anti-government protests in Iran

This should probably be a bit more central in my consciousness:

Over 40 killed as mass protests rock Iran after ‘morality police’ kill woman over ‘improper hijab’

More than 40 people have reportedly been killed as anti-government protests rocked dozens of Iranian cities in the last week following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested by the Iranian "morality police" for not properly wearing a hijab earlier this month.

At least 41 people have been killed, and more than 1,200 have been arrested during the protests as of Saturday, Iran's state television reports. According to Reuters, the death toll is unofficial as an official count has not been released. 

The unrest followed the death Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who is said to have fallen into a coma in police custody after her arrest for not following Iran's strict conservative dress codes.

Amini was interrogated at the Vozara detention center, where she reportedly experienced blows to the head while under interrogation. Authorities claim she died of natural causes, but critics are skeptical.

You may have seen the meme (one of many, really) showing a split screen. On one side, it says, "Iran before the Revolution," with pictures of very Western-looking young Iranian women. On the other side, it says, "Iran after the Revolution," and it shows nothing but women covered in burqas.* Well, it turns out there's been something of a meme war going on all this time; some versions of this meme stress that traditional dress was actually a thing in the pre-Revolution days, i.e., not much changed over the years. Whether or not that's true, the fact is that a young Kurdish woman was singled out for violating a strict dress code. Whether she paid the ultimate price because of the dress code or because of her ethnicity (the Kurds have been put upon wherever they've formed communities) is hard to say. The upshot is that a lot of cities are sites of huge anti-government demonstrations right now.

Whether all of this adds up to revolutionary fervor driven by a grassroots desire to return to secularism is yet to be seen. We Americans have been hopeful, in the past, that the Iranian people would rise up and break their shackles, but time and again, the opportunity for overthrow has come and gone, with the status quo remaining the status quo. 

It's a bit like watching China or North Korea—always hoping the people will wake up, rise up, and shatter their oppressive governments. It never happens, and the reason could be as simple as Life trumps liberty—and I want to live. Would I lay down my own life in such conditions? With the way things are going all over the world—increased surveillance states resulting in dwindling privacy and ever-shrinking rights—the suffocating pall of totalitarianism is upon us, and more and more, it's looking as though the only real solution will come from taking up arms, cracking skulls, and burning down governments. I'm still young enough to engage in such a thing, but would I have the intestinal fortitude to do so? I don't know. I'd like to think that, when the rubber meets the road, I won't be a coward when the trumpet sounds, but up to now, this is a moral test I haven't yet directly faced. 

For the moment, I'm safe in Korea, but even here, postmodernist thinking has infiltrated academe, and leftists who sympathize with North Korea brazenly show their faces and make their loony pronouncements. The rot reached these peninsular shores years ago, and even Korea will soon be riddled with metastases. It doesn't help that Korea offers its citizens no Second Amendment rights, so acquiring a gun, should things become chaotic, may mean... appropriating one from someone else.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to watch Iran with morbid curiosity, but I seriously doubt this current affair will end with Iran's government being toppled and replaced.

when dressing like a tablecloth was the in thing

one of those "not much has changed" memes

an obvious step backward

another leftist counter to supposed rightie stereotypes

a rightie's dark vision of the future

Does this hint at something cyclical?

__________

*Burqas cover the whole body, but in Iran, it's the hijab, which covers the head and shoulders, usually without covering the face, that is compulsory.