The Iran regime sucks, it’s authoritarian and brutal.
Yet I can’t help but having a nagging feeling that the reason we are hearing these stories, is to help justify the next move of Israel/USA.
There is no doubt that USA is a huge part of the reason it is as bad as it is now in Iran, because half a century of sanctions against Iran has undermined their economy, and bad economy is a major factor of the internal problems of Iran. Life threatening poverty has a strong tendency to lead to violence.
Iran might have been on a path to a more civil society when moderates were at power. However this was against Israels plan to picture the local rival as force of evil… so Trump singlehandedly ended the nuclear deal Iran was kept word in and proved to the Iraninan leaders that ‘the West’ can’t be trusted. Next election saw a switch to more conservativism and repression, just as intended.
It is like condemning Hamas for violent resistance after Israel completely shot up the peaceful Hamas peaceful march of return against occupation in 2017 with full backing of the West, and so many other Palestinian attempts at a peaceful resolution which were met with bloody massacres from their oppressors.
Yeah oppressed people are going to learn a lesson. They will become “hardliners” who “no longer trust the West”. And they should be praised not falling for it again.
No doubt the sanctions and theft of Iranian assets have radicalized the country, both the regime and following that the opposition too.
The international community that participated in this are all guilty of crimes against humanity.
Deepa Parent at The Guardian has been churning these articles out at a steady pace, often pushing out inflated death tolls of Iranian civilians and citing unconfirmed sources. Any story from her should be considered highly suspect at best and consent-manufacturing propaganda at worst.
The Grayzone is a disinformation blog that exists to defend authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, al-Assad’s Syria, and China. They specifically e.g. whitewash China’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang, deny al-Assad’s chemical attack on Douma, and support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
You surely know this, of course, if you’re citing them. I’m just clarifying for others.
That’s an odd way to say that the source is uncredible and a mouthpiece for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity of authoritarian regimes. You know, like the kinds of crimes being discussed here.
And outlets like The Guardian and The BBC are responsible for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel and its Western allies.
Does that make every article written for them fundamentally untrue?
Okay, so you just fundamentally don’t understand or care about how source credibility, bias, or anything outside of a black-and-white binary works. Taken in the extreme, I can’t say “Hey guys, check out this InfoWars source*” and then claim “but mainstream outlets are biased and lie too!!” when I’m rightly called out for it.
Yeah, sources like BBC News are biased for e.g. Israel’s genocide in Palestine. That’s why we normally treat them with a grain of skepticism when they report on things like that; for BBC News specifically, I’d probably just find a better source if I want reporting on Israel in Palestine or Lebanon. Nonetheless, it’s not ridden with unhinged conspiracy theories about how e.g. al-Assad never carried out an illegal chemical attack on his own people or AI-hallucinated disinformation about Alexei Navalny.
The Grayzone is a quintessential mouthpiece that exists effectively solely for that purpose.
* Edit: I guess I actually can cite them now and it’d be kind of funny. God bless you, Tesseract.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has condemned the Chinese policies in Xinjiang as genocide.
One can’t in good conscience cite the IAGS as an authority when they condemn the genocide in Gaza and then ignore them when they condemn the genocide in Xinjiang.
One can’t in good conscience cite the IAGS as an authority when they condemn the genocide in Gaza and then ignore them when they condemn the genocide in Xinjiang.
Whoops, sorry, based on the standard you set below, I’m afraid I have to conclude that you’re actually stanning the shit out of Marjorie Taylor Greene. After all, a bad actor not discussed here says that Israel is perpetrating a genocide of Palestinians much as Adrian Zenz says China is perpetrating a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs, and therefore I’m going to have to attribute your opposition to the obvious, well-documented, ongoing genocide in Palestine to an antisemitic belief in Jewish space lasers.
Wow, arguing in bad faith totally unconstrained by logic is so much fun; I see why you like it now.
(Edit: And in this case, I’m citing what’s effectively an actual neo-Nazi compared to just a member of a right-wing think tank with a wildly out-of-context screenshot. Even when I’m trying to be bad-faith as a joke, I somehow can’t measure up to your work.)
The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like checks notes Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, and Qatar found China’s cultural-genocidal “achievements” “remarkable”.
Was this actually meant to sway anyone, or were you just hoping copy–pasting this would get people to zone out, not read it, and just passively agree you’d said something convincing?
Edit: Anyway, here’s a good debunk of that article by Modern Chinese historian and socialist David Brophy. I disagree with Brophy on the subject of “genocide” because it’s very clearly a cultural one (whereas he’s using the one about killing off etc. of a group), but he nonetheless compellingly points out that the article you linked is a crock of shit. Even disregarding that they used AI to write it and provably hallucinated sources, it’s still a sloppy piece of propaganda.
Oh, okay, so you’re pulling a disingenuous whataboutism for someone who wasn’t even being discussed.
I didn’t offer Adrian Zenz’s opinion for the same reason I wouldn’t have offered Saudi Arabia’s. You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia which is why I criticized you for doing so. I instead offered the opinion of David Brophy excoriating that piece of AI slopaganda but who you completely sidestepped because his article competently and credibly drags the Monthly Review one into the street and puts it out of its misery.
It’s actually kind of hilarious that you’re (unsurprisingly) doing one of the main things Brophy criticizes Prashad and Chak for in the debunk I seriously doubt you cared to read.
Edit: And by the way, just because I didn’t even think to earlier because I was more frustrated with your invoking someone never discussed here than I was with what he said: here’s the full context.
He was replying to Michael D. Swaine, who wrote:
Other than the fact that “he” alone did not do this, that many CN actually like greater surveillance, and that the camps are a gross overreaction to a real problem, no. But I was thinking more of the BRI nonsense, “quasi-emperor for life,” “play by its own rules,” MIC 2025, etc.
Zenz replied:
Many Germans liked Hitler’s control mechanisms. They reduced crime and rid society of unpopular minorities. @Dalzell60
You deliberately took this out of context. He’s literally using Hitler to describe how many people liking bigoted authoritarian measures doesn’t make it a good thing.
He’s still part of an expressly right-wing think tank, so I’m not suddenly endorsing things he’s written about China’s cultural genocide. What I am saying is that this is the dumbest possible way you could’ve smeared his credibility – by picking out a quote where he’s obviously and fully criticizing Hitler.
Coming into a comment thread that is calling out the manufacturing consent against Iran, and bleating “but Xinjiang!” is whataboutism if I’ve ever seen it.
And yes, you are parroting Zenz. He is the source of this myth - via countless western sources regurgitating the same claims he’s been making since 2018.
In March 2017, the Jamestown Foundation (Washington DC) published a three thousand-word report on “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State” written by Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.1 A few months later, the same writers published another report, this one slightly longer at nearly five thousand words, with the more aggressive title, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang.”2 At that time, there was not much interest in these stories. Zenz came from the Victims of Communism Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the U.S. Congress in 1993 and funded by various right-wing sources, including the Heritage Foundation.
You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia
And, ya know, a plethora of others that you decided to ignore for some reason… Associating a large swath of Muslim and Arab nations with human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia really lets your racism show.
I was remarking on the credibility of your source; you were remarking on the credibility of someone never cited here. You decided to use the source in the first place and then defend it when called out; I immediately disavowed the one you tried to push on me.
Brophy goes over your exact type of asinine rhetoric that seeks to ascribe this only to right-wing think tanks.
But equally, the Left should not allow criticism of genocide claims to smuggle in an attitude of indifference to the human suffering that those claims point to—precisely what Prashad and Chak are trying to do. In their hands, talk of genocide is reduced to the work of a handful of individuals affiliated with right-wing think tanks, a move that allows them to focus on cultivating a sense that the entire Xinjiang issue is a construct of funding sources and self-interest. This will pass for “materialism” in some circles, but it is the sort of analysis that Gramsci had in mind when he complained of the reduction of Marxism to “economic superstition.” In such thinking, “‘Critical’ activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures.”
Sadly, far too much of today’s China debate has this feel to it. Prashad and his co-thinkers are often enough on the receiving end themselves of critiques focusing on funding sources. It is a pity that instead of elevating the discussion above this level, they choose to descend to it.
you should at least demonstrate reading comprehension
I did comprehend, and I’m not falling for it; citing e.g. Saudi Arabia on any matter of human rights is patently ridiculous. The fact the Uyghurs are predominantly Muslim doesn’t automatically mean nakedly corrupt predominantly Muslim nations with extreme records of human rights abuses are going to stick up for them, and dressing it up that way to give it a veil of credibility is frankly disgusting.
Well presumably these nations care about Muslim culture. Are you saying they dont actually care about the Muslim people in Xinjiang? Thats a lot of Muslim countries listed, and you cherry picked a few out of them. Are they all wrong? Why would they defend the genocide of a Muslim group?
Thats a lot of Muslim countries listed, and you cherry picked a few out of them.
I cherry-picked them? Those were four of the seven countries AI slop authors Prashad and Chak named, and I noted them because they’re obviously corrupt and abusive and the authors definitely know this; the fact that the authors decided to list even one of the four I listed as if it’s compelling is absurd.
I just as easily could’ve included Egypt (under the extremely corrupt and abusive el-Sisi “presidency” since 2014) and Nigeria (roughly Muslim–Christian split and notable for extreme corruption), but I decided to list the most obviously egregious majority of them from the list the authors provided as evidence. You can view the full list of representatives here.
Yes, I fully believe Muslim-majority countires would defend the cultural genocide of a Muslim ethnic group toward political ends; what kind of question is this? Again, read the Tempest article by David Brophy and try to discuss it here; he uses his experience as a socialist and a historian to break down the half-hallucinated lies by Prashad and Chak.
Nah, the kind of violence we are talking about here has nothing to do with sanctions/Israel/USA. It’s the regime against the people, not people against each other. And this is 100% the regime’s responsibility. Israeli and US leadership is bad, but it has nothing to with the regime’s brutality. Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them. Plus they run a very corrupt and inefficient economy anyway.
“Corrupt and inefficient economy” they are able to fight the world’s most expensive army while still actively selling munitions to Russia while also at a food surplus while also managing to punish a dozen US allies that picked sides poorly. Even the CIA admits they could keep this up for YEARS.
They have a far more efficient economy than any country in the west – all developing countries do by necessity.
Ok, this is just blatant propaganda. Everything you just wrote is hilariously false or a misrepresentation of the issue at hand. But by all means, continue believing that fucking Iran’s economy is superior to that of the “western world”…
Calling everything that disagrees with your owners’ world view “propaganda” is just pure slavebrained behavior.
Yes, the fact they are able to feed themselves while under crushing sanctions and even have a fucking space program means they have a more efficient economy than say, the US with it’s 1% hunger rate or the UK which is starting to kick people out of housing because they ‘can’t afford it.’ They are able to accomplish the same thing every society has as a goal – taking care of its people better than if they were on their own – with 1/10,000th of the resources.
Developing countries that aren’t in famine are indeed better economies than developed countries, because they don’t have developing countries to exploit to prop up their economy.
Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them.
They had already agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons, and let international observers in to verify, in the talks that ended apruptly when the US and Israel started bombing them.
And before that, there had already been a deal in place, which the US unilaterally pulled out of.
Yes - conspiracy theorists are great at finding any and all possible supporting evidence no matter how poor. Just vague general “relationships” is sufficient.
They’ve worked together in the past != The guardian ran this to support Trump.
WTF? This is in no way a conspiracy, this has been known for decades, USA instated the Shah to get control of the Iranian oil.
And your false equivalence is outright stupid.
No you are way off, the nationality of the outlet has very little bearing on whether it might be American propaganda or not.
Claiming that because it’s a British outlet it can’t be American propaganda is outright moronic.
The Iran regime sucks, it’s authoritarian and brutal.
Yet I can’t help but having a nagging feeling that the reason we are hearing these stories, is to help justify the next move of Israel/USA.
There is no doubt that USA is a huge part of the reason it is as bad as it is now in Iran, because half a century of sanctions against Iran has undermined their economy, and bad economy is a major factor of the internal problems of Iran. Life threatening poverty has a strong tendency to lead to violence.
Iran might have been on a path to a more civil society when moderates were at power. However this was against Israels plan to picture the local rival as force of evil… so Trump singlehandedly ended the nuclear deal Iran was kept word in and proved to the Iraninan leaders that ‘the West’ can’t be trusted. Next election saw a switch to more conservativism and repression, just as intended.
I’d say you’re right.
It is like condemning Hamas for violent resistance after Israel completely shot up the peaceful Hamas peaceful march of return against occupation in 2017 with full backing of the West, and so many other Palestinian attempts at a peaceful resolution which were met with bloody massacres from their oppressors.
Yeah oppressed people are going to learn a lesson. They will become “hardliners” who “no longer trust the West”. And they should be praised not falling for it again.
No doubt the sanctions and theft of Iranian assets have radicalized the country, both the regime and following that the opposition too.
The international community that participated in this are all guilty of crimes against humanity.
Deepa Parent at The Guardian has been churning these articles out at a steady pace, often pushing out inflated death tolls of Iranian civilians and citing unconfirmed sources. Any story from her should be considered highly suspect at best and consent-manufacturing propaganda at worst.
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/01/guardian-iranian-death-toll-concocted-monarchist-doctors/amp/
The Grayzone is a disinformation blog that exists to defend authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, al-Assad’s Syria, and China. They specifically e.g. whitewash China’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang, deny al-Assad’s chemical attack on Douma, and support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
You surely know this, of course, if you’re citing them. I’m just clarifying for others.
You may not be a fan of the source, but the facts in the article speak for themselves
Other outlets that challenge the alleged death toll numbers, include Zeteo [link], just FYI.
That’s an odd way to say that the source is uncredible and a mouthpiece for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity of authoritarian regimes. You know, like the kinds of crimes being discussed here.
And outlets like The Guardian and The BBC are responsible for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel and its Western allies.
Does that make every article written for them fundamentally untrue?
Okay, so you just fundamentally don’t understand or care about how source credibility, bias, or anything outside of a black-and-white binary works. Taken in the extreme, I can’t say “Hey guys, check out this InfoWars source*” and then claim “but mainstream outlets are biased and lie too!!” when I’m rightly called out for it.
Yeah, sources like BBC News are biased for e.g. Israel’s genocide in Palestine. That’s why we normally treat them with a grain of skepticism when they report on things like that; for BBC News specifically, I’d probably just find a better source if I want reporting on Israel in Palestine or Lebanon. Nonetheless, it’s not ridden with unhinged conspiracy theories about how e.g. al-Assad never carried out an illegal chemical attack on his own people or AI-hallucinated disinformation about Alexei Navalny.
The Grayzone is a quintessential mouthpiece that exists effectively solely for that purpose.
* Edit: I guess I actually can cite them now and it’d be kind of funny. God bless you, Tesseract.
Removed by mod
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has condemned the Chinese policies in Xinjiang as genocide.
One can’t in good conscience cite the IAGS as an authority when they condemn the genocide in Gaza and then ignore them when they condemn the genocide in Xinjiang.
Then it’s a good thing I’m not doing that.
Is there a genocide happening in Gaza? And if your answer is yes, on what basis are you saying that?
Yes, there is. Based of a plethora of sources - some more reputable than others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human_rights_groups_accusing_Israel_of_genocide_in_Gaza#List
Whoops, sorry, based on the standard you set below, I’m afraid I have to conclude that you’re actually stanning the shit out of Marjorie Taylor Greene. After all, a bad actor not discussed here says that Israel is perpetrating a genocide of Palestinians much as Adrian Zenz says China is perpetrating a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs, and therefore I’m going to have to attribute your opposition to the obvious, well-documented, ongoing genocide in Palestine to an antisemitic belief in Jewish space lasers.
Wow, arguing in bad faith totally unconstrained by logic is so much fun; I see why you like it now.
(Edit: And in this case, I’m citing what’s effectively an actual neo-Nazi compared to just a member of a right-wing think tank with a wildly out-of-context screenshot. Even when I’m trying to be bad-faith as a joke, I somehow can’t measure up to your work.)
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like checks notes Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, and Qatar found China’s cultural-genocidal “achievements” “remarkable”.
Was this actually meant to sway anyone, or were you just hoping copy–pasting this would get people to zone out, not read it, and just passively agree you’d said something convincing?
Edit: Anyway, here’s a good debunk of that article by Modern Chinese historian and socialist David Brophy. I disagree with Brophy on the subject of “genocide” because it’s very clearly a cultural one (whereas he’s using the one about killing off etc. of a group), but he nonetheless compellingly points out that the article you linked is a crock of shit. Even disregarding that they used AI to write it and provably hallucinated sources, it’s still a sloppy piece of propaganda.
Right back atcha
Oh, okay, so you’re pulling a disingenuous whataboutism for someone who wasn’t even being discussed.
I didn’t offer Adrian Zenz’s opinion for the same reason I wouldn’t have offered Saudi Arabia’s. You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia which is why I criticized you for doing so. I instead offered the opinion of David Brophy excoriating that piece of AI slopaganda but who you completely sidestepped because his article competently and credibly drags the Monthly Review one into the street and puts it out of its misery.
It’s actually kind of hilarious that you’re (unsurprisingly) doing one of the main things Brophy criticizes Prashad and Chak for in the debunk I seriously doubt you cared to read.
Edit: And by the way, just because I didn’t even think to earlier because I was more frustrated with your invoking someone never discussed here than I was with what he said: here’s the full context.
He was replying to Michael D. Swaine, who wrote:
Zenz replied:
You deliberately took this out of context. He’s literally using Hitler to describe how many people liking bigoted authoritarian measures doesn’t make it a good thing.
He’s still part of an expressly right-wing think tank, so I’m not suddenly endorsing things he’s written about China’s cultural genocide. What I am saying is that this is the dumbest possible way you could’ve smeared his credibility – by picking out a quote where he’s obviously and fully criticizing Hitler.
Coming into a comment thread that is calling out the manufacturing consent against Iran, and bleating “but Xinjiang!” is whataboutism if I’ve ever seen it.
And yes, you are parroting Zenz. He is the source of this myth - via countless western sources regurgitating the same claims he’s been making since 2018.
And, ya know, a plethora of others that you decided to ignore for some reason… Associating a large swath of Muslim and Arab nations with human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia really lets your racism show.
I was remarking on the credibility of your source; you were remarking on the credibility of someone never cited here. You decided to use the source in the first place and then defend it when called out; I immediately disavowed the one you tried to push on me.
Brophy goes over your exact type of asinine rhetoric that seeks to ascribe this only to right-wing think tanks.
They are showing evidence that the leading Muslim countries in the world support China’s policies in Xinjiang.
Disagreeing is one thing but you should at least demonstrate reading comprehension.
I did comprehend, and I’m not falling for it; citing e.g. Saudi Arabia on any matter of human rights is patently ridiculous. The fact the Uyghurs are predominantly Muslim doesn’t automatically mean nakedly corrupt predominantly Muslim nations with extreme records of human rights abuses are going to stick up for them, and dressing it up that way to give it a veil of credibility is frankly disgusting.
Well presumably these nations care about Muslim culture. Are you saying they dont actually care about the Muslim people in Xinjiang? Thats a lot of Muslim countries listed, and you cherry picked a few out of them. Are they all wrong? Why would they defend the genocide of a Muslim group?
I cherry-picked them? Those were four of the seven countries AI slop authors Prashad and Chak named, and I noted them because they’re obviously corrupt and abusive and the authors definitely know this; the fact that the authors decided to list even one of the four I listed as if it’s compelling is absurd.
I just as easily could’ve included Egypt (under the extremely corrupt and abusive el-Sisi “presidency” since 2014) and Nigeria (roughly Muslim–Christian split and notable for extreme corruption), but I decided to list the most obviously egregious majority of them from the list the authors provided as evidence. You can view the full list of representatives here.
Yes, I fully believe Muslim-majority countires would defend the cultural genocide of a Muslim ethnic group toward political ends; what kind of question is this? Again, read the Tempest article by David Brophy and try to discuss it here; he uses his experience as a socialist and a historian to break down the half-hallucinated lies by Prashad and Chak.
Nah, the kind of violence we are talking about here has nothing to do with sanctions/Israel/USA. It’s the regime against the people, not people against each other. And this is 100% the regime’s responsibility. Israeli and US leadership is bad, but it has nothing to with the regime’s brutality. Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them. Plus they run a very corrupt and inefficient economy anyway.
“Corrupt and inefficient economy” they are able to fight the world’s most expensive army while still actively selling munitions to Russia while also at a food surplus while also managing to punish a dozen US allies that picked sides poorly. Even the CIA admits they could keep this up for YEARS.
They have a far more efficient economy than any country in the west – all developing countries do by necessity.
Ok, this is just blatant propaganda. Everything you just wrote is hilariously false or a misrepresentation of the issue at hand. But by all means, continue believing that fucking Iran’s economy is superior to that of the “western world”…
Calling everything that disagrees with your owners’ world view “propaganda” is just pure slavebrained behavior.
Yes, the fact they are able to feed themselves while under crushing sanctions and even have a fucking space program means they have a more efficient economy than say, the US with it’s 1% hunger rate or the UK which is starting to kick people out of housing because they ‘can’t afford it.’ They are able to accomplish the same thing every society has as a goal – taking care of its people better than if they were on their own – with 1/10,000th of the resources.
Developing countries that aren’t in famine are indeed better economies than developed countries, because they don’t have developing countries to exploit to prop up their economy.
They had already agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons, and let international observers in to verify, in the talks that ended apruptly when the US and Israel started bombing them.
And before that, there had already been a deal in place, which the US unilaterally pulled out of.
True. But only one part of a bigger picture.
So do you complain in stories about Trump doing stupid and evil things with “a nagging feeling that it’s just to help justify the next move of Iran?”
You admit the Iranian government “sucks” yet news of them doing bad things surely must be American propaganda? Even from a British paper?
Conspiracy thinking does us all no good.
The British with help by the Americans are pretty much the reason why the current regime is in charge
1953 Iranian coup d’état
Yes - conspiracy theorists are great at finding any and all possible supporting evidence no matter how poor. Just vague general “relationships” is sufficient.
They’ve worked together in the past != The guardian ran this to support Trump.
WTF? This is in no way a conspiracy, this has been known for decades, USA instated the Shah to get control of the Iranian oil.
And your false equivalence is outright stupid.
That isn’t the conspiracy. The conspiracy is therefore this article is propaganda.
No you are way off, the nationality of the outlet has very little bearing on whether it might be American propaganda or not.
Claiming that because it’s a British outlet it can’t be American propaganda is outright moronic.
That’s not what I’m claiming. Thanks for playing.
It can be true but also propaganda, or just coincidentally the kind of news Zionists would like to see (truthfully). It’s hard to tell.
I think it’s worth including this meta context when discussing the article.
It can also just be an article about an objectively totalitarian regime doing horrible things.
Sometimes a banana is just a banana.
Straw man argument.