this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Most of the allies in world war 2 were horrible, repressive regimes. I would still support them.
Iran ranks 3rd in the world in numbers of engineers. 70% of them are women.
'The second class citizens' is exagerated, and often simply lies for propaganda purposes, like the Mahsa Amini case.
The last execution of homosexuals was 20 years ago, and this was for rape, not bcs homosexuality.
Yes many islamic countries have issues, and these are the typical hasbara machine's ammo:
"Let us genocide the Palestinians bcs they hate the gays!"
Also your WW2 'democracies' were - and still are in many cases - colonisers and looters of a large part of the world.
Do you have a particular source on modern LGBT realities in Iran you could recommend?
No sorry, LGBT is not particularly my interest.
Maybe go on Lemmygrad and ask them directly.
A few hours ago there were some discussing the attacks.
It's entirely reasonable, you just have a white supremacist double standard.
The vast majority of the British Empire couldn't vote and were considered lesser beings. The US had racial inequality inshrined into law and a habit of murdering minorities. The USSR I leave as an exercise to the reader.
I assume you mean Israel.
Lol, the WW2 allies absolutely treated women as second class citizens, and criminalised homosexuality. Its also ghoulish the way westerners go "these countries treat minorities badly, so it's ok to kill them (including the minorities). Ukraine isn't perfect about minorities either, do you use that to say they deserve to get invaded? Oh wait, Ukraine in white.
The British Empire was more evil than Iran by multiple orders of magnitude, yet for some reason (white supremacy) you don't take this stance on WW2
Churchill voted greatest Briton of all times in 2016.
A white supremacist who used the slogan 'keep Britain white'.
Called Jews 'hebrew bloodsuckers' and has murdered millions
And it's the same people who voted him that who are now condemning Iran and defending Israel. Whatever ideology they claim to possess, the one they actually practice is white supremacy.
USSR?
I wasn't joking. Or was the USSR a functioning democracy?
The USSR was a functioning democracy, moreso than its peer countries. Rather than being entirely decided by Capital, the Soviets extended democratic input to the economic sector. Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan and This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong are both good first-hand accounts.
It certainly wasn't perfect, either, but it was a dramatic improvement on Capitalism. Zhenli has a good article on contextualizing some of the failures of democracy in early Socialism, as well as pointing out how western leftists often let the perfect Socialism in their heads be the enemy of the flawed but really existing Socialism in the real world, that faces real struggles thanks to being a really existing system.
I'm not sure why you're thinking that I was making any kind of values judgment about the USSR whatsoever (honestly, don't really feel like getting into it with a tankie right now). All I said was that they weren't democratic (they weren't dude), and they were probably our most important ally during WW2.
My point was about the USSR being democratic, which is historically true. They held elections, decided economic decisions collectively, and extended democracy not just from the realm of deciding which bourgeois politician or party represents you to the economic and political sectors governing policy and direction. A simple "they weren't dude" doesn't disprove historical fact.
Unless, of course, your parameters for deciding if something is democratic or not is decided by vibes, there's really no reason to call it undemocratic. As an overall measure of material functions of democracy, the USSR was more democratic than the major powers of the allies and axis during World War II. They certainly had flaws with their democracy, hence the inclusion on my part of Zhenli's essay, but these flaws weren't because they had the "wrong recipe," but because democracy is a material structure that needs to be built.
As for the "tankie" jab, I'm not going to apologize for being a Marxist. I agree that they were the most important force in World War II, but I disagree with your characterization of their democracy, hence why I offered sources for you or onlookers to read into to learn more. The opening of the Soviet Archives has only affirmed these primary sources as accurate, and the Zhenli essay helps us reframe how we think about building democratic structures in general.