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If this is true, then RIP
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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All those Iranian citizens who think the U.S. is doing this for them... They're about to find out the hard way what putting your trust in the U.S. is like, let alone Trump. You would think they'd learn from the last time.
Nobody thinks this. Lemmy users need to stop being racist like this. Iranians are not stupid, these people have agency. They know what a war with the US means, they had two of their neighbors go through it. They know it's hell, but the thing is that the regime right now is so cartoonishly evil that if a war loosens their grip on power and opens up a real possibility for a new government, then it might just be worth it.
I'm Iraqi. My family lived through the terror of Saddam Hussein. The US invasion was hell. It destabilized the country and a lot of people died. Nobody recalls that time as a good one. Yet, at the same time, you'll be hard pressed to any Iraqi that wishes the US didn't depose of that evil regime.
One of the most pathetic things about Reddit is that whenever an argumentative user is incapable of defending their views on their own merits, they spend a embarrassing amount of time digging through someone else's post history to try to find something attack their character with. It's just such a lazy and desperate thing to do because it demonstrates a shallow confidence in their own beliefs, and it also shows that they value "winning" an argument through fallacious means rather than having discussion where opinions are exchanged. I see you're doing your best keeping that chronically online spirit alive here on Lemmy as well.
So let me get this straight, you spent god knows how long going back months into my account history, and the best you could do was intentionally misrepresent my 3 of my positions and then complain about a single word that I used 4 months ago? Damn, that's pathetic.
If you kept digging a little longer or maybe tried reading a little deeper, you would've find out that I'm an Iraqi who's family lived during Saddam Hussein, the US invasion, and then we migrated to Syria after an Iranian terrorist militia attacked our neighbor's at the dead of night. We stayed in Syria for a few years but things started going downhill there too, so we decided to immigrate to the West, and the US was the first country to accept our applications. This is not the gotcha you think it is.
I'm not going to waste too much time here because you're someone who engages in bad faith, but I just want to point out that this narrative is false. Iranians are not protesting just because of the sanctions, they're protesting government tyranny, corruption, and incompetence. If it really was just the sanction, then explain the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests where the country went into uproar for 2 years after the regime killed a teenage girl for not following their religious dress code or explain their water crises where they're threatening to evacuate their capital due to regime's mismanagement or the 2017 hijab law protests. The sanctions don't magically make the regime more authoritarian and incomptent, they just expose the problems that were already there faster.
You're going to need to source this. I know for a fact that you either made this up or you're intentionally misinterpreting some paper that says something very different. If you can't link the exact source you're referring to and then show specifically which part said this, I'm going to safely assume that this claim has no substance.
Also, I find it really annoying, how you're going out of your way to bootlick a regime that is this evil with some low level fallacy like whataboutism. "However bad their regime" my ass, It's not a competition. Other countries doing other bad things does NOT justify, excuse, or negate the evil things that the Iranian regime has done or is doing. The only reason you would even do something like this is because YOU support the regime. At this point you're not just criticizing the West, you're actively defending the regime. You're directly opposing Iranians who are fighting for their freedom and rights, and you're doing everything in your power to stand with their oppressors.
Everybody acknowledges that the coups of the Democratic government were bad, but guess what? It's not the 1950s anymore. We live in a completely different reality now, and those events do not justify or excuse the islamic regime's atrocities against their neighbors or their own people. Like what is even the though process here? "There was a coup 70 years ago that's bad therefore we should support and let this evil regime slaughter and oppress millions of people", it's an asinine position.
The US invasion destabilized the country, but the thing that made it worse was this very same Iranian regime. Their terrorist proxy militias are directly responsible for corrupting the new government, keeping the country unstable through violence and fear, causing violence by stoking sectarian tensions, and turbo charging minority oppression that led to the rise of ISIS. Like what the hell are we even talking about here? How the hell is ignorant Westerner going to try and lecture me about my own country?
So you're example is a Marxist youtube grifter who carters to a Western audience? If that's your source of information on the country then no wonder why you're out of touch. You need to look things made by Iraqis for Iraqis. Go look up Ahemd Al Basheer. He's an Iraqi personality who's followed by millions of Iraqis and he's commonly called the voice of the Iraqi people. He does a very successful late night styled TV show on youtube and DW called Al Basheer Show. Most of his videos are in Arabic, but he did do a youtube series in English awhile back for an international audience awhile ago, you should go watch that. That should be way more informative than someone like Hakim lmao
I'm an Iraqi. I lived there. The birthplace location on my passport says "Baghdad, Iraq". My family has literally lived through these events. I have family in both Iraq and Iran. I know what happened to me, my family, and what's going on in my country, you don't. The sheer arrogance of you thinking that you could double down on lecturing me about my own lived experiences makes you a living example of the ignorant and chauvinistic westerner stereotype.
Ahemd Al Basheer has 7.5 million subscribers on his youtube channel, and virtually all of those are Iraqis. He is an Iraqi who also lived through all these events who made a show exposing Iraq's problems to Iraqis in Iraqi Arabic. The only people who tune are Iraqis because other Arabs simply won't understand all the Iraqi references, jokes, and politics. It would be like Australians tuning in to Canadian political shows, it almost never happens. There's only like 46 million Iraqis in the world both in Iraq and diaspora. That means 16% of all Iraqis in the world watch this guy, and that's just going off of subscriber numbers. His channel more than 1.6 BILLION views. He's not some rando youtuber, he literally is one of the biggest voices in the country.
Compare that to Hakim, who virtually no Iraqi has ever heard of. When Iraqis see the name Hakim, they think of the Egyptian singer, not this guy. He has a small channel of 300k subscribers that is exclusively in English catering to a Western Marxist audience. Meaning that all videos come from an ideological lens, which means he is inherently not objective or in tune with the rest of the country since the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are not Marixst. Regardless, his entire channel is designed to maximize profit from sponsorships, constant merch drops, ads, and begging people to subscribe to his Patreon in every god damn video. It's literally a grift. Oh also, this guy has a history of saying some vile shit like saying the ethnic cleansing under Stalin was a good thing or that the Soviet invasion of Poland was justified or him denying but also simultaneously praising the genocide that was committed by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.
Like this is the guy who you're proudly watching? This is your source of information on the country? If Hakim is where you get your info on Iraq, then you literally have no information hygiene. Let's take a second and consider the two options here. One is a Marxist grifter who spreads misinformation to appease an English speaking Western audience, the other one is one the most prominent figures in Iraqi culture and politics and his content is made for Iraqis... hmm, I wonder which one gives me better insight on the country.
The fact that you don't even know who Ahmed Al Basheer even is or what he stand for tells me all I need to know about you. You know NOTHING about this country or this region of the world, yet you speak as if you know more than the people who lived through these events themselves. You don't understand Iraqi history, you don't know who the prominent Iraqi figures are, you can't speak our language, you know nothing about our culture, and you certainly don't know what we've been through. Like it's one thing to be ignorant, but it's another when you're doubling down on it. That's just Dunning–Kruger effect. If you're going to continue being a clown then you'll get treated like one.
I'm obviously against it, but it's also entirely irrelevant. The fact that you're so desperately chasing smooth brained "gotchas" just shows how disingenuous you are.
Not really, but I'm also not mourning the death of Khomeini like I'm sure you are
Where do you base the number of half a million deaths due to US-EU sanctions on? Because I know the EU uses sanctions, but not (at least explicitly) with the intention of causing wide scale hunger.
The actual study and not just the short article is https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00189-5/fulltext. However, I don't really find the claim backed that the EU is a major factor in that regard:
Not very familiar with how to read the data, but to me, EU sanctions have no really significant impact on mortality in any of these specifications that would allow to construct a hard causality; there is almost no entry for EU sanctions in table 3 where there's a statistical significance, except for "Child mortality (5–10 years)" in Specifications 3 and 4, where it barely reaches the threshold (p=0.051 and p=0.052); in the latter, the UN sanctions have a MUCH higher correlation.
Not exactly sure how one can come to the conclusion that this is US+EU sanctions when there's such a difference between those when viewed in isolation… that said, a correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, e.g. let's say there's a civil war and the government gets sanctioned, then you do have a correlation between deaths and the sanctions, but it's the former that caused the latter and not the other way around.
That said, I'm not disagreeing that sanctions can't have negative effect on a population, in fact it's the normal people getting hit first because usually the targets of sanctions will make sure it's their citizens suffering and not themselves
Thanks for the source, interesting read. Makes me question sanction more. Haha, well here on Lemmy you can have a conversation when asking clarification, so thank you as well :)
Yea that guy reeks like a hasbara.
There's also the water issue, and that definitely wasn't because of sanctions; and even if the reason for riots might be due to external factors, it does matter to a population how the leadership responds to it, and the response has been horrible.
Yeah because issues are always absolute and there is no nuance.
Yes, water is mismanaged in Europe as well and it will bite us, but we're not currently at Iranian levels where they considered moving the capital because the potable water situation was so bad.
The proposal made little sense all things considered, but this is the level of competence the Iranian leadership showed in that situation.
The problem wasn't only lack of rain, but also a lot of mismanagement that led people without water to riot.
Call me crazy, but I consider "providing your citizens with water" as a core government task; why you bring up the Chinese government with something totally unrelated is beyond me.
You're just building a straw man here, people went to demonstrate because of the water crisis that was also caused by mismanagement (and climate change for that matter); these protests were also answered with violence. My point was that I consider this a core government task, even so much that I don't those that do it because it is the bare minimum.
Up to you to decide if you want to consider the "Great Man-Made River" as a success, it surely did improve water quality, but there's no regeneration of the taken water and most of the water is used for irrigation. It also lead to the effect of ground water level lowering; how it all turns out remains to be seen, and from what I read, experts expect up to 50 years of water supply at the current rate (optimistic ones up to 250), not the 4000 years the Gaddafi government estimated back then.
I just don't like how the posts like the one I answered to imply that this is all the US' doing. They play a really big role in all of this, but the Mullahs are also shitty and some of their domestic issues – which have caused riots because people didn't have access to water – were also caused by their own decisions. It's not only interventionism… both sides can be shitty
Perhaps they should.
I'm Iranian, living in Iran. He is right.
A very big portion of people think trump or netanyahu's attack and war will save them from the islamic republic.
When people are angry, hungry, getting killed, hopeless and poor, we can't expect their brains to work properly.
It's by design though. US policy has destroyed the Iranian middle class (you know, the exact people who would otherwise do the regime-changing). The whole point is to cause desperation and despair which they can take advantage of. It's the same method that was used against castles and city-states in the middle ages.
Yes. I think ruling by desperation and despair is the method of new superpowers. Almost all over the world, people are hopeless and depressed and news and politicians keep reinforcing it.
Is trump not cartoonishly evil too?
He is 100%. The difference is that Trump rules the US, not Iran. For Iranians, anything that can realistically help them get rid of their oppressors is a glimmer of hope that cling on to even if the odds aren't that great.
Yeah, because the US has a stellar history if installing fair dictators. That's how Hussein came to power in the first place.
For the record, I don't support the US installing a new regime. I want the Iranian people take their country back for themselves, not be under new management. I just think that with how ruthless and evil this regime is willing to be, it's simply not possible for the people to overthrow it by themselves.
The issue with that is that's how they got into this mess the first time. And the midterms are coming, Kamala lost on Palestine. I don't mean to be a dick but the timing seems very similar...
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. You grossly overestimate how much people care about Palestine. The vast, vast majority don't care, it's very much down on the list of priorities for most people, including the ones who vote Democrat. Kamala lost for 3 reasons:
I think you're probably right that Trump might start a war because the midterms are around the corner, but at the same time, I genuinely think he's too dumb to think that strategically. I think it's much more likely that he wants something to distract the population from the Epstein files.
Honestly, I used to not understand that mindset. But living in the US now, I'm starting to feel that desperation. Literally anything that would knock that clown off his stool would be worth it, even a deal with the devil himself.
Fuck, this sucks so much.
The strongest empathy comes through experience. What Iranians are experiencing now might be what we experience in 10 years if not sooner. The fight against fascism is a global one, and there's no such thing as a good fascist regime.
Not sure if you mean the regime in Iran or USA.
Both can be true but what's the point of your comment?
I don't think that's true. the US one has definite cartoon vibes. The Iran one seems a bit more "physical"
Yeah, the US has a level of incompetence to it that makes it somewhat amusing, from a distance.
The Iranian regime is a lot better at what they do, and that's the scary part.
Sorry, let me clarify that my comment wasn't meant to express an opinion, but to ask why their response was to skip the main content of OP's post and ask that question. However as another user pointed out OP seems to be a Tesla shill amongst other things, so I guess neither of those posters is worth engaging with. The internet is miraculous
Users on this site are really are gullible to misinformation. That user was lying. You're free to browse my account history as you please, and make your own opinions instead of relying on a single dishonest user who's engaging in bad faith.
I scrolled enough to know you're somebody I wouldn't enjoy talking to, so farewell. Tell my kids I love them
The feeling is mutual
The Trump administration is evil, but it's still night and day compared to the Iranian regime. The Mullahs make MAGA look tame in comparison.
Americans and their main character syndrome drives me up the wall sometimes. Even well meaning ones can't not interpret the world from the perspective of US doing a thing, and everything else being the consequence of that.
I just hope that most of that are bots trying to stir chaos, otherwise it's too sad
Calling out USA on its atrocities and its bad rep with foreign interference throughout history is USdefaultism now?
WTF are you smoking?
You're more bot-like than the OP. Just calling names making things up to manufacture consent in a made up reality in a bot farm.
There is a not insignificant (at least by noise level) portion of the Iranian Diaspora that want the US to invade specifically to install Reza Pahlavi as King. I know because they are harassing my wife on social media when she posts her position which is as you described. You are right in that the majority don't want a war like this, but Royalists specifically (including the prince of nothing himself ) seem to actually believe that this would be a good thing.
You only have to look at what happened around Huda Beauty, when their Iraqi owner said the same thing you are saying.