by Siyǎvash Shahabi Just look at the size of this crowd. These are people who came out fully aware of the risks—live bullets, arrest, even death. This presence is not random, not emotional, and not the result of some outside call. It is a conscious decision by people who feel they have nothing left to lose except humiliation and silence. Anyone who reduces the anger and uprising of Iranians to “foreign interference” or to “Pahlavi” is either not stupid but knowingly lying, or is a racist who does not want Iranians to deserve freedom, dignity, and the right to decide their own future. Or worse, they are someone cheering from afar, treating the clash between East and West like a Colosseum spectacle—applauding a gladiator fight while real people’s lives, futures, and deaths mean nothing to them. Our lives as Iranians cannot be reduced to this naive and stupid “East versus West” binary. We are not pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, and we are not tools for settling power struggles. The p...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51