The peasant’s revolt, or more accurately, brave young women’s public protests currently underway against their respective authoritarian regimes in Iran and now China, are sadly doomed for opposing reasons.
With Xi Jinping it will be ended in China by the despotic President’s underlying pragmaticism which will see him relax the ludicrous attempted crushing of Covid by locking everyone up idiocy. It’s not analogous to Hong Kong 3 years back which simply saw the territory brought into the central government’s administrative fold.
We’re well familiar with that here with Jacinda’s daily broadcast to our slavishly subservient public which authoritarian nonsense was based on her assurance she was going to eliminate the virus. In my view that woefully meek submission was the most shameful episode in New Zealand’s history. Today, finally adopting the pragmatic Swedish live with it model, it’s silence from Jacinda.
In Iran the courageous protesting women are fighting supernaturalist fanatics in the form of unelected mystics who believe they have a duty to control female behaviour because Allah said so. The only way they can be beaten is not by protest, but by guns, specifically shooting the brain-dead soldiers currently happy to shoot the protesters.
History repeatedly shows, seemingly daily today in Africa, that soldiers are only effective if no-one shoots back, but when that occurs, they break speed records running away. In the post-war years the only conspicuous exception was Vietnam.
But who will arm the Iranian women? The nation with the greatest interest in doing so is surely Israel to eliminate its greatest threat, the Iranian fanatics openly asserting their goal being to eliminate Israel. Currently the Israelis have concentrated on successfully knocking off Iran’s nuclear scientists, but sooner or later some will survive and complete building nuclear weapons.
At the root of all of these universal troubles, be it the ill-fated, ill-considered Jacinda Joan of Arc fantasy, or authoritarianism world-wide, lies the craving by some people to order others about.