As details of the death toll for January’s protests continue to emerge, three students explain why they are resisting a return to normality
More than 45 days after a brutal January crackdown that left thousands of Iranian protesters dead, students across several universities are protesting again. As Iran’s new academic term began on Saturday, students in Tehran gathered on campus, chanting anti-government slogans, despite a heavy security presence and plainclothes officers stationed outside university gates.
The Guardian spoke to protesting students about why they were rallying despite the fact that thousands had been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the January demonstrations.
“Our classrooms are empty because the graveyards are full,” said Hossein*, 21, a student at the University of Tehran. “It’s for them – our friends, classmates and compatriots, who were gunned down in front of our eyes, that we decided to boycott the classes.”
The protests are good and justified, all power to the Iranian people. Iran deserves a second revolution, after the first one was taken over by the Mullahs for their own goals.
But it’s genuinely disheartening how readily nominally progressive spaces are jumping abord the manufactured consent for an imperialist military intervention by Israel and the US.
How, exactly, will bombing Iranian cities help their liberation? Or even if they succeed with deposing the Mullah regime, is anyone really expecting self determination by the Iranian people afterwards? We’re seen how the Shar’s son is pushed as the next US puppet government by US- and Israeli media (and their European allies).
The Iranian people, not just the current regime, are supportive of Palestine, and Israel and the US absolutely cannot accept that. Don’t cheer for imperialist intervention.
at this point I’m don’t understand it but I can see it as a possible future for a lot of Latin America
we are watching in real time how Venezuela is transforming into a US colony
right now Fidel’s grandson is allegedly making deals with the US gov (while the US asks Mexico to stop any deals involving gas with Cuba)
and here in Mexico the state is so corrupt and the US propaganda is running strong for an intervention like the one in Venezuela (and what happened yesterday just made it worse)
The american savages are drooling at the prospect of colonizing Latin America as part of their future war effort with china. They will plant propaganda everywhere to steal from the global south as the death throes of their crumbling empire.
Please provide evidence where this generally left-of-centre british reporting is “manufacturing consent”. Which text lines do you think are trying to make us readers agree to that kind of action by these two states?
The guardian.
I’m not sure you know what it means to be left of centre.
From the Wikipedia article of Atrocity Propaganda (I added emphasis):
Nice wiki quote. Now show me, where this applies to the article.
From the text in the post, I’ve added emphasis:
There is literally not one paragraph in the post text without atrocity propaganda, some paragraphs with several cases. Are you being purposefully obtuse?
They are spreading details about the crimes committed by the enemy, whether factual or not, and this can serve to justify a casus belli. It’s literally the definition of atrocity propaganda.
You’d need to show how this is more than simply reporting events and the POV of participants. You’d have to show how the intention is propaganda, how the article manipulates the reader, etc. You’d need to show how this differs from the reporting of ICE crimes, for example.
And then you’d need to show how the article tries to convince me that a US military intervention would be something I as a european should support.
Reporting ICE crimes is also atrocity propaganda. Propaganda doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means you’re swaying public opinion. I believe that spreading anti-ICE propaganda is good because ICE are a bunch of fascist pigs, I believe that propagating anti-Iran propaganda in the context of the military buildup against Iran is bad because it serves to justify the casus belli and the upcoming military invasion.
How exactly is this article doing this?
Propaganda is communication that is primaroly used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda. Methods to do so would be using selective facts, loaded language, etc so the audience does not come to a rational conclusion but a fabricated one.
Which facts does the article leave out, where does the article use loaded language, which effects do these parts have and how does that make me, a european, want the US go to war on Iran?
That’s not how propaganda works, propaganda explicitly can be true information as explained to you before using the Wikipedia article. I literally quoted it to you, it can be factual information.
Mentioning atrocities in every single paragraph is the biggest case of atrocity propaganda, and if you are purposefully obtuse enough not to see it, just drop this conversation.
I think most people are hoping for an attack on military targets like last year. No-one is calling for “bombing cities”. That’s a tankie fantasy. A fantankasy
People said the exact same thing about Libya in 2011. ‘Just military targets.’ ‘Just a no-fly zone.’ It’s genuinely impressive how the same script can be rolled out over and over.
What it actually meant was destroying Libya’s air defenses and command systems. Once that was done, NATO pushed regime change, the state collapsed, and the country was handed over to militias, foreign powers, and jihadist groups. That’s the model.
When people say ‘only military targets,’ they’re repeating the same script. You don’t bomb a country’s defenses unless your goal is to weaken it. Once that happens, it’s open season: invasion, proxy forces, destabilization. These strikes are never isolated. They’re step one.
The biggest death toll in the Iraq war didn’t come from the US explicitly bombing civilians, it came from the US destroying the infrastructure and military of Iraq, leading to a failed state which melted the economy, led millions to destitute poverty, and created the conditions for the appearance of ISIS.
The US doesn’t need to bomb civilians to murder them, they already murder half a million civilians worldwide every single year through economic sanctions, in which Iran is plastered.