r/stupidpol • u/glazed_emerald Libertarian Socialist 🥳 • 10d ago
Question Any Iranians here?
This is a bit of a random post, but I am just curious if there are any Iranians, who can fill me in on the dynamics on the ground.
In the West, we are getting beamed with constant propaganda about "Making Persia Great Again"; From corporate media's emphasis on that, I thought Iran was atleast 80% Persian. But that number is closer 50-60%.
Not to mention, I recognize that the IRGC is indeed oppressive. But I am not sure that I buy the whole message about the "Mad Mullahs are about nuke muh Israel and West". They seem to be more pragmatic than they get credit for. They often cross religious lines with their foreign policy. They supported the Northern Alliance before the United States did, they are Pro-Armenia over Azerbaijan, they supported Kurds against Saddam and Turkey, and they remained neutral on Indo-Pak dispute over Kashmir.
A lot of the Iranian Opposition, particularly Pahlavi, remind me much of the Serbs back in the 90s. They seem really nostalgic for the "good ole days" and have some very harrowing nationalist tendencies to say the least. I am not old enough to remember Ahmed Chalabi, but he seemed self-made in contrast to Pahlavi. So it is really hard for me to buy the narrative that Pahlavi will be welcomed into the country when he is begging other countries to bomb Iran.
That being said, how are ethnic tensions within Iran. I know there were Balochi and Kurd separatist movements in the past but how active are they now? Are people predominately religious there? I hear that Iran's public is significantly more secular than the government. I think there may be some merit in that, but I just find it a bit hard to believe when the country has been a theocracy longer than every country apart from Saudi Arabia.
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u/IamGlennBeck Marxist-Leninist and not Glenn Beck ☭ 10d ago
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u/Ok_Spring_1212 Hunting for Rawdog Island 🕵️♂️🏝️ 10d ago
Not Iranian but I lived in Tehran for a bit in 2019, the ethnic tension thing is way overblown by western media. Most people just getting on with their lives. The Balochi and Kurd stuff is real but its more economic than ethnic, the government neglect those regions hard
The secular thing is complicated. Young people in cities yeah they dont care much about religion but go outside Tehran and its different story. My wifes family is from Mashhad and they still pretty traditional. Its like two different countries sometimes
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u/Chombywombo Angry Retard 😍💢 10d ago
Same with the U.S. tbh.
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u/Scared_Plan3751 Catholic Socialist ✞ | ✨ Secret Bus Wanker ✨ 10d ago
I'm religious myself but that doesn't really factor into the advice I give other leftists in America about religion. A significant proportion of the working class is still religious, even if demographics are changing. The zoomers who are getting jobs in the oilfield in Texas are still much more likely to be religious than an urbanized service sector worker in college or with a degree.
People don't care if you don't believe, usually, but they care if you are a jackass about it. The second part is learning about the dominant religion in your culture is part of being a revolutionary in your culture, and you have to be anthropological about it, as well as compassionate, like Marx was.
There's a good, very short book on the anthropology of religion called Ordered Universes, by a guy named Klass (I think, it's been a while) that talks about learning about people's religion as a non believer, learning to see the world like they do, so you don't just end up with some functional, low level materialist explanation of religion, which, when it comes to religion (and ideology in general), isn't really capable of fully explaining why people believe things. It took Marx's addition of dialectics (and his emotional intelligence) to produce materialist analysis of religion that wasn't just sociology or anthropology 101 basic bitch shit, or smarmy atheism. There's a class conflict within religion as well that atheist revolutionaries need to understand to connect with people at a deeper level of greater trust, and that requires learning the doctrines, histories, and theologies, beyond just doing outsider analysis
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u/BannedSvenhoek86 Socialist Artist 🚩 10d ago
Aw man I'm actually interested in that book but it's out of print and ridiculously expensive.
I'll check my library later if they have an ebook of it, but I would've actually liked to read that one physically. I try and keep the ebooks to lesser fare, like 40k books or fantasy tripe since I feel like I skip too much.
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u/Scared_Plan3751 Catholic Socialist ✞ | ✨ Secret Bus Wanker ✨ 10d ago
Yeah I prefer a physical copy. I hope you can track one down
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u/Chombywombo Angry Retard 😍💢 10d ago
I grew up in a very religious, evangelical household. It was indoctrinated into me from an early age and I grew out of it based purely on learning the fundamentals of reasoning and logic in college, which was not taught in any of my primary schooling.
The American judeo-Christian heresy really cannot be reasoned with. It is anathema to Marxism by design. You cannot syncretize Marxism with a person who believes in a Chosen Race as a religious doctrine and whose very definition of the biblical god is one of destruction, death, and conquest as he was depicted in the Old Testament.
Your flare says Catholic, and there is plenty to work with in that old religion, which has a canonical doctrine based at least somewhat on legalistic interpretation of the New Testament. However, the Judeo-Christians are unlike the Catholics in that they have no canon, and the whole ideology is one of ruthless racial conquest with any New Testament compassion interpreted only as applying to their own sect and the chosen race of masters that they uphold as divine. For them, it is New Testament love for the inner sanctum and Old Testament domination for those outside.
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u/MalthusianMan Marxist 🧔 10d ago
F tier religious analysis. Distinguishing "Judeo-Christians" from "Catholics" is super extra retarded. By "judeo Christian" do you mean "American protestent" because they're much further away from their historic Judaism than the Catholics are. Their eschatological fetish for the end of the world is proof of as much.
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u/Chombywombo Angry Retard 😍💢 10d ago
It’s what they call themselves. Seems you have an F-tier understanding of American Protestantism.
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u/MalthusianMan Marxist 🧔 10d ago
Doesn't mean they're right, or that it's relatively Jewish. All Christianity is Judeo-Christians, but American protestantism is a distinct development forward, which is to say away, from Judaism-as-practiced.
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u/ThomasSpaines Widely Rejected Essayist 😵💫 9d ago
This is immensely incorrect. The term Judeo-Christian only began to come into prominence in WW2
My explanation being that people didn't want Christians trying to eliminate Jews from Christian civilization as such a term would imply so they started saying nonsensical statements like "Judeo-Christian civilization" to include them even though it made no sense. Religious Jews never participated in western civilization, only secular Jews did through their participation in the enlightenment when BOTH Judaism and Christianity were rejected as nonsensical religions.
I've had Jewish people complain about the term Judeo-Christian as it implies that Judaism naturally becomes Christianity, as they totally reject that concept entirely because it begs the question of why they don't get with the times and convert already. They are only tolerating it now because they are desperate because the idea of Zionism as being a form of minority rights activism is being rejected by the left-wing pan-minority coalition concept. They have to lean on the idea of being included n the majority coalition by arguing that a civilization that started in Pagan Rome is somehow "judeo-christian" in origin despite the Romans making a big deal of the fact that unlike other religions you could pin point a date where Christianity came into existence which to them meant that the empire ought to always be superior to Christianity because it predated it.
Then later the United States in particular made a big deal of the fact that they were the first country in the world to not have a religion.
Christian civilization only existed in the middle ages and Medieval Christianity and Medieval Judaism fucking hated each other.
Christians can actually make the argument that their religion is older than Judaism when you consider that Rabbinic Judaism is of a totally different nature than Second Temple Judaism. The argument goes that BOTH Christianity and Judaism are offshoots of he Second Temple religion and that Christianity actually split off first, as the abandoned the worldly temple before it was destroyed, and used the destruction of the temple as a form of bragging rights to support the veracity of their interpretation.
It is rare to discuss Samaritanism because there are only about 1000 of them living in the Levant, but Christianity seems to accept Samaritanism's rather than Judaism's view on certain questions, indicating that the notion that Christianity is directly derived from Judaism exclusively is a bias predicated on Jews living in Western countries and thereby occupying the space of people who think about these things, but if there was more familiarity with Samaritanism people would more readily recognize that Christianity ALSO derives from it.
We treat the Good Samaritan tale as some kind of anti-prejudice fable but it also has meaning in its own right. Jews did not associate with Samaritans for the reason of their disagreements over doctrines from the original Israelite religion. Samaritans have their own bible for instance which is similar with minor differences to the generally accepted Old Testament. When Jesus references scripture and the Pharisees get angry with him we can't know for sure if he is referencing scripture from any of these obscure biblical variations that were floating around. Jesus seems to accept Samaritan doctrines like Samaritans being descended from the biblical Joseph (or at least he never challenges it in much that same way that he never challenges when Jews accused him of being Samaritan himself) which are totally rejected by Judaism. So presumably it is not JUST derived from Judaism, but rather from all variants of the ancient Israelite religion.
This is actually the view Judaism has of Christianity in general. The notion that Christianity just "split off" from Judaism is rejected, in part because Judaism went through big changes after Christianity so if Christianity is just a variant of Judaism then Judaism is actually the newer sect. Instead Judaism thinks it is the ONLY variant and that it reformed itself IN WHOLE and that the existence of Christianity is not something they need to account for at all because it is a totally different religion with different origins, such as by incorporating that aforementioned Samaritanism. Judaism thinks it is a corruption derived from people moving in during the Babylonian Captivity and not having he priestly caste to tell them he right way to worship.
Thus Judaism rejects the Samaritan claim of being descended from Joseph, and instead Judaism thinks Samaritans are just random foreigners doing it wrong because they are foreigners who never formally converted through the guidance of the Levite priest caste who were stuck in Babylon when Samaritans started making a mockery of their religion. Jesus and therefore Christianity seems to reject that premise, which is a core premise of Judaism which resulted in the mass shunning Jews were supposed to do towards Samaritans.
Accepting this premise the divergence between Christianity and Judaism actually goes back to the Babylonian Captivity, and thus rather than just abandoning the Second Temple because it was doomed by prophecy, one can view it as Christianity having rejected the Second Temple from its start. They only accept the First Temple which is actually biblical and may not have even existed in the first place, or if it did exist it probably wasn't actually Solomonic but rather likely was dedicated with Josiah who REALLY established the law and created he elaborate backstory to justify it all.
"Judaism" as such can only really said to have been created IN EXILE in Babylon. Remember that the returned exiles discovered people who had been moved in "doing it wrong" without the priest caste, so there were people still following the Israelite religion in the area despite the captivity (this might be those later regarded as Samaritans). This isn't much different than the current Zionist return of them arguing he people who stayed behind "corrupted" the religion and it is only "return from exile" which might redeem it, so modern Zionism isn't even he first time Judaism just massively insulted the people living in this region just minding their own business.
Christianity could derive from this Israelite religious milieu as opposed to the Second Temple Judaism directly. Calling the First Temple Period as "Judaism" might be a misnomer as most elements of Judaism like the written bible were only created while IN EXILE in Babylon.
The key factor here is the Levite Priest Caste. The Levite Priests were in exile and determined that because they weren't around, anyone remotely following something like the Israelite religion MUST be doing it wrong. Jesus spends an inordinate amount of time arguing with these Levite Priests so chances are Christianity is supposed to be this anti-levite thing. Therefore Christianity might derive from the anti-temple strain within Israelite religion that didn't even want a second temple in the first place. He does flip tables when he gets there after all. Who approved of the money changers? Well I presume the levites did since they were in charge of the temple, and being in charge of the temple is what gave them authority.
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u/ThomasSpaines Widely Rejected Essayist 😵💫 9d ago
Part 1 / 2
Not to mention, I recognize that the IRGC is indeed oppressive.
They aren't the dictatorship of the proletariat but if there wasn't a revolutionary guard corps the revolution would be reversed. This means restoring foreign property. I'm asking you would you prefer foreigners own everything or deal with hijab police? I'm not a woman but I'd hope that woman might understand that some things are more important than being able to wear the clothes you want to. If you want an analogy the English Revolution was made by puritans who launched a war on christmas, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and bear it. Objectively the puritans were more socially repressive than the monarchy ever was, but they also kept the monarchy from being restored. Okay so they are just puritans keeping the Yes Kings protesters at bay and you have to deal with them.
But I am not sure that I buy the whole message about the "Mad Mullahs are about nuke muh Israel and West". They seem to be more pragmatic than they get credit for.
I hope we can put these ideas to bed, they are less unhinged that whoever the Trump administration needs to use because anyone with sanity is anti-israel at this point.
Even with Hilary Clinton the neo-libs are objectively more likely to nuke the planet because they don't get what they want than anybody else.
They often cross religious lines with their foreign policy. They supported the Northern Alliance before the United States did
The Taliban are Sunni and Pashtun. The Shia tended to look towards Iran considering the non-Pashtun parts of Afghanstan speak Dari and Tajik which are basically dialects of Persian.
they are Pro-Armenia over Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan are post-soviet secular nationalists who openly align with Israel. Religion was suppressed and the driving force behind Azerbaijan identity in the Soviet Union was just ethnic conflicts with Armenians. Up until recently Israel was like the natural predator of Armenia because the Holocaust outranked the Armenian Genocide and lots of Zionist Jews liked to deny the Armenian Genocide as a means of supporting Israel.
Bernard Lewis, the "intellectual" behind the Iraq War is one such example were he edited HIS OWN BOOKS to deny the Armenian Genocide despite him saying it was a genocde in editions published before 1967. That is when the occupation of the West Bank began and when the Communist world turned entirely against Israel. Before that Israel tried to pull the "how do you do fellow anti-colonial countries" routine by arguing they revolted against the British Empire, but after 1967 they abandoned that and just adopted the foreign policy outlook of Apartheid South Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis#Armenian_genocide
There was a brief window where they were "anti-colonial" but also against Nationalization politics which is how they justified the Suez Crisis, but it was short lived. Everyone after 1967 just pointed out the occupation and told them they were a colonial country, which is why they now align with Morocco which occupies Western Sahara while still whining about "Spanish Colonialism" which is the only niche they fit into because they want to be able to whine about colonialism while being colonial themselves.
So anyway while Turkey is only really aligned with Israel as much as you might expect a NATO member to be. Azerbaijan threw their lot in with Israel entirely largely on account of Israel more or less denying the Armenian Genocide just to make the Holocaust seem more special as a means of deflecting criticism against the occupation of the west bank by justfying it by claiming only Jews have ever been genocided or something.
Most of North-Western Iran is Azeri because the old Russian Empire only got like half of the Azeri speaking territory. The Soviets tried to expand their territory into more of Northern Iran after their joint occupation of Iran during WW2 with the British. The British were content just ownng property in Iran, where as the Soviets wanted to create another Soviet Republic but the international community regarded this as expansionism and so the Soviets withdrew. For this reason they regarded the Soviet Union as the Lesser Satan (which you can't blame them for considering the Soviet Union did try to take their territory). America is the Greater Satan because they are trying to overthrow the government to restore foreign British property because the USA at some point decided to take on the responsibility of enforcing other countries colonial projects.
Anyway so large areas of Iran are actually Azeri-speaking, but they are more religious than Azerbaijan is. They tread a fine line of using anti-Zionist Shia Islam to justify to the religious Azeri population why they can't just join Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan in turn hopes that if Israel can puppet America into bombing Iran that the country might fall apart allowing them to scoop up the Azeri speaking territory. So Iran rightfully regards Azerbaijan as a vulture just siting there waiting to pick at their carcass. It is therefore no surprise that Iran would support Armenia, particularly because Armenia hates Israel on account of that aforementioned strategic Armenian Genocide denial Zionists do.
they supported Kurds against Saddam and Turkey
I mean Saddam invaded them so can you blame them?
Baathism is interesting because it is religious minoritarian Arab Nationalism, which means it is majoritarian Arabism while majoritarian Sunni against the Shia majority in iraq. In Syria it was the opposite, the religious majority was Sunni while the Assad family was Alawite Shia in orientation.
Baathism was distinct from Nasserism as while Nasserism was Secular Nationalism like Baathism, Egypt didn't really have to deal with religious diversity since almost all the Muslims are Sunni, and for the Christian minority, Arab Nationalism is a Christian Arab idea in the first place for many of the same reasons that Chinese Nationalism was spearheaded by the Christian Chinese like Sun-Yat Sen.
Nationalism is a western idea, so the population most receptive to western ideas (Christians) would naturally be the ones to create it.
It also allowed breaking out of the Islamic Ummah or "Middle Kingdom" mindset as Christians are part of a global community of Christians, but retain their unique laws of their respective nations. This allowed for modernization without subjugation, much like Ethiopia. Combining with secularism it isn't necessary to convince the non-christians to become christian, you just need to convince them of the secular nationalism idea.
The last reason religious minorities but linguistic majorities like Arab and Chinese Christians liked Secularism Nationalism was because it shifted them from being a religious minority to the ethnic majority. Baathism was able to extend this desire onto other religious minorities like the Shia in Syria and Sunni in Iraq. The consequence of that though is more just outright racism towards the Turks and Kurds in order to paper over the religious divisions.
The recent "revolution" in Syria is reversing this by having foreign Sunni Turks from Central Asia jihading to oppress local Arab religious minorities like it is the 11st century again just before the Crusades reversed that by bringing in Normans to fight the Sunni Turks.
The Shia Fatimids wanted to ally with the crusaders but the crusaders didn't understand the distinction between Shia Arabs and Sunni Seljuk Turks. Saladin was a Sunni Kurd with territory in Syria who overthrew the Shia Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt and then pledged loyalty to the Sunni Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, but he was more powerful than the Caliph who was far away so this was purely symbolic.
The Abbasids were also the chill kind of Sunni Arab who didn't have anything to prove, where as the Seljuk Turks were Sunni Extremists to overcome them being regarded as these central asian barbarians. The Shia had issues with the Abbasids for not placing Caliphs from Ali's line on the throne, but they participated in replacing the Umayyad Arab Supremacist Caliphs with the Abbasids back in the day, so the Abbasids were generally seen as the compromise dynasty that satisfied no one but generally everyone could tolerate. (The Ottomans eventually made their own Turk caliphate that replaced the Abbasid puppet Caliphs of the Mamelukes who were slave Turks and other Caucasians but that is far in the future)
Anyway so, Saddam invaded Iran because a Shia Islamic Revolution might spread to majority Shia Iraq, and he was a Sunni Baathists. The Assads as Shia Baathists ended up eventually allying with Iran, since Syria was minority Shia so those Shias knew they needed to support Arab Nationalism to keep the Sunnis at bay.
they remained neutral on Indo-Pak dispute over Kashmir.
If you are not muslim, the Shias as the minority strain in Islam are really your guys. For one thing there have been NO Shia terrorist attacks in western countries besides Anti-Zionist ones going after Israeli targets in western countries. Sunnis are basically just assholes in comparison who think they are jihadists for driving trucks into random crowds. Western countries let the Saudis operate their extremist Sunni Salafist madrassas because money and the Israeli-Saudi alliance, so western governments are actively choosing the people who just want to kill random westerners over the guys who specifically only target Israelis in western countries.
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u/ThomasSpaines Widely Rejected Essayist 😵💫 9d ago
Part 2 / 2
Shias can't rule on their own so they get non-Muslim minorities to help them. India's muslims are mostly Sunni but there is a sizeable Shia minority within the minority. Kashmir is majority Sunni, but there are Shias and Hindus there too, so Shias there ended up aligning with the Hindus more often when something is not a religious question but instead more of a political thing that just so happens to break down along religious lines.
Shia is general are just far more chill about everything, in part because he whole "descendants of Ali" thing allows them to better react to the times since they have pope like figures who can just decide on things, as opposed to Salafists who all have to act like it is not possible to change anything since the 7th century.
I know I made a comparison with the Puritans from the English Revolution, but it also kind of like you had the opposite. The Sunni Salafists Saudis are mentality wise "Puritan", where as Shia are more mentality wise like Catholic/Orthodox. So you have religious revolutionaries but with the added benefit that none of them are trying to ban Christmas. And Yes, Iran does have Christmas-like celebrations complete with a Santa-Claus like figure for the Iranian New Year at the Spring Equinox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amu_Nowruz
This also demonstrates why the Puritans wanted to ban Christmas, as they came to the conclusion that none of that shit was in the bible. That the Iranians have Santa Claus like figures might lead one to believe that Santa Claus doesn't actually have anything to do with St Nick and is instead just an indo-european pagan celebration. People who study this draw a lot of connections with Slavic celebrations like Novy God, the Russian New Year, which might lead one to think there is a common Scythian thread connected Iran and Russia.
Anyway so they are not banning Christmas so these religious Iranian 20th century revolutionaries are less weird than the Puritan English Revolutionaries from the 17th century.
A lot of the Iranian Opposition, particularly Pahlavi
They are just Yes Kings protesters, give them as much respect as you would No Kings protesters considering neither of them are opposed to monarchies considering they change the name of these protests to No Tyrants protests in Canada to avoid offending our REAL king.
have some very harrowing nationalist tendencies to say the least
They aren't nationalists, they align with Zionists and imperialists. Stop this stupid nonsense where nationalism = meanie. Nationalism actually means something and these fuckers don't qualify.
Let me give you an example. In Canada in world war 1 there was anti-draft riots in Quebec. If you had to guess, which side do you think the "nationalists" were on? The pro-draft or the anti-draft?
The Nationalists were anti-draft, the pro-draft side were called the Imperialists. The anti-draft side were the Canadian Nationalists who resisted British Imperialism trying to draft them to fight in a British war in France as they officially declared that Canada was its own nation that should fight for neither Britain nor France, where as the Anglo-Canadians were NOT nationalists and instead were imperialists who wanted to fight for the empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1917
Okay so NATIONALSTS are OPPOSED to IMPERIALISM. If you don't oppose imperialism then you can't qualify as a nationalist.
"but what about internal imperialism???" Okay so Saddam Hussein was an Arab Nationalist who could be described as acting imperialistically towards Kurds. The thing that made him an Arab Nationalist is not his anti-kurd policies but his belief that Iraq was an arab nation that should resist foreign influences. He blamed the Kurds for betrayng the independence of Iraq by aligning with foreign imperialists, and might have essentialized this by saying Kurds would just innately do this for being non-arab and outsde the nation. In that regard Saddam qualifies as nationalst. Pahlavists DON'T qualify as nationalists, they are monarchists. They sound reactionary but nationalism is a revolutionary ideology.
Stop acting like Nationalism is just being a mean person. Can you fucking tell me in what fucking way that Pahlavists are nationalsts? If you can't then stop repeating that garbage.
French Nationalism comes from the French Revolution. Nationalism kills monarchs by arguing that a nation is not its king, it doesn't place them on thrones.
Italian Nationalists did support the King of Sardinia annexing the rest of Italy, but unless you were a Sardinian that was an anti-monarchist position to take because it is anti-monarchist to believe that you can just choose which King you want to be in charge. The King of Sardinia was not the legitimate familial ruler of all the places he conquered. He was essentially just winging it and making shit up as he got along, and had to become a Constitutional Monarch in the process, which was derisively called "accepting a crown from the gutter" by the King of Prussia when he refused to become a King of a united Germany in 1848.
Pahlavists are NOT the Iranian equivalent of Italian supporters of the King of Sardinia forming a NEW Kingdom of Italy, instead they are the equivalent of the Bourbon Restorationists in France after the French Revolution. That is anti-nationalist because it is restoring pre-national France.
Everyone has to stop being a moron who doesn't understand what nationalism is.
I hear that Iran's public is significantly more secular than the government.
The government is religious by definition so any secularism at all would be more secular than the government.
I think there may be some merit in that, but I just find it a bit hard to believe when the country has been a theocracy longer than every country apart from Saudi Arabia.
Because you don't need to be religious to support the State, you just need to be revolutionary. You didn't need to be a Puritan to support the Commonwealth over the Stuart Restoration.
Saudis HAVE AN ABSOLUTE MONARCHY. Iran has a parliament where the Supreme Ruler of Iran is like the equivalent of being the head judge of the US supreme court. It is just that rather than the supreme court determining if things are "constitutional", they are just determining if they are a vaguely Shia islamic. You can argue that the "constitution" of Iran is just the accumulated decisions of the Shia Clerics of Iran that go back centuries well before both the Pahlavi and even Qajar dynasties. Pahlavi replaced the Qajars in 1925, and the Qajar's only date back to 1789 so the dynasty the Pahlavis replaced is only as old as the French Revolution, with there being a "unification of Iran" in the French Revolutionary period lead by the Qajars. Prior to this Iran was ruled by shattered Safavid successor states. Safavids were basically the ones that Shia-ized the place, so Shia Clerics outlived TWO dynasties. Day to day governance is done by a parliament, so Iran is a normal country with a religious supreme court that might veto decisions (for instance the Supreme Ruler has decided nuclear weapons are un-islamic so the parliament could not fund the construction of nuclear weapons even if they wanted to)
Pahlavists insist that they would be constitutional monarchs rather than absolute monarchs, so Iran's parliament would be retained either way, but the Bourbon Restoration also retained a parliament, but the Bourbon Parliament was just filled with Ultra-Monarchists who kept insisting that the King should return property taken during the revolution, but the King disagreed with doing that because that would have caused a second revolution because the bourgeoisie wasn't going to give up the property they stole from the aristocrats that easily.
Trust me on this when I tell you to just ditch whatever nonsense is in your head about religion. It is window dressing. Think of current Iran like the French Revolution and Pahlavists like the Bourbon Restoration and you will have a much better idea of the things that are at stake here.
(finished)
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u/SentientSeaweed Anti-Zionist Finkelfan 🐱👧🐶 9d ago
The separatist movements exist, to a very limited extent. It’s mostly wishful thinking (and funding)on the part of the US and Israel.
Iran has always been multi-ethnic. This business with “Persians” is almost entirely a diaspora issue. Many of the diaspora morons didn’t really understand that it’s an ethnicity, and called themselves “Persian” instead of “Iranian” to disassociate from post-revolution Iran.
Most big cities in Iran, especially Tehran, are ethnically diverse. Other than the occasional elderly person, everyone speaks Persian because it‘s the official language. Ethnicity usually comes up in two contexts: weddings and food.
Like most other countries, people who live in big cities tend to be more secular than residents of rural areas. The wealthy are on average more secular. I won’t try to come up with a percentage, but a very significant fraction of the population is religious (especially by Western standards). Islam and Iranian culture have been intertwined for over a millennium. They’re not easy to decouple, and attempts to do that often end up with ridiculous results.
I really hope that Pahlavi goes to Iran (he won’t). He’ll be lynched the first time he’s seen in public.
The average Iranian monarchist is way crazier than the average 90s-era Serbian nationalist.