TOTAL DISCONNECT OF THE AMERICAN MIND FROM REALITY IN IRAN

Shown in blue below is the comment of a worthy but frustrated American on a website with 250,000 members, indicating how far off the American ability to think in terms of reality is when referencing Iran as the venue.

This applies equally to much of the Administration, the Intelligence Agencies, much of the Military (specially retired talking heads advisors and TV pundits) and sadly so, the State Department.

Alan's response follows the blue comment:

COMMENT:

"I feel for the people. But the reality is they are sitting on a powder keg with the lunatics running the asylum.I don't. An unstated corrallery of the Bush Doctrine is "citizens: you are responsible for your own country" This is an assertion of radical democracy. No more victim nations.

If a nation of millions allows a handful to rule, for decades, without any significant opposition they have de-facto made the decision to support those tyrants. Please don't come crying to us (though they will) when we are forced to bomb you because of the action of those rulers.

I will respect the Iranians when they rise up, violently, to depose the lunatics. Anything less is cowardice and unworthy of a supposedly great people.

At least some Nazi's tried to assassinate Hitler. Many others resisted. All I see from the Iranians are protests, which sometimes go violent. This is silly.

The time is long past to be organizing military resistance, buying guns, forming cells, and carrying out targeted assassinations of Mullahs.

This is what would certainly have happened in the USA decades ago were some sick sect of crazed religious fanatics attempt to impose dictatorship on the American people.

So no, I won't feel sorry for those who die. They have literally brought this upon themselves".

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Easy to stand in your shoes or sit in the safety of your chair and accuse a populace of cowardice because they no longer want to face an Arab mercenary force - the Basiji - newly equipped with $253 MILLION of weaponry and crowd control and riot suppression equipment AND open season to kill anyone they want to in the streets - without fear of punishment.

Their sole job - presently, is to repress any street location or university demonstrations and use whatever means they want. A new task envisaged for them will be the running of elections and screening of candidates. If it was bad and discriminatory before, the "fix" is in for the ardent followers of Hojatieh to win everything.

They have been given arrest authority BUT they take those arrested to their own sites and do with them as they please. And their pleasure is inevitably sadistic to the extreme.

No law, no oversight, no restrictions and nowhere for anyone to go and complain.

Within those parameters, would you DARE go into the streets of your own neighborhod to even shop for groceries let alone oppose anything or anyone? Say if the local gangs had the same mission in mind and the same immunity from punishment or retribution?

Be real, good friend.

Specially when the social weave of Iranian society - after over a quarter of a century of the Mullahs - has been weakened by corruption essential for survival.

Where married women take on several lovers to pay their daily life's needs and to feed their husbands and children.

Where prostitution is almost an unavoidable part of life for women. In best case scenarios as a beaten and degraded wife of some man - often with multiple wives. Who at any moment can find herself thrown into the street to join the countless homeless women on the streets of cities, who failed to please their husbands enough and thus become indigents with no way to earn a living

Where drugs are sold more easily than music CDs.

Where more than 400,000 starving children roam the streets of Tehran and will do anything to survive. Peddling themselves or others - snitching on others to the authorities for a meager reward - to survive another day.

Compared to Iran's current social turmoil and dislocation, the Jews almost "had it good" under Hitler - not much of an exaggeration since the Bassiji kill just as readily or more so than the Nazi SS. The streets and private homes are the concentration camps, not just the multitude of formal prisons.

They have been killed and maimed with tire irons by Bassijis for appearing close to a small crowd in the streets, even if not participants. What energy is left in these battered, sucked dry souls to do what you ask? To avoid your accusation of cowardice.

Put your thoughts into Islamic Iranian context not some philosophical, impossible parameters of what should have, could have, might have been done in an American scenario.