sovereignty.
"Iran’s mullahs, ayatollahs, and other varieties of witch doctors are a cross between a horde of fanatics and a criminal gang. To speak of their enslavement of their own populace as if it had a particle of legitimacy means the rulers have the right to subjugate and terrorise those caught in its jaws. Such relativism does to morality what jihadists did to the World Trade Center on 9/11.
"As one Iranian escapee asked on social media: Why is it, do you think, that there are no Iranians in the West protesting Israel’s attack? The absence of protests by Iranian refugees tells you all you need to know about the nature of the Iranian regime. ...
"Dictatorships do not recognise any rights of their enslaved subjects. They cannot, therefore, claim some 'right to rule.' ...
"Once we cease to think in collective terms, the principle becomes clear: among fully free countries, it does not matter which one has jurisdiction over the area in which you live. Your life and happiness depend on your rights being protected, not violated, by whichever government has jurisdiction.
"Whether or not one lives under the jurisdiction of a rights-protecting government, not the colours of the flag one lives under, is the life-or-death issue. ...
"The time has come to move toward freeing all the people in the Middle East, thereby making the whole world safer. The time has come to end the Islamic Regime in Iran."~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'Why not end the Iranian dictatorship?'
That said ...
"Iran [is] a country that is vaster, more populous, and significantly more complex than Iraq. ...
"Should Israel continue on its current trajectory, including the targeting of the Islamic Republic’s civilian and energy infrastructure, it will break the Iranian state. But the Israelis are neither capable of, nor inclined to, pick up the pieces afterward. Rather, they will 'internationalise' the problem.. ...
"Optimists may note that Iran isn’t Iraq — an ethno-sectarian hodge-podge cobbled together within artificially drawn borders. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s ethnic constituents have long related organically as Iranians.
"But while this is true, even this innate coherence couldn’t ease the deeper struggle: the difficulty of rebuilding order in a context of profound, culturally ingrained tension between state and society. ..."
~ Sohrab Ahmari from his post 'The regime change maniacs are back'
Still, Iranians deserve better. Much better. And so does everyone the mullahs and their proxies have terrorised since 1979.
PS: A few Iranian and related folk I follow on Twitter...
Masih Alinejad
π‘πΆπΌπ΅ ππ²πΏπ΄ ♛ ✡︎
Kareem Rifai
mersedeh_eye
Elica Le Bon Ψ§ΩΫΪ©Ψ§ Ω Ψ¨Ω
Ali Safavi
Alireza Jafarzadeh
Nasser Sharif
Hamid Azimi
Nasrin Saifi
NCRI-FAC
People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)
1 comment:
I agree with the gist, but two contrary observations. Firstly, I don't regard either the absence or presence of Iranian protests in the West as a meaningful metric for how bad the regime is. After all, there's a lot protesting Israel's attacks on Gaza, which has just as much if not more justification. Secondly, I don't think we can say the Iranian people deserve something better. No doubt some don't deserve it. But there must be a majority, or at least a large minority that allowed the regime to come to power in the first place, and still be there today. John Lewis in his book Nothing Less Than Victory makes a convincing case that wars aren't won by just targeting the regime. The populace needs to suffer at home the consequences of the regime's fighting wars abroad, before the will to wage war is eliminated.
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