does anyone have any updates on how the protests are going in iran? it seems to no longer be getting attention from the media so not much is said about recent developments.
From the looks of things, it looks like yet another protest movement the Iranian government has succesfully quashed. For all the civil unrest that Iran gets, and sometimes deservedly so, the Mullahs have established an ironclad security apparatus. Not to mention even if a segment of the Iranian youth population are Western leaning, many Iranians are still religiously conservative to the core and didn't sympathize with the protesters.
Its funny, because its kind of an inverse from the 1979 revolution. For all the pictures of pre-revolution women in Iran wearing skirts and high heels the West likes to parade around, those women had the luxury of being a part of the urban middle class. The rest of the country wasn't so fortunate, didn't like the Shah, and thus were easily radicalized by the revolutionary Islamic ideaology.
Be that is it may, a lot of people protested for legitimate reasons besides the religious repression, such as the corruption, the outsized dominance of the clerics and the IRGC, and the state of the economy. Iranians were the intellectual backbone of Islamic civilization and to this day, Iranians are highly cultured and educated. Their country could be the Germany of the Middle-East, but instead is run by fanatics who want to keep the status quo.
As a sidenote, all things considered, when I look at how quickly the CPC was willing to meet the demands of the people when public discontent over Zero COVID boiled over, one realizes that there are "dictatorships" in the world, per the West's definition. And then there's China, where even when the leadership fumbles, they always have the nation's and people's interests at heart.