The great strength of these [Iranian] protests – the sudden, overwhelming way in which they have spread, fuelled by social media – could also be their undoing. As we saw so tragically in the wake of the Arab Spring, this new generation of leaderless, internet-based movements can lack the coordination, durability and ideological focus to topple the despotic leaders they rage against.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayOctober 9th, 2022 |
 26 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I remember Barack Obama betraying the Iranian people when the rose up to oppose the regime.
I hope the heroic Iranian people will not be betrayed again.
Even in the time of Barack Obama it was clear that the Islamic Republic of Iran regime was an ally of Mr Putin in Russia and the People’s Republic of China – why Barack Obama, de facto, decided to side with the regime, against the Iranian people who had risen up against it, I do not know.
Obama’s sins are many, but betraying the Iranian people will go down in history as one of the worst.
The Iranians watch too much western TV.
They’re using tactics designed to sway a democracy, against tyrants who rule with guns. They may attract many followers, but that just means the death toll rises.
What they need isn’t popular uprising. They need violence and force. You can do that with fewer people.
I think bobby b has it right. The protests in the streets and/or Passive Resistance routes don’t really work when the government doesn’t care in the least how many of its own civilians it kills to maintain order.
Killing government troops and breaking things and setting stuff on fire work a whole lot better in that instance.
To overthrow the government requires force. But unless the regime is way more decrepit and corrupt that the Iranian one, it won’t happen by armed rebellion. With no arms and no organisation it would be a matter of days to stop that.
What it needs is for the army to change sides. And that happens when they no longer want to crush the protests, because they agree with them. That does mean that the protests have to move from being peaceful, but I think we’ve already seen that.
If these protests succeed, it will be because the army or police think that the government is overstepping the bounds of decency.
After such revolutions have occurred,
don’t these countries usually end up with a government just as bad if not worse than the old one?
That would be quite an achievement in the case of Iran
It is not just Islamic regimes such as the Islamic Republic of Iran – although it is good that the Iranian people (unlike some, some, of the groups in the “Arab Spring”) understand that “more Islam” is NOT the answer – it is, in their case, the problem. We must remember resistance to non-Islamic tyranny as well – both the Marxist People’s Republic of China and the vile military dictatorship in Burma (which is a servant of the People’s Republic of China dictatorship) persecute Muslims – and persecute everyone else as well.
There is truly heroic resistance going on against the military dictatorship in Burma – everyone who cares about liberty, no matter what our other differences are, should support it.
Just remember that the Mullahs are Shia and “TWELVERS”.
They need CHAOS to call down the Twelfth Imam to sort out the “sheep from the goats” (faithful vs “infidels”).
Straight-up apocalyptic cultism, with NUKES?.
Get you affairs in order, NOW.
Carter betrayed Iran.
The Obaminatin betrayed Iran.
Brandon, et al, will betray Iran.
Discuss.
A few thoughts:
Western media are good at seeing what they want to see with protest movements. As a whole they thought the Arab Spring was going to be an Arab equivalent of Eastern Europe in 1989. On the other hand disapproved protest movements – yellow vests, truckers, lockdown sceptics – are presented as neo-nazis. So while I’ll keep an eye on what’s going on in Iran, I don’t have any confidence in the media coverage of it.
The Revolutionary Guards spring to mind as the force any protest movement would have to overcome. I doubt they will go quietly or peacefully, and they have significant foreign proxies in places like Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon that they can get additional manpower from.
I’d agree you probably can’t get too much worse than Iran’s current government, but if it was to descend into civil war like Syria, Libya or Yemen that would likely be worse than the status quo.
Yes it would be ‘worse’ but that is not a great reason to not overthrow a tyrannical govt. if there is a possibility of doing so.
The Canadian truckers popular and justifiable protest, also fuelled by social media, was ruthlessly crushed by a despotic regime with little regard for the law. It can happen anywhere.
I agree with Chester Draws (October 10, 2022 at 2:20 am): as is the norm in such cases, unless a tyranny is way more corrupt and decrepit than it seems likely vile Iran yet is, any would-be overthrowers of it must co-opt or create an army. Protests that will not in themselves overthrow the regime could nevertheless have a role in that.
There is also the point that Hannah Arendt made about the evolution of totalitarian regimes, that the existence of overt protest “was not the reason for repression, as sometimes pretended, but the last impediment to its full fury.” If the protests cannot acquire an army, then they will impose a cost on the regime for the murder of that woman only at quite a cost for many protestors, but the cost of the absence of protest could still be worse.
(Easy for me to say from my position of safety in Britain, of course.)
Bruce.
Carter betrayed the Iranian people.
Obama betrayed the Iranian people.
Biden/Harris will betray the Iranian people.
Yes Sir – correct.
Long term, not really.
The French revolution is a classic case. The immediate successors were much worse. Napoleon not much different. But the restoration monarchy had to be much, much more careful of public opinion than the ancien regime. And eventually the successive revolutions ended up with the Fifth Republic.
Or the Russian revolution. Sure, Russia became much worse, but it was a great success for Finland.
We just tend to notice the bad result, and not the good one, and not look at the long picture. If you don’t have a revolution a country just stays with the same crappy system as it gets worse and worse.
Chester Draws (October 10, 2022 at 9:58 pm), your cases show that, after the revolution, things can eventually get better – by the revolution being defeated (France) or escaped (Finland).
The American revolution offers a strong case for things being better for its victory than if it had been defeated. The others all had to be defeated, or contained till they collapsed.
Hannah Arendt sees a key difference between the American constitution and the later European ones: the American one was a people constituting their government whereas the European ones were each a promise of good behaviour made by a government to its people after the defeat of a revolution.
I do not know for sure, but i have a hypothesis: For Obama, the highest form of success seemed to be to get to sign a piece of paper, no matter what is written on it.
This is how we got ObamaCare and the Iran deal.
WRT the Iran deal: Obama would not have got to sign it, had he supported the Iranian protests. Supporting the protests would have inevitably led to failure, according to Obamaian logic, because no piece of paper would have got signed.
(But to be fair, there was no certainty that Obama’s support would have led to the fall of the Iranian regime.)
Chester:
It seems to me that the English Civil War is an even better example: without it, there might not have been a Glorious Revolution.
Chester and Snorri.
As a basic point of history – Louis XVI (the Ancien Regime) was very careful of public opinion – that is why there was a French Revolution.
Tyrants do not tend to get overthrown – weak men who call Parliaments or Estates General (because they dare not take decisive action themselves) get overthrown.
Who called the English Parlaiment that turned on Charles the First? He did – Charles called it, because he would not act like the tyrant his enemies later accused him of being.
Charles even betrayed some of his chief supporters to Parliament – must not offend “public opinion” even if it means betraying your friends to be murdered.
It is hard to think of a man more careful of public opinion than Louis XVI – he was like a cushion who carried the impression of whoever had last sat on him.
If he was around today, he would be checking the opinion polls and focus groups before deciding what to have for breakfast.
It was that attitude that got Louis XVI murdered – and got his family and hundreds-of-thousands of other people murdered.
Obama had two beloved mentors who shepherded him from lowly Chicago organizer to Prez. Both were deeply committed Iranophiles, on the side of the anti-Shahs. He retained their views concerning Iran, I think.
France in 1789 has very serious problems – a crushing national debt, although much LESS bad than today, and a terrible guild system (introduced by Henry IV) and endless regulations introduced by Louis XIV and his chief minister Colbert.
However, the regulations of today are at least as bad – and both taxes and government spending are vastly higher (not lower – vastly higher) than they were in 1789.
“But torture..” – it was Louis XVI who ended that (before the Revolution – indeed the Revolution brought it back).
“But freedom of religion” – again Louis XVI was against religious persecution (people are confusing him with Louis XIV – a sort of historical dyslexia).
“But serfdom” – Louis X largely ended serfdom in France (back in the Middle Ages).
“But slavery” – it is quite true that there were slaves in the French colonies. And slavery is wrong – so pointing at Haiti today and wondering what more than two centuries of “freedom” has achieved is NOT a sufficient answer. Although I do note that when the BBC tried to whip up racial hatred in the Dominican Republic, they got the answer that “all of us are descended from both slaves and slave owners” and when they tried to get sympathy for Haiti they got the reply that the first thing that Haiti did was invade the Dominican Republic and rule it, despotically and with great brutality, for 20 years – until the Dominicans rose up and drove the Haitians out.
Slavery is unlawful under natural law (natural justice) – as was recognised by King Louis X of France in the Middle Ages – but clever lawyers, centuries after he died pointed out “but he did not say it was unlawful in the French colonies”.
That is quite correct – because there were no French colonies when he was alive.
In England a similar trick was used – slavery was declared unlawful as long ago as 1102 (“this abominable trade of buying and selling human beings”) – but again “this did not mention the colonies” (because they did not exist at the time). There were no English colonies in 1102 therefore… – actually therefore nothing (as slavery violates natural law) – but lawyers will always invent excuses)
There even had to be repeated legal judgements against slavery in England itself – from the 16th century to the 18th century.
To cut a long story short – the lawyers would say…
“Most certainly there was a legal judgement of such and such a date which declared that such and such a person was not a slave – but my client did not claim ownership of this person, indeed was not even born at the time, my client is claiming ownership of quite a different person…”. So, unless a “slave” had wealthy friends who could afford a long legal battle (and could prevent the slave being sent overseas in the meantime) the person was in a difficult position.
Judge Mansfield broke out of the Common Law problem of putting everything in terms of individual cases – by using very general (almost Roman Law or Scots Law) language in his judgement of 1772.
Leaving aside France and the problem of too many Kings with the same name – so people get them confused.
I sometimes wonder why Henry the First of England was such a stickler for the law and tradition.
Tracking down a direct descendant of Alfred the Great (in Scotland) – and marrying her.
Making a great show of swearing an oath to obey the laws of England (i.e. conceding that his will was NOT law).
Backing the Westminster gathering of 1102 that declared slavery (and various other things) against natural law – and, therefore, against the law of God.
It is almost as if Henry the First had a guilty conscience about how he came to the throne – and wished to make up for things.
But I may be being too cynical.
bobbly b – thank you for the information, I was baffled by the behaviour of then President Obama. Now I understand the motivation for his horrible actions, de facto supporting the Iranian regime against the Iranian people, a bit better.
Leaving aside the Hegelian nonsense about thesis, antithesis, synthases (the idea that two opposing ideas merge, in the “march of history”, to produce something better that both).
On, France in 1789 and Iran in 1979 there seems to have been an “intellectual” bias against monarchy.
What really matters is not the form of government – but, rather, what government does. This was not grasped by Thomas Paine (or even by Thomas Jefferson) in 1789 – or by President Carter in 1979.
Thomas Paine even supported fiat money by the new regime (France has fiat money and Credit Bubble banking right now – and it is a disaster, as it is in Britain and the United States and so on) – when he had opposed such ideas under monarchies.
Mr Paine actually argued (or rather stated) that fiat money under a monarchy was bad, but under the “elected representatives of the people” was good.
This level of utter stupidity is astonishing.
When one reads the second part of Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”, promising various benefits to be paid for by the Central Government, and his demented “Agrarian Justice” (taxes on large private property owners going up to 100% – yes 100%) I sometimes wonder of the American left needed Karl Marx – there is plenty of “justification” for tyrannical policies (for an unlimited central government) in Thomas Paine.
As for pro liberty people who adore Thomas Paine – as with J.S. Mill (Labour Theory of Value, Ricardian smearing of private landowners, even hostility to individual owners of large factories, mines and so on) – be careful who you praise.