Not to detract from the content here but I do find it very telling that posts about domestic US issues (including protests) repeatedly get flagged on HN, including just today[1], but there are currently two posts about Iranian protests on the front page.
I think this is because anyone who understands the Middle East knows that the fall of the Iranian regime would be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall, not because the Islamic Republic is a global power, but because it has been a central tool for China and Russia and a major engine of terrorism in the Middle East.
Its collapse would rip out a core pillar of their influence and fundamentally change global power dynamics.
Why am I supposed to root against Iran when the United States used peace negotiations as a ruse to assassinate their scientists and then help Israel launch an unprovoked sneak attack?
The "terror in the Middle East" you're referring to, is that just them helping Palestinians to resist the relentless Israeli onslaught? Helping Afghans and Iraqis to expel American occupiers?
Libya and Syria are lawless hellscapes forged by the United States and Israel. Their allied Arab satraps in the region use slave labor to construct luxury towers and playplaces for the uber rich. Where does that figure in your formulation?
"America is bad" (in reference to the foreign policy pursued by its psychopathic ruling class) is generally a useful heuristic at this point, yes. But what "occupiers" are you even talking about?
Why are you using a jewish word at me for standing up for people that want to be free of religious oppression? Why do your comments appear to be 100% propaganda focused/unhinged in this thread?
Edit: Oh I get it. A special jewish word for jewish propaganda. Your a racist AND a propagandist. Of course you don't care, you appear to just be here to spread your propaganda and talk at people, not be part of a discussion on the map of Iranian protests. Hope you catch a ban.
Hasbara is a Hebrew word commonly used to refer to Israeli propaganda, which you are spreading whether you know it or not, and I don't give one whit about your armchair psychologizing.
Thanks for bringing this up, I'm just realizing the same now.
"HN is not a political forum" or "if you expect to see it on the news, it probably should not be on HN" is invoked all the time when there's a post about the US, but never when the story is about any other country.
If it's helpful to note, Twitter was always intended to become what it has become. We need to return to organizing our own networks free of this control.
Ah, but that's where our opinions differ. I'm a Twitter expatriate, cast out for daring to have a simple, different, honest opinion. Tried and tried, but the Twitter gods continue to ban me. If you look at my recent past comments, you'll note the negative Twitter influence that reaches, even here. Corruption is everywhere, in my view.
Yes in America you can have your pick of Pepsi Agenda or Coke Agenda as long as you don't do something like organize protests in Ferguson, at which point you will be murdered in your car and your death reported on page 30 of the newspaper.
There was a federal civil rights investigation into the officer's conduct. There was also an unsuccessful attempt to indict him before a grand jury. The shooting was reported on the front page of the New York Times on Aug. 12 2014. I don't think this example helps you.
You don't seem to understand the context of the post you're responding to, which is not referring to Michael Brown, but to the suspicious deaths of DeAndre Joshua and Darren Seals among others.
You can pretend you are the reasonable one here, but you're not. As someone who has been watching this for a while you look to me like a sea lion. Treating your position with disdain is the more rational of these two position.
Do I have evidence of a high level criminal conspiracy to which I have access to none of the tools or methods that could possibly obtain evidence, evidence that if it did exist would surely put my own life in danger?
Upvotes in this local propaganda war have no bearing on veracity or constructive behaviour, it just means the faction you can be slotted into is more wont to press the upvote arrow on the type of message you keep on posting.
Israel is a Jewish theocracy (and a genocidal, illegitimate apartheid state), yet that doesn't stop us from being subjected to Zionist propaganda 24/7 (including these fabricated "protests").
Edit: Ok so this is clearly being brigaded, there's not way my post got flagged less than a minuted after posting.
You nailed it, it's totally non-organic. There are massive protests in Israel (and the US!), yet small protests in Iran are being absolutely shoved down our throats on every single social media site in preparation for yet another unprovoked attack against Iran by Israel.
Yep. Iran was quite restrained in their attacks during the 12 Day War -- hopefully they made their point about their true nature to any Western observers who aren't completely plugged into the propaganda matrix. This time they need to shove 4 hypersonics right up Unit 8200's ass.
I agree, if you contrast what Iran has done with literally any Israel/US act of aggression, it's very clear to see who is operating within the rules of human rights and who is not. I too hope Iran takes off the gloves in round two.
One aspect is that there has been little coverage by the media about these protests that have been going on for close to a couple of weeks and two, presumably the Iranian regular forces are repressing their protestors. People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies didn’t get protested as much if at all. If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.
> People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies
ICE, CBP, etc., and the other agencies that have been deployed in what this Administration calls an “immigration crackdown” or “mass deportation effort” or a number of other variations which emphasize that it is a new and more forceful policy, were not carrying out either what that campaign is publicly characterized as by the administration, or the campaign of domestic terrorism against the American population, including murdering citizens on the street, that it actually is, under previous presidencies.
> If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.
Aside from demonstrating that the purpose of the campaign is not efficiently increasing deportation of people actually illegally present in the United States (a point that critics of the policy have no problem at all agreeing with), I’m not sure what point you think that comparison makes.
You would think the fact that the ICE goons aren't actually being used for deportations would make these people start to question what they're actually for, but I guess if they were capable of that they never would have believed something like "migrants are the cause of America's economic problems" in the first place.
> People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies didn’t get protested as much if at all. If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.
This is not what people are protesting in the US, though it is a convenient talking point used by MAGA to dodge the issue of ICE deporting US citizens without due process, or straight up murdering them.
There's been a very aggressive push to trump up this story across all social media by the Zionists. These threads are being heavily manipulate. Sadly it looks like Israel is going to attack Iran and this heavy push of propaganda on US social media sites is one of the first steps.
That article says "at least 19 protesters and one member of the security forces have been killed", although that was as of a few days ago.
The numbers you quoted are from the end of the article, which is about the previous demonstrations in 2022.
(In fairness, it's confusing because BBC News articles put almost every sentence into its own paragraph, which I think is intended to help low literacy people read them. But it does make it hard to follow the connections between sentences that really ought to be together in a paragraph, like in this case.)
Unfortunately we've seen protests like this before in Iran (perhaps not this widespread, however).
Shouting in the streets won't end the regime. The regime will either just wait it out, or clamp down with violence. The people will need to take more direct action if they hope for any change to come out of this - which unfortunately likely means more death.
Without weapons, the people of Iran will have a difficult time overthrowing the regime. This may highlight to some folks abroad the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment, and an armed civilian population - things we take for granted in the US, and some wish to abolish.
It's a nasty, depressing situation. The regime needs to end. The people of Iran, and the people of the world will be far better off without this regime.
I disagree with this - there have been overthrowings that did not require weapons in the field (i.e. Egypt, Tunisia), while widespread weapons were likely to cause civil wars (Lybia, Syria). In these cases however the role of the army was key in forcing the rulers out (and in Egypt to replace them), which might be unlikely in the case of Iran.
> This may highlight to some folks abroad
> the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment,
> and an armed civilian population
British India, the USSR, East Germany, Francoist Spain, Apartheid South Africa, Communist Romania etc. etc. The 20th century is full of repressive regimes with even more repressive gun laws that fell due to protests etc.
The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.
If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.
The actual idea is that this will give individual members of the "security forces" a plausible excuse to not repress the protests violently - which can be very helpful in shifting the overall incentives towards a peaceful transition of power.
> This may highlight to some folks abroad the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment, and an armed civilian population
I don't think this highlight that at all. Judging by what has happened so far, the people who have the guns join the tyranny rather than oppose it. Why would it be any different in Iran?
You can look at historical revolutions - going back to the beginning of time - to see your statement is obviously false. An armed civilian population is one that can enact revolution. A disarmed population is one that gets killed, beaten and controlled.
No rebellion or revolt had ever been successful without arms supplied from outside sponsors.
Random personal small arms that a bunch of people just happen to have at home are not enough to win a revolutionary war against a professional military.
> Random personal small arms that a bunch of people just happen to have at home are not enough to win a revolutionary war against a professional military.
They're absolutely enough to tip the scales in favor of those within that professional military who would rather support the prospective revolution. Such people will definitely exist given a widespread revolt against a violently oppressive regime.
Yes random small arms make quite a difference in many scenarios. I can say this with zero commentary on whether one feels society broadly should have more guns.
September 9, 2025 - Protesters storm the Nepalese parliament, ransacking it and setting it on fire. Homes of leading politicians are also torched and the politicians themselves attacked.
Soon thereafter, the prime minister resigned along with other ministers and the president dissolved the parliament and scheduled a new election.
I think that counts as a successful rebellion or revolt.
Except authoritarians can only clamp down in protests so much, working against them is economic and even regional social collapse due to running out of water. There's a lot building against them.
I actually hope western countries stay out, lest it gives support for nationalists to rally
I fear so much for the future of Iran. Iran needs to decide its future, free from outside powers. Iran's entire 20th and 21st centuries of paranoia and strife can be traced back to, partly (imo mostly), to British, Russian, and eventually American interference, meddling, and domination in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century respectively.
Iran will never have a happy store as long as it remains an "interests" for greater powers.
I came here to comment on this specific issue. The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.
> The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.
It's an important note that middle America is also currently speedrunning unsustainable levels of groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry.
They've just not yet hit dust .. but they have achieved significant depletion and the projections aren't good.
Interestingly both the Saudi's and the Chinese operate sizable ag operations in the US and export that s/water/food/ back to their home countries.
Certainly foreign powers caused a lot of damage to Iran, but nowhere near as much as the Islamic Regime and considering that is what, I hope, we are witnessing the overthrow of. I think that we have cause to be optimistic
The clergy weren't explicitly backing the Shah, they were just fearful of anything like communism happening, since most communist countries/communists are aesthetes.
Iranian clergy as an institution starting coming into political power, really, around the time of the Russian-Persian wars, were one of the highest ranking Shia scholars in Iran issues a fatwa supporting the war against Russia.
What was always intriguing for me in Iranian politics is the support for bringing back the Shah, a government which was not the pinnacle of freedom. It's either things are that bad, people are nostalgic or it's a narrative pushed by the Islamic Republic to defame the protestors (the last seems unlikely though).
Isn't there the possibility of just asking for a non-autocratic figure?
Democracy is not just a switch you flip on or off. Iran has literally no cultural history of anything than autocracy. Monarch -> Shah -> Theocratic Dictator.
Its a very western view that Democracy is the pinnacle form of government. I dont think all cultures align that way.
"Shah" is actually an abbreviation for Persian "Shahanshah" ("King of kings"), the very same title Cyrus the Great claimed. But the Shah's government in the 20th century was actually quite successful in modernizing the country, fostering a robust middle class, securing women's rights and gradually reducing the oppressive power of Islamic clerics in education and the court system. This is ultimately why those very same clerics ultimately pushed for an "Islamic" revolution which undid the bulk of those gains.
> Its a very western view that Democracy is the pinnacle form of government.
Not only a Western view: South Korea made a very successful transition from an initially authoritarian government to a real liberal democracy, and a very similar story in Taiwan. But the key there is "liberal", as in "classical liberal": protection of foundational rights actually matters a whole lot more than whether people are physically able to vote for a candidate on an election ballot. The latter is generally useless without the former, but it does help make popular sovereignty more robust once the former is in place.
That’s skipping over more than 100 years of recent history. Iran started transitioning to a democratic form of government with establishment of parliament after constitutional revolution starting from 1905. Twice, foreign super powers meddled and help derail it.
Even if that's the case, you would assume they'd not ask back for the previous problematic iteration.
I do agree that democracy generally fails in the middle east or anywhere there is a sizable amount of people that do not believe in democracy.
However, the current Iranian system is autocratic but it works really hard to mask it to appear democratic, so obviously the appearance is important to them and presumably for the people
Iran was once democracy too, but in 1953, United States (CIA) and the United Kingdom (MI6) orchestrated a coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister.
Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry in 1951, which had been controlled by the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP).
So in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 organized protests, bribed military officers and politicians, and spread propaganda to destabilize Mosaddegh's government.
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had fled during the initial coup attempt, returned and ruled as an authoritarian monarch with strong US backing until the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
In 2013, the CIA released declassified documents confirming American involvement, and in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the US role, calling it a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.
Elections were about as democratic in Iran as they are in North Korea.
By the time the Shah dismissed the Prime Minister, Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament, was jailing his opponents, his party had turned against him and he was ruling by decree like a dictator.
Mosaddegh held a flawed referendum and used emergency powers, but by that point, the CIA and MI6 were actively paying off politicians, military officers, and funding mobs to destabilize his government, all while Britain was strangling Iran's economy with an oil embargo. His defensive measures didn't happen in a vacuum.
Comparing Iran's elections to North Korea..? Iran had a functioning parliament, multiple parties, and real political competition.
And "the Shah dismissed him" glosses over the fact that this dismissal was literally part of the coup plot coordinated with foreign intelligence agencies! Read files that CIA released.
And even if you think Mosaddegh was sliding toward authoritarianism, what replaced him? 26 years of the Shah's rule backed by SAVAK, a secret police that tortured and killed dissidents. The coup made things dramatically worse, not better.
Mossadegh had repeatedly asked for dictatorial powers to be granted to him and then extended, even prior to any of these events. It's misleading to call the subsequent developments a "coup" when that government was de-facto undemocratic to begin with. Genuine democracy was never even in the picture.
> Mossadegh had repeatedly asked for dictatorial powers to be granted to him and then extended, even prior to any of these events
Mosaddegh requested emergency powers from parliament and parliament granted them. That's how constitutional systems work during crises. Many democracies have done this (FDR's wartime powers, for example). Requesting powers through legal channels isn't the same as seizing them.
> It's misleading to call the subsequent developments a "coup" when that government was de-facto undemocratic to begin with
This argument doesn't hold up. A coup is defined by how power is taken through force, bribery, and foreign intelligence operations and not constitutional processes. The CIA literally codenamed it Operation Ajax. Declassified documents describe it as a coup. The US government has officially acknowledged it as a coup. You're arguing against the people who planned it.
> Genuine democracy was never even in the picture.
You are basically settin an impossible standard. By 1953 standards, very few countries qualified as "genuine democracies" (the US still had Jim Crow). Iran had an elected parliament, multiple parties, a free press, and a prime minister chosen through constitutional processes. Was it perfect? No. Was it more democratic than most of the region? Yes
Even if we accept that Mosaddegh's government was imperfect, what replaced it? An absolute monarch ruling by decree with a secret police force. If your standard is democracy, the coup objectively made things worse, which is a strange outcome to defend.
> Mosaddegh requested emergency powers from parliament and parliament granted them. That's how constitutional systems work during crises.
Except that there was no legitimate emergency and no crisis, in fact there was just the opposite: Mossadegh had just instigated an insurrection against the then-legitimate government and thereby forced the Shah to not only put him back in power but also to let him appoint a defense minister and a chief of staff - a clear violation of the prevailing norms at the time which delegated this appointment to the Shah. The request for an explicit grant of power of "dictatorial decree" then came immediately after that. This was a clear established pattern of trying to weaken Iran's existing institutional norms and center power on himself, not unlike the whole Germany 1933 playbook. That's very much not how democratic systems work.
What actually happened in July 1952, which you're calling an "insurrection" is
Shah tried to replace Mosaddegh with Ahmad Qavam. In response, the Iranian public took to the streets in massive protests supporting Mosaddegh. The Shah backed down due to popular pressure and reinstated him. That's not Mosaddegh "instigating an insurrection", unless it's your definition of a population backing their elected prime minister against royal overreach. So unless we're calling mass protests illegitimate, this was democratic pressure working as intended.
As for "no emergency and no crisis", Britain had organized an international embargo on Iranian oil, frozen Iranian assets, threatened military action, and was actively working to destabilize the government. Iran's economy was being strangled. Dismissing that as "no crisis" is basically ignoring basic historical facts.
On the military appointments, yes, Mosaddegh sought control over the military, breaking from tradition. But given that the Shah and military officers were actively conspiring with foreign intelligence to overthrow him (which we now know from declassified documents) his concerns about military loyalty weren't paranoia. They were correct.
The Hitler comparison is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Hitler dismantled democracy and ruled for 12 years. Mosaddegh was removed by a foreign backed coup and spent his remaining years under house arrest. One of these is not like the other.
Is it "royal overreach" when a prime minister voluntarily resigns and the king/queen then formally picks someone else (after negotiations for parliamentary support) to legitimately take that place? That would be news to an awful lot of people in the UK, among other places. When you explicitly resign from power, you don't get to take it back by force absent new elections. It's a done deal.
I heard a recent underground poll taken before these protests showed about 1/3 support the Shah, 1/3 oppose him, and 1/3 are ambivalent. The government of Iran has silenced all of its internal opponents, and the Shah is the most well-known and most popular external opponent.
Even if they don't love him, a vast majority would prefer him over the Ayatollahs.
I don't think there is a possibility. A democracy that isn't in the US' interest (and now Russia's) descends into autocracy as a defense against interference. A Shah is a compromise that gives them acceptability to the superpowers and a better life than an opposing autocracy.
>we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
See all the instances of "we do not want most political stories":
Unfortunately many of these people revel in hypocrisy, and believe it makes them superior that they are willing to use it when others aren't. Nevertheless always worth pointing out!
Literally once in a lifetime chances for human rights in a regime that has hung several women for not covering their faces this year is a bit different then the latest CNN headline.
Israel would much rather the people of Iran look like the UK or Germany - employed, safe, happy, free - than the reign of terror of both Iranians and non-Iranians being attacked directly and by proxy.
If your antisemitism runs so deep you are willing to sacrifice the Iranian people to hurt the Jews, you are not a friend of the Iranian people.
Works for me, current Firefox nightly on Linux. Check your extensions, especially look at uBlock Origin is you happen to use it in 'advanced' mode - I had to allow fastly.net, cartocdn.com, tailwindcss.com and unpkg.com for it to work because I default block all 3d party content.
146.0.1 on Arch Linux here. Disabled uBlock Origin; no difference. I don't have any other relevant extensions. DoH disabled. No difference in private window.
In what way does it not work? Anything relevant in the console?
This is what I get in the console for a working map, running Firefox 148.0a1:
Download the React DevTools for a better development experience: https://reactjs.org/link/react-devtools react-dom.development.js:29905:19
cdn.tailwindcss.com should not be used in production. To use Tailwind CSS in production, install it as a PostCSS plugin or use the Tailwind CLI: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation cdn.tailwindcss.com:64:1711
You are using the in-browser Babel transformer. Be sure to precompile your scripts for production - https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/ babel.min.js:3:3121456
Partitioned cookie or storage access was provided to “<URL>” because it is loaded in the third-party context and dynamic state partitioning is enabled. 2
Cookie “__cf_bm” will soon be rejected because it is foreign and does not have the “Partitioned“ attribute. settings
Source map error: Error: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Resource URL: https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.min.js
Source Map URL: babel.min.js.map
The map is just grey. The controls are there though.
cdn.tailwindcss.com should not be used in production. To use Tailwind CSS in production, install it as a PostCSS plugin or use the Tailwind CLI: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation cdn.tailwindcss.com:64:1711
You are using the in-browser Babel transformer. Be sure to precompile your scripts for production - https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/ babel.min.js:3:3121456
Source map error: Error: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Resource URL: https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.min.js
Source Map URL: babel.min.js.map
The site is hosted on a Github property so maybe it is just the 'normal' fluctuations of that site which causes these grey-outs. Microsoft has turned what used to be a rather quick and usable site into an undercooled jar of pink unicorn-infested molasses, alas.
Protesting theocracies is a sacred duty for any self-respecting leftist. I rather have a monarchy than a theocracy, a dictatorship rather than a monarchy, an oligarchy rather than a dictatorship, and a democracy rather than an oligarchy.
That said: please also protest any inference from foreign power, whether they are an oligarchy, a dictatorship or another theocracy/ethno-state. If the current Syrian situation is believable, a revolution/coup from the base show better results than one supported by the US/Russia or local powers.
Obviously related. The protests are not organic. There are photos online of cash, and guns provided by Mossad. Iran is trying to get control by pulling the plug on the chaos.
Israel wants nothing more than another failed state filled with sectarian violence.
Ironically there have been much larger real protests in Israel. Zionism has become completely unstable. The good news is that means it's close to failing, the bad news is that it will become even more desperate and violent as it perishes.
“If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
The immediate flagging of any non-Zionist comment on this and the other Iran post is pretty wild. Mods can you please disable flags or at least do something about the clear manipulation happening here?
Be weary of taking this seriously. The Israelis are trying to drum up support for attacking Iran. It's pretty shameful that this is posted on HackerNews tbh.
That is some grade A nonsense. Israel is a democratic county and has been having regular elections since its inception. To label it as unstable is to show your bias.
Israel is a genocidal terrorist entity. It's also wildly unstable. They've been having massive protests (even predating Oct 7th). The government is literally run by extremists and they have many apartheid laws to enforce Jewish supremacy, including the ability of any Jew to become an Israeli citizen and start voting (so much for democracy!). If only indigenous Palestinians were allowed to vote, it would be a democracy. A voting populous of imported Europeans is not that. Thankfully the Zionist project won't last much longer as the world has seen its true nature and rightfully turned against it.
Your entire (recent - I did not dig down deeper) comment history consists of fomenting against Israel, Zionists and Jews. I think Reddit is a better fit for that kind of rhetoric but your downvote-happy comrades seem to disagree. A shame, really, that the supposedly intelligent members of this 'hackers' forum allow themselves to be led by the nose by this or that faction just as long as that faction knows how to get them to feel virtuous. Intelligence, it seems, is not what it is cracked up to be. Narrowly targeted intelligence without wisdom is a sure path to creating the behaviour seen here,
I took this map as a positive (Iranians protesting their totalitarian theocracy). I wish there were a corresponding map for the US, of Americans protesting their dictatorship. Alas, I don't know of any large protests yet.
They're actually not doing that, they're doing the opposite of that, calling to bring back the secular shah to replace their current Islamic theocracy.
You 5 days ago: “ You are still young so you don't seem to get it yet but history has shown that killing or capturing the leader of a country with outside actors rarely leads to anything good. It usually just leads to more instability.”
The only involvement Israel or any nation should have here is arming or protecting the protesters. Anything beyond that would end in disaster. And by protecting protesters, I mean granting them asylum if they need it, not sending in troops.
The last thing we need is Israel or any other nation deciding they want to be the new rulers of Iran. That will work out just as well as the US's involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq.
While there is no doubt Israel would be glad to be rid of the current regime in Iran it is far more relevant that a large part of the Iranian population seems to want to get rid of the current regime. It is quite risky to partake in protests there but people do it anyway because they - as far as I can see rightly so - are done with their country being held back by the current regime.
Let's hope that any regime change in Iran happens with as little bloodshed as possible and that the new regime actually represents the population instead of only some powerful (domestic or foreign) faction. Khamenei seems to have prepared for a run to Russia [1] together with 20 members of his family so let him climb aboard that plane and leave sooner rather than later.
Why is a map of unrest in Iran equal to Israeli propaganda? I'd say the Iranian population has more agency than whatever Israeli institution you'd accuse of producing this site, let alone going out in the streets of Iranian cities to protest the current regime.
Well first of all a lot of these protest are pro Iranian government. Second, there are much bigger anti-government protests happening right now in Israel, but there's no state apparatus trying to bring attention to them (quite the opposite). An Israeli bus driver even drove over an murdered an anti-war protester. But most importantly, this is a coordinated effort to manufacture consent for Israel's next preemptive attack on Iran.
You're wrong I'm so many ways it's hard to know where to start, but one obvious one is that the teenager who was run over was not an anti-war protestor, he was protesting a potential change to exemption from military conscription for the ultra-Orthodox. Not a peacenik. Haredi conscription is a contentious issue but framing it as anti-war is disingenuous.
This is what the kids are being spoon fed these days I guess. US = imperialism = bad. Else = good. So one dimensional. No empathy for the Iranian people who just want to be able to live with these same freedoms these kids don't even know they have. Pathetic
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
Its collapse would rip out a core pillar of their influence and fundamentally change global power dynamics.
The "terror in the Middle East" you're referring to, is that just them helping Palestinians to resist the relentless Israeli onslaught? Helping Afghans and Iraqis to expel American occupiers?
Libya and Syria are lawless hellscapes forged by the United States and Israel. Their allied Arab satraps in the region use slave labor to construct luxury towers and playplaces for the uber rich. Where does that figure in your formulation?
Edit: Oh I get it. A special jewish word for jewish propaganda. Your a racist AND a propagandist. Of course you don't care, you appear to just be here to spread your propaganda and talk at people, not be part of a discussion on the map of Iranian protests. Hope you catch a ban.
"HN is not a political forum" or "if you expect to see it on the news, it probably should not be on HN" is invoked all the time when there's a post about the US, but never when the story is about any other country.
I'll take the current state of HN over every other forum on the internet.
You can pretend you are the reasonable one here, but you're not. As someone who has been watching this for a while you look to me like a sea lion. Treating your position with disdain is the more rational of these two position.
You have no place in polite society. Get lost.
Do I have evidence of a high level criminal conspiracy to which I have access to none of the tools or methods that could possibly obtain evidence, evidence that if it did exist would surely put my own life in danger?
No, no I do not.
Leave. You're a net-negative to this website.
Edit: Ok so this is clearly being brigaded, there's not way my post got flagged less than a minuted after posting.
ICE, CBP, etc., and the other agencies that have been deployed in what this Administration calls an “immigration crackdown” or “mass deportation effort” or a number of other variations which emphasize that it is a new and more forceful policy, were not carrying out either what that campaign is publicly characterized as by the administration, or the campaign of domestic terrorism against the American population, including murdering citizens on the street, that it actually is, under previous presidencies.
> If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.
Aside from demonstrating that the purpose of the campaign is not efficiently increasing deportation of people actually illegally present in the United States (a point that critics of the policy have no problem at all agreeing with), I’m not sure what point you think that comparison makes.
This is not what people are protesting in the US, though it is a convenient talking point used by MAGA to dodge the issue of ICE deporting US citizens without due process, or straight up murdering them.
> trump up
I see what you did there
Just by being involved, I imagine they’re in serious danger. So far, more than 550 people have been killed and 20k detained by security forces.[1]
Godspeed.
Edit: these death numbers are from an older protest and are inaccurate. Please see article / comments below :)
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3kl56z2l4o
The numbers you quoted are from the end of the article, which is about the previous demonstrations in 2022.
(In fairness, it's confusing because BBC News articles put almost every sentence into its own paragraph, which I think is intended to help low literacy people read them. But it does make it hard to follow the connections between sentences that really ought to be together in a paragraph, like in this case.)
Shouting in the streets won't end the regime. The regime will either just wait it out, or clamp down with violence. The people will need to take more direct action if they hope for any change to come out of this - which unfortunately likely means more death.
Without weapons, the people of Iran will have a difficult time overthrowing the regime. This may highlight to some folks abroad the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment, and an armed civilian population - things we take for granted in the US, and some wish to abolish.
It's a nasty, depressing situation. The regime needs to end. The people of Iran, and the people of the world will be far better off without this regime.
I hope the best for the people of Iran.
The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.
If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.
I don't think this highlight that at all. Judging by what has happened so far, the people who have the guns join the tyranny rather than oppose it. Why would it be any different in Iran?
Random personal small arms that a bunch of people just happen to have at home are not enough to win a revolutionary war against a professional military.
Self defense pistols and hunting rifles don't win wars, artillery does.
They're absolutely enough to tip the scales in favor of those within that professional military who would rather support the prospective revolution. Such people will definitely exist given a widespread revolt against a violently oppressive regime.
Yes random small arms make quite a difference in many scenarios. I can say this with zero commentary on whether one feels society broadly should have more guns.
September 9, 2025 - Protesters storm the Nepalese parliament, ransacking it and setting it on fire. Homes of leading politicians are also torched and the politicians themselves attacked.
Soon thereafter, the prime minister resigned along with other ministers and the president dissolved the parliament and scheduled a new election.
I think that counts as a successful rebellion or revolt.
I know a LOT of folks in the US that are regular citizens with plate carriers, night vision, thermals, suppressors, and forced-reset triggers.
A lot of them have better training that most leg infantry, and many are veterans.
I actually hope western countries stay out, lest it gives support for nationalists to rally
Iran will never have a happy store as long as it remains an "interests" for greater powers.
It's an important note that middle America is also currently speedrunning unsustainable levels of groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry.
They've just not yet hit dust .. but they have achieved significant depletion and the projections aren't good.
Interestingly both the Saudi's and the Chinese operate sizable ag operations in the US and export that s/water/food/ back to their home countries.
What countries backed the mullahs against Iran's secular and left opposition, helping SAVAK kill the opposition?
In 1979 the US was working to prevent anti-anti-Russian forces from coming to power, not the mullahs.
Iranian clergy as an institution starting coming into political power, really, around the time of the Russian-Persian wars, were one of the highest ranking Shia scholars in Iran issues a fatwa supporting the war against Russia.
Isn't there the possibility of just asking for a non-autocratic figure?
Its a very western view that Democracy is the pinnacle form of government. I dont think all cultures align that way.
> Its a very western view that Democracy is the pinnacle form of government.
Not only a Western view: South Korea made a very successful transition from an initially authoritarian government to a real liberal democracy, and a very similar story in Taiwan. But the key there is "liberal", as in "classical liberal": protection of foundational rights actually matters a whole lot more than whether people are physically able to vote for a candidate on an election ballot. The latter is generally useless without the former, but it does help make popular sovereignty more robust once the former is in place.
I do agree that democracy generally fails in the middle east or anywhere there is a sizable amount of people that do not believe in democracy.
However, the current Iranian system is autocratic but it works really hard to mask it to appear democratic, so obviously the appearance is important to them and presumably for the people
Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry in 1951, which had been controlled by the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP).
So in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 organized protests, bribed military officers and politicians, and spread propaganda to destabilize Mosaddegh's government.
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had fled during the initial coup attempt, returned and ruled as an authoritarian monarch with strong US backing until the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
In 2013, the CIA released declassified documents confirming American involvement, and in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the US role, calling it a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.
Elections were about as democratic in Iran as they are in North Korea.
By the time the Shah dismissed the Prime Minister, Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament, was jailing his opponents, his party had turned against him and he was ruling by decree like a dictator.
Comparing Iran's elections to North Korea..? Iran had a functioning parliament, multiple parties, and real political competition.
And "the Shah dismissed him" glosses over the fact that this dismissal was literally part of the coup plot coordinated with foreign intelligence agencies! Read files that CIA released.
And even if you think Mosaddegh was sliding toward authoritarianism, what replaced him? 26 years of the Shah's rule backed by SAVAK, a secret police that tortured and killed dissidents. The coup made things dramatically worse, not better.
Mosaddegh requested emergency powers from parliament and parliament granted them. That's how constitutional systems work during crises. Many democracies have done this (FDR's wartime powers, for example). Requesting powers through legal channels isn't the same as seizing them.
> It's misleading to call the subsequent developments a "coup" when that government was de-facto undemocratic to begin with
This argument doesn't hold up. A coup is defined by how power is taken through force, bribery, and foreign intelligence operations and not constitutional processes. The CIA literally codenamed it Operation Ajax. Declassified documents describe it as a coup. The US government has officially acknowledged it as a coup. You're arguing against the people who planned it.
> Genuine democracy was never even in the picture.
You are basically settin an impossible standard. By 1953 standards, very few countries qualified as "genuine democracies" (the US still had Jim Crow). Iran had an elected parliament, multiple parties, a free press, and a prime minister chosen through constitutional processes. Was it perfect? No. Was it more democratic than most of the region? Yes
Even if we accept that Mosaddegh's government was imperfect, what replaced it? An absolute monarch ruling by decree with a secret police force. If your standard is democracy, the coup objectively made things worse, which is a strange outcome to defend.
Except that there was no legitimate emergency and no crisis, in fact there was just the opposite: Mossadegh had just instigated an insurrection against the then-legitimate government and thereby forced the Shah to not only put him back in power but also to let him appoint a defense minister and a chief of staff - a clear violation of the prevailing norms at the time which delegated this appointment to the Shah. The request for an explicit grant of power of "dictatorial decree" then came immediately after that. This was a clear established pattern of trying to weaken Iran's existing institutional norms and center power on himself, not unlike the whole Germany 1933 playbook. That's very much not how democratic systems work.
As for "no emergency and no crisis", Britain had organized an international embargo on Iranian oil, frozen Iranian assets, threatened military action, and was actively working to destabilize the government. Iran's economy was being strangled. Dismissing that as "no crisis" is basically ignoring basic historical facts.
On the military appointments, yes, Mosaddegh sought control over the military, breaking from tradition. But given that the Shah and military officers were actively conspiring with foreign intelligence to overthrow him (which we now know from declassified documents) his concerns about military loyalty weren't paranoia. They were correct.
The Hitler comparison is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Hitler dismantled democracy and ruled for 12 years. Mosaddegh was removed by a foreign backed coup and spent his remaining years under house arrest. One of these is not like the other.
Even if they don't love him, a vast majority would prefer him over the Ayatollahs.
EDIT: Found the poll, last taken in 2024: https://gamaan.org/2025/08/20/analytical-report-on-iranians-... . The Shah is preferred by just 31%, but no one else even gets double-digits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818
>we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
See all the instances of "we do not want most political stories":
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Guess this is one of the exceptions!
If your antisemitism runs so deep you are willing to sacrifice the Iranian people to hurt the Jews, you are not a friend of the Iranian people.
And Fedora 43
This is what I get in the console for a working map, running Firefox 148.0a1:
cdn.tailwindcss.com should not be used in production. To use Tailwind CSS in production, install it as a PostCSS plugin or use the Tailwind CLI: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation cdn.tailwindcss.com:64:1711 You are using the in-browser Babel transformer. Be sure to precompile your scripts for production - https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/ babel.min.js:3:3121456 Source map error: Error: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. Resource URL: https://unpkg.com/@babel/standalone/babel.min.js Source Map URL: babel.min.js.map
Protesting the Iranian government is perfectly legitimate. Binding that with supporting a return of the equally brutal and corrupt shah is depressing.
Given there are only three categories, I'd expect large to be on the order of hundreds of thousands, but I don't think that is the case here?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7y0579lp8o
That said: please also protest any inference from foreign power, whether they are an oligarchy, a dictatorship or another theocracy/ethno-state. If the current Syrian situation is believable, a revolution/coup from the base show better results than one supported by the US/Russia or local powers.
Israel wants nothing more than another failed state filled with sectarian violence.
Now begone to Reddit, foul fiend.
What about all the ICE and school shootings, mass shooting maps for USA? That would be definitely helpful.
This post is example of American hypocrisy, double standards and propaganda.
If Iran does not have oil or natural resources these clowns do not even care.
The last thing we need is Israel or any other nation deciding they want to be the new rulers of Iran. That will work out just as well as the US's involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Let's hope that any regime change in Iran happens with as little bloodshed as possible and that the new regime actually represents the population instead of only some powerful (domestic or foreign) faction. Khamenei seems to have prepared for a run to Russia [1] together with 20 members of his family so let him climb aboard that plane and leave sooner rather than later.
[1] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601048903