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Discussion (112 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I still believe the Iranian government is more afraid of it's people than of the US and Israel - the US and Israel can bomb leadership and materiel, but without ground troops, regime capitulation is unlikely, unless the populace can themselves overthrow the govt (though that is hard to do when there is a major imbalance in who has guns).
Iranians broadly hate their government, yeah. But the thing that gets them rioting is economic failure. Which the strikes have exacerbated.
Social media is swarmed by people saying it’ll be like Iraq and Iranians will hate the US for its actions. I’m not convinced. My small anecdata of Iranian friends with contacts in Iran agrees with me.
I think we could see regime change within a decade.
I believe Iranians want to be able to decide their own fate, with the dignity that all humans deserve. Without criminal domestic religious zealots and without foreign meddling and bombing.
The previous protest was followed by the killing of Mahsa Amini, in morality police’s custody because of improper hijab. It’s not only economic hardships. But you’re right that war has made the situation worse, obviously.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/iran-at-least...
I am having a very hard time believing anyone would be favourable to the country currently lobbing bombs at them from halfway around the globe. Regardless of how much they dislike their current regime.
Maybe this fuels some "everyone loves America, the good guys" fantasy, but, as someone who's come from a country where the people did not like the regime, I am very skeptical foreign interference will be seen positively or even neutrally.
Or maybe this is an attempt at making the war seem somehow just and led on humanitarian and democratic principles, as opposed to what it actually is.
For reference, it has been verfied [~] that the regime killed ~220 students just in the recent uprisings of this January. That's a whole school full of students, all under-18. And then you have to ask, why would a teenager be on the streets, given that they knew, everyone knew, that snipers and machine guns will be there? Just 5 days ago they hung an 18-year-old who was arrested this Jan. They also hung a 19-yo wrestling champion very recently. The collateral damage of these bombings, which must be denounced and is reprehensible, still has not reached these levels either in brutality and in number. [1]
[~] (my internet connection is not good enough to find the sources, I'm using dnstt in a very unreliable network)
[1] AFAIK, Around 180-190 students have died in the recent conflict. Some 160-170 was due to an erroneous airstrike by the US military on the first day of the war, and their school was within 30 meters of a military base (!). Furthermore, some of the other students who have died were the children of the assassinated regime officials.
1) they HATE their government more than anything in the world. They’ve seen the government killing its own people.
2) the consensus of civilians is that strikes by and large are hitting IRGC targets. They do not feel civilian targets are being targeted even though the nature of it has resulted in civilian deaths.
3) they don’t feel inclined to give trump the slightest amount of trust or good will. They just want regime change by any means.
If.
Past riots were related to women rights or election fraud. The last one were related to the economic situation, but there is a large young population in Iran which aren't religious anymore, and living in an oppressive theocracy
https://gtnm.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-theocratic-authorita...
Didn't help anybody in Minab.
Now, they're probably good to go for a couple more decades. Trump is precisely the kind of threat Iranians have been warned about since the revolution. When a regime spends almost half a century preparing for something and it finally happens, it earns them considerable forgiveness. Also, nothing unites people quite like a foreign threat, especially one dumb enough to bomb schoolgirls in its opening salvo.
By scuttling the JCPOA for no apparent reason and now invading Iran right when it appeared the regime was crumbling, Trump has single-handedly reinvigorated Iran's theocracy and given them the public support they need for the final push towards nuclear weapons. That's what's so sickening about this invasion. It has acted in diametric opposition to the the policy goals it was purportedly pursuing.
They say things like "no matter what it takes, no matter how many of us die, we must be free again, this time we will win against the terrorist regime" (paraphrased).
The regime will kill you/your loved ones and brand them as criminals if you protest against them or break an unreasonable law, the US and Israel will kill you and brand you as terrorists because you happened to be Iranian and in the wrong place.
I think people outside of Iran/Iranians vastly underestimate the disdain for the Iranian regime. Go watch the movie "It was just an accident" to get a basic feel for how much they hate the regime, then amplify that tenfold.
Iranian here.. no, we're not celebrating US bombing our children. People are very united right now, the war is for the survival of IRAN. Our plight with IRGC is set aside to defeat the invaders attempting to take our home land.
I'm not sure how you can both claim "you support the bombing of your family in Tehran" but also claim "the campaign needs to end".
For reference, my own cousin was taken to Evin prison for 6 months after the Mahsa uprising and after she was released, she had to be hospitalized for a year. She will never leave a normal life again. So I have NO LOVE for IRGC.
But no, I am not going to "cheer" for US and Israel for bombing Isfahan, Shiraz and destroy our Shah Cheragh.
We have 90M people in our home and we can figure things out among ourselves, just like have done so since the dawn of the Achaemenids.
P.S I hope your family is safe.
I once attended a military "fair"(?) where they'd show off their equipment and had some anti-US "games", eg one involving throwing a shoe at a target with Obama or maybe Bush's face printed on it, and observed people enthusiastically taking part in it.
My impression was that while people hated and feared the regime, they still broadly shared the anti-foreign intervention stance, particularly against the US. I'm having a hard time believing that they'd still be pro-US after Trump threatened genocide against them.
With that being said I don’t like/want the war. I understand and sympathize with the emotional response from my compatriots because they see the oppressors are getting the bloody beating they well deserve. But I don’t really think that the current war brings anything good for the people. I wish it did but it doesn’t look like it. I wish the regime would fall but they haven’t and we now have ~2000 more innocents dead on top of thousands that government killed in January.
How in your mind do we get to the regime answering for its crimes? What is going to dislodge them? If they are not dislodged and continue to indoctrinate more people where does this go? If they have more weapons where does it go?
Is any chance that some elements within the current regime will change sides? What percent of soldiers or militia are die hard fanatics vs. people who will jump ship if there's a good chance of that "ship" sinking?
Of course, that only brings us to, "It's easy to claim others are offering their lives for your goals."
I guess it's probably best to just realize everything you see on the subject of any given war is probably propaganda. And judge the value of it through that lens.
Your paraphased quote also implies that there must be actual regime change for the deaths to be worth it (ie, no IRGC).
That seems a little bit suspect, how many Iranians do you know? I have difficulty believing that less than around 20-30% of them support the regime. There seems to be a baseline of around that fraction of people who support the status quo.
It isn't so hard to find people who support full-on communism. Any reasonable sample should be turning up a lot of really weird opinions.
Clearly your sample of Iranians is very biased.
I am not pro theocratic regimes, but not only does the US/Israel _not_ have the right to wage this war, but this war will only make the regime stronger.
Nothing more unifying than getting bombed, especially in martyrdom cultures.
Essentially, they’ve created a two-tier system controlling who can access the internet.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_SIM_Card
Erm, dude, you did look at the graph on the Mastodon post linked to, right ?
You see that bit where it falls off a cliff to 0% netblocks ?
"white SIM card" or not, you're not getting internet if there's no BGP routes being announced.
The only way around 0 BGP announcements would be satellite...
I suspect your "white SIM card" was a pre-war status-quo ...
Not sure if we're all looking at the same plot, but I see things hovering above zero, not exactly at zero.
That propaganda can also be spread by people who do not have "white simcards" simply by virtue of the fact they live outside Iran.
This includes, for example, the various posts made by Iranian embassies around the world.
Come on, this is a technical forum, I really shouldn't need to spell that out !
As I said, satellite is a thing.
I also don't doubt there may be some traditional land-based BGP access going on too, maybe using "borrowed" prefixes. But I do not think it is as much as people think it might be.
I also doubt there are 50,000 "white SIM" active today... I suspect that Wikipedia "unofficial figure" reflects pre-war. Most have very likely been disconnected or blocked.
They know leaving the internet online would be beneficial for their adversaries, perhaps especially as Israel is one of them, and Israel's use of cyber is no secret.
So by killing the internet, they have an instant air-gap firewall.
Making the most of the levers they have fighting asymmetric warfare.
I mean, sure. But then being at war is also economically harmful. :)
Their country is very much on the edge of chaos which is why they are brutally controlling their citizens.
Especially being at war with practically all the countries around you.
Sure, but why make their life easier ?
Taking your line of argument, you would also need to say "well, the US are going to bomb us anyway. We might as well just post all the GPS coordinates of sensitive sites up on Twitter".
It doesn't matter what your constitution says, western countries have readily adopted brutal censorship during serious wars virtually every time.
Failing to do so simply allows hostile foreign powers free reign in the information space domestically and increases the chance you lose
Of course information does still get in and out, but that is severely throttled
Iran has been rolling out the National Information Network (essentially a whitelisted internet) since the Green Revolution [0] back in 2009-12. Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [8], and China [8].
Iran also uses a two-tier SIM card system - ideologically vetted individuals get a "white" SIM which gives full ingress/egress outside the NIN and others have a normal SIM that can be blacklisted from egressing outside the NIN.
Notice how Iranian websites have a page saying "Transferring to Website" - that's the gateway page for the NIN.
[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/
[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa
[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...
[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...
[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545
[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...
[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/
[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home
[8] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...
The issue is, if you control the Network DMZ, it's extremely difficult to bypass. In Xinjiang and Tibet (which has a similar setup) they used to use smuggled Kazakh, Nepali, and Indian SIM cards but that was cracked down.
A lot of the info from inside Iran that is not regime connected is coming from areas in Iranian Kurdistan where an Iraqi SIM could be smuggled or accessed somewhat easier than other areas.
Bitcoin and Crypto as a shadow financial system was enabled by Qatar and the UAE where there are dedicated deal desks that work on ExAmerica trades.
This is why the IRGC striking Qatar and the UAE was such a bad move. Even companies in the PRC try to follow American sanctions regimes because trade with Japan+SK+ASEAN is higher priority than trade with Russia or Iran.
predictable down vote
but listen up, Iran has made a tactical move in this, but the implication is that they, like Afganistan are consideriing a strategic move, and many others are watching.
more down voting, which is an excellent demonstration of how the internet is used by those that "own" it
- "You are wrong! Everyone is not crazy"
- "You see? I told you. Everyone is crazy"