Case study in the misery of #geopolitics - elsewhere I mentioned the ongoing #Iran riots[^1], to which a classic comment guy replied “ah yes, Muricans and Jews meddling!”
The problem here a complete and rather arrogant blindness of this Western (but also very much Russian and Chinese) “experts” to the fact that even your “average brown people in Iran” have brains and can simply get pissed off when there’s shortages of food or hyperinflation (as in case of Iran right now).
We had the same thing in 1980’s in communist #Poland when you had to queue overnight to get meat or basic groceries from shops because there was an artificial shortage of everything. I had no clue what people in the world were saying about this because it was 1980’s and we also had censorship as an added bonus. Only after communism collapsed we learned that in addition to all people who were understanding and compassionate, there was a whole bunch of “geopolitical” morons who naturally argued that it’s just all just CIA staged coups etc. You certainly couldn’t t see that from your couch 5000 km away, but even your average Eastern Europeans can get genuinely pissed off by decades of totalitarian and completely dysfunctional governance.
In short, when judging protests in foreign countries always try to get the full context before actually making your judgement. I’ve learned this hard way, which is why I never blanket condemned 2023-2024 Polish farmer’s protests against Ukrainian grain imports – that is until at some point there was a clearly visible Russian infiltration into these protests, at which stage I started to point this out publicly. And yes, there are protests obviously controlled from outside and we had a fantastic case studies in #Donbas in 2014 - groups of barely interested people with identical placards who come and disappear in an organised way. Or a classic riot caused by disinformation, as happened in Southport but these are short lived - you can’t have thousands of people sitting on #Euromaidan in winter for three months for a covert salary, that simply doesn’t happen.
P.S. below is a 1988 photo I’ve done on one of such protests in Kraków using a Smena camera and having absolutely zero clue about photography ☺️
