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.”
You’re not wrong about the Guardian but also like… the Iranian government is fucked. Yes, this is probably propaganda to manufacture consent, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a real story of real students fighting a real struggle. It’s a tough line to walk.
Not a tough line to walk, really. I see no constant stream of news on Lemmy about Qatar being an apartheid state with 80% of migrants without rights, or Saudi Arabia’s similar policy. No constant stream of posts about mass incarceration of black people in the US, of Nazis roaming the streets of Madrid and Paris…
Deciding what news to publish is itself extremely political, and focusing on atrocity propaganda in Iran, a heavily sanctioned country against which there’s an ongoing US military buildup on the verge of invasion, is willing and a form of atrocity propaganda. It’s designed specifically to make progressive people less critical of the upcoming strikes, and judging by the number of upvotes these posts get, it’s working.
5 years ago there wasn’t this constant stream of anti-Iranian propaganda, it was Venezuela, and we’ve seen the results. Learning to distinguish the workings of propaganda is critical to any progressive, and it allows us both to be more resistant to propaganda and to use it better (for example by relentlessly posting about Palestine or the ICE, we can similarly engage in what I consider good atrocity propaganda).
“It’s not a tough line to walk, I just think that students facing oppression, violence, and mass killings by a theocratic government should shut up and be quiet in case their struggle might be perverted to further imperial interests.”
I don’t know, from where I’m sitting, you seem to be struggling a bit to walk that line as easily as you proclaim.
I never said this. All my power to the students combatting the repression in Iran. My issue is absolutely not with the protestors, my issue is the framing of this in western media as justification for military invasion of Iran.
And on that, I agree with you 100%, but this specific article doesn’t do that. It’s implicit, I agree with you, but how do you suggest combating that? I think the solution has to be using every news article post as a platform to denounce that military intervention and promote critical thought, rather than decrying the mere existence of those posts and suggesting that people will be too stupid to discern the truth if they’re faced with propaganda. (Which is, of course, accurate lmao, but it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are never taught how to think critically and presented with opportunities to do so, they will remain stupid forever.)
Also in my opinion, Americans oppose military action in Iran for financial reasons, which always takes precedence over moral concerns. So, in this case, both fortunately and unfortunately, Americans will not be motivated to support military action because of another government’s brutality against student protestors imo. It’s a tired old talking point out of the War-on-Terror and Hasbara playbooks, but even older people barely buy that shit anymore - and even if they do, they’re probably more concerned with why every trip to the grocery store is $250.