The World is Still Watching (We Hope)

So much has been said of the Iranian crackdown having silenced the protests. There are a lot of ways this can be so:

1. people have been cowed
2. the movement has lost steam
3. people have been eliminated

1 and 2 are certainly part of the equation, but I think what really happened is 3, and the survivors are scared of the same happening to them.

http://internationalpost.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/280/

In the words of Josef Stalin, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." Remember the uproad of Neda a few weeks ago? Iran seems to be heading toward the realm of statistics.

Iran has suffered under dictatorships for 55+ years. It's shameful that the US had a major hand in the first 25 of those, and very sad that the revolt against the Shah enabled the last 30.

Recent events have shown the Islamic dictatorship to be the most brutal. This is the direct effect of religion's ability to get people to think of Us vs Them and treat the opposition as sub-human. The Shah stepped down partly because he wouldn't order his forces to shoot into crowds. Khamenai and Ahmadinejah seem to have no such compunctions.

All very scary and sad. Scary for the US as well, as the neo-cons who are most vocal about how we should intervene are the same people who would have the US become more of a Christian dictatorship than it already was during the Bush years.