> I’m not convinced. My small anecdata of Iranian friends with contacts in Iran agrees with me.
I am having a very hard time believing anyone would be favourable to the country currently lobbing bombs at them from halfway around the globe. Regardless of how much they dislike their current regime.
Maybe this fuels some "everyone loves America, the good guys" fantasy, but, as someone who's come from a country where the people did not like the regime, I am very skeptical foreign interference will be seen positively or even neutrally.
Or maybe this is an attempt at making the war seem somehow just and led on humanitarian and democratic principles, as opposed to what it actually is.
Let's put it this way: Have you seen someone's brain on the sidewalk lately? No? Lost a loved one / a friend / a classmate? Perhaps when people see this (as I have) they find more favorable views of the aerial bombing campaign.
For reference, it has been verfied [~] that the regime killed ~220 students just in the recent uprisings of this January. That's a whole school full of students, all under-18. And then you have to ask, why would a teenager be on the streets, given that they knew, everyone knew, that snipers and machine guns will be there? Just 5 days ago they hung an 18-year-old who was arrested this Jan. They also hung a 19-yo wrestling champion very recently. The collateral damage of these bombings, which must be denounced and is reprehensible, still has not reached these levels either in brutality and in number. [1]
[~] (my internet connection is not good enough to find the sources, I'm using dnstt in a very unreliable network)
[1] AFAIK, Around 180-190 students have died in the recent conflict. Some 160-170 was due to an erroneous airstrike by the US military on the first day of the war, and their school was within 30 meters of a military base (!). Furthermore, some of the other students who have died were the children of the assassinated regime officials.
There's a very narrow and vanishing window of opportunity left to end-up with anything other than a total disaster, and even in that case I'm not holding my breath for the quality of life for the next 5 years. In the long-term, it's harder to predict than either side wants to admit.
If you need a hint, just take a look at what this regime did in Syria (600k dead and 12 years of internal war), in Gaza and Palestine (75k dead), in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and more. Most recently, this January in Iran with 40k dead. You see mullahs' footprints everywhere there is a humanitarian disaster, and I'm not optimistic about the future of Iran, in either case. These are not the kind of people that let go easily, they have a cataclysmic view of the world. They (literally) gave a "Passport to Heaven" to their fighters (Assad supporters) in Syria, and those very same fighters are chanting pro-regime songs (if you can even call it that) every night at every square and major street in the city.
As an Iranian, we saw these [death] figures as an abstract concept prior to these recent events. We (the ordinary citizens) heard about Yemen and the massacre in Syria, we "sympathized," and that was it. It wasn't until this January that it finally hit me, that 40k people dying is like 15 Tienanmen squares happening at once, or 5 times the D-Day battles casualties. And it's chilling to think about what the future will look like, knowing that this is only the beginning and we are choosing between "terrible" and "much worse."
Tel Aviv perhaps? Wartime is the worst time to stage a revolutionary for anyone,specifically because its a induces a state of emergency, and any activities can be construed as aiding the enemy.
My anecdata is from just two families whom I am hearing from indirectly and have never met in person. The takeaways are:
1) they HATE their government more than anything in the world. They’ve seen the government killing its own people.
2) the consensus of civilians is that strikes by and large are hitting IRGC targets. They do not feel civilian targets are being targeted even though the nature of it has resulted in civilian deaths.
3) they don’t feel inclined to give trump the slightest amount of trust or good will. They just want regime change by any means.
Calling on JD Vance and Elon as if they're known for a principled respect for free speech is crazy. It just reads as unnecessary propaganda or a poorly-disguised threat from powerful friends. I'm generally inclined to agree with Cloudflare here and the post makes me question that.
I'm starting to feel that this line of reasoning has turned into pseudoscientific divination. And it's really unfair to writers who put effort into blog posts.
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