The uprising in Iran has transformed into a postponed earthquake, one that is inevitable and most likely will be very destructive. The pent-up anger and frustration will surely come to the surface again but in what shape or form is to be determined. Maybe it will take place when Ali Khamenei dies.
The regime has lost all credibility and is a dead man walking. The voting that is taking place against the regime is through the dumping of the currency and the purchase of dollars and gold. Within the past month the dollar has gone from 37,000 tomans to 54,000 tomans, and all indications are that by the end of the Norouz holidays the dollar will go above 60,000 tomans.
The regime is broke and is selling off extremely valuable public lands, with a Qatari sheikh apparently about to walk off with Jamshidieh Cultural Center, a pristine piece of property in northern Tehran. The Cinema Museum located at Ferdows Garden is also on the block. If the regime wanted to stoke the fury that the young have in their hearts, this is the way to do it. This is further proof of just how dumb and ignorant this regime is. We are being ruled by medieval minded knuckleheads whose competence doesn’t go beyond running a butcher shop.
What protests are still taking place are now in foreign lands, which is appreciated, but not that useful. Various gatherings have taken place where opposition figures have met and made speeches, again not that effective when it comes to toppling this murderous regime. Show me one opposition figure willing to return to Iran and dedicate themselves to building the new Iran after this regime is removed? There isn’t one. These opposition figures live comfortable lives outside of Iran and will not return to the horrendous Tehran traffic jams and the choking air pollution, no matter how secular or democratic Iran becomes. We in Iran are on our own and it’s a mistake to place any hope on those that have left, or on anybody with an illustrious pedigree.
The regime’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is the version of Islam it has imposed on innocent Iranians. Instead of leading Iranians to the truth it has led them into a dead-end where it grants itself permission to hang, rape, and torture innocents because they are declared the enemies of God, a God that if it stood in front of them, they would not be able to see it.
The evidence that they have been leading Iran down the wrong path is visible to anybody that can see. A brain drain that has been ongoing for decades, environmental destruction caused by a dam building mafia, an automobile industry mired in producing death traps on fifty-year-old technology, a delusional nuclear industry costing over a hundred billion dollars with its only output being crippling sanctions, an ignored water crisis largely of their own making, and systemic corruption so prevalent that getting anything done without bribing somebody is impossible.
One success they can point to is the “education” of hundreds of thousands of clerics who are financial leeches from the day they enroll at seminaries to the day they are assigned some well paying “supervising” job. Iranians have woken up to the fact that they have been scammed and that this has been a forty-three-year-old hoax and along the way they had been promised heaven but have ended up receiving a special kind of hell.
Those that have perpetuated this disaster are living in Iran, down the street from us. They don’t live in Mecca or Baghdad. They live amongst us. We have let them do this to us. We have opened our doors to them. We have allowed them to brainwash our children. We have swallowed their superstitions. We have done this to ourselves. When you discover that you are holding a hammer in your hand and you are smashing that hammer into your own head, what do you do to stop the pain? You drop that hammer. And that is what Iranians need to do. There is no other solution.