Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?

If you want the Iranian people to engage in a forever war against the West, this is the kind of attitude you must hold.

“Some arbitrary injustice done by dead people forever justifies us to do whatever we want” isn’t a viable political or culturally progressive route to go down. Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran? Do they need a nuclear bomb to get over it? Will they stop hanging gay people, helping Russia, and providing militia support to destabilize Arab countries once they get what they want (whatever that is)? What date or specific thing do they need?

Can anyone say?

Of course not. Because totalitarian regimes always have to obsess over past injustices, perceived or real, to drum up support for the regime so that it can continue to hold power against the best interests of their people. It masks their own failures, like Tehran running out of water because their government spent all their money bombing innocent people.

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AlecSchueler a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?

People often ask these questions as if they're unanswerable or as if any answer would essentially be arbitrary.

What you need to do is look at contemporary global systems of inequality and consider their roots. For this it would seem British imperialism is often a sensible place to go to, in this case almost certainly.

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ericmay a day ago | parent [-]

That seems like a different kind of criticism, one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality and injustice that were instantiated by broader colonial powers and conflict, whether that's the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, or Persian, for that matter.

We're not talking about global systems or inequality which have innumerable reasons, but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.

	▲	AlecSchueler 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality The UK was spoken of in the particular because of its long and violent history in Iran. We could point to any number of things like Anglo-Persian oil, the 1941 occupation or the 1953 which was previously mentioned. Countries like Portugal and the Netherlands simply don't have that history in the Iranian context. Of course if we were speaking about somewhere like Indonesia then we would foreground other colonial powers. There is also of course much that should be said about broader colonial history but the question above was why do we bring up British wrongdoing rather than ancient Persian history. > but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior "Bad behaviour" is your terminology. We're talking about why they have sanctions imposed on them. > and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression. No-one else was talking about this but you, and it feels like it was only raised in an attempt to undermine genuine concerns about legacy issues.

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jst1fthsdys 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced. I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.

> Vietnam got over it. Why can’t Iran?

Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?

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ericmay 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Vietnam hasn't been sanctioned for decades following the war. Why can't the US and Israel get over the Shah being overthrown?

We've tried but then they fund all these militias and kill lots of people and keep trying to build nuclear bombs. What if they stop doing those things?

> You are trying to use events from antiquity to dilute or excuse events done within living timeframes. You realize lots of Iranians lived during the Iran-Iraq war, yes? You know the US supported Saddam as he was gassing them, yes? These are things people who still live experienced.

By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Do you remember (or are you even aware) of things like the Atoms for Peace program? Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets? Arab nations also supported Iraq during the war. You are over-simplifying and cherry-picking while ignoring the fact that international relations is a lot more complicated than "country did X, therefore enemies for all time". USS Cole, Lebanon, it's not like Iran is innocent. And before you go and say well what about 1953, well then you can just keep going back to some other slight or injustice. If you want to live in a world of forever wars, by my guest. I think we should give peace a chance but that requires Iran to stop certain activities that simply do not serve anyone but a tiny minority of theocrats and despots.

> I hope that provides some insight as to why Iran hates the US.

Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them. Iran's autocratic government hates us and they can't pursue a path of peace because authoritarian regimes need external enemies to direct popular anger against to cover up for their own shortcomings. It's a common playbook that we're all well aware of.

	▲	jst1fthsdys 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> We've tried No we didn't. Well, we tried the JCPOA eventually, but that got nuked by Trump. > By that logic Iran should thank us for getting rid of Saddam. Yeah, thanks for killing the guy you used to gas and slaughter our people. All water under the bridge now, even though you provided that support for him to gas and kill us. > Atoms for Peace program How is this relevant? > Why does/did Iran have F-14 fighter jets? They seized them when they overthrew the Shah. > I think we should give peace a chance Then the US should show some good faith and release frozen funds and lift sanctions. To expect Iran to weaken themselves when the west has shown perfidy time and time again is, frankly, ridiculous. The war going on now has only made that more impossible. > Iran and the Iranian people don't hate the US and we don't hate them. They may not hate the average American, but they hate our ruling class. And I assure you, our ruling class hates them all. They are racist fascists, it's what they do. You are naive if you think people like Rubio or Trump give two shits about Iranians. They want to destabilize a regional power and exploit natural resources. The best way to do that would be to throw Iran into chaos so no one faction controls power. It would be another Iraq situation and millions of Iranians would die.