Political Humor

The situation in Iran is nothing like having a neighbor with an abusive father figure.

It's more like having a local black church in white America, where the white people were the dominant violent force for 600 years and the black church was actually run by a pastor who collaborated with the white supremacist militias. The churchgoers all tithed dutifully every week, and they workee in their community garden, and the pastor took a good chunk of that money and some of that food and gave it to the white militias. In exchange, the pastor was protected and made rich, while the churchgoers remained poor and unsafe.

The churchgoers then decide that they've had enough and they band together and establish a democratic committee and eventually elect a new pastor and kick the old pastor out.

Then the white suprenacist militias infiltrated the church, paid a few of the less scrupulous of the church goers to support them and disbanded the committee, ran the elected pastor out of town, and reinstalled the old pastor who then not only kept the money and food flowing to the white militias but also cracked down hard on the people who dared oppose him.

And then a new leader emerged among the churchgoers. He and his group had seen enough of what happens if you pretendike the white militias are going to leave you alone and let you live in peace. He formed a militant black organization, and he kept discipline in the organization by adhering to something all the churchgoers had in common and all the white militias did not - the church's religion. It turned out that two things were true. 1) this religion combined with militancy had many brutal disciplinarian aspects to it and the members lost some important freedoms and 2) it created a strong bond that the white militias could not infiltrate, could not manipulate, and the movement got stronger over time.

Eventually this new militia, helmed by this leader, established a whole structure of organization, created a strong reliable bureaucracy, distributed power effectively to keep the organization running, defend against white militias, and was able to not only get rid of the pastor who betrayed his people but also rebuilt the church, took back the money, and made the garden bigger and kept all the food for the people.

And now, after decades of the white militias sieging the black church, where they have been killing millions of people in other black churches but have been afraid to attack this church directly because it is very strong and very large, where the white militias have been going around the whole state telling every other white militia to not help them, in fact to sell them nothing so that they might starve or die without medicines and the like, where the white militias even got other subjugated black churches to stop supporting this particular black church, NOW we want to say that the white militias killing the current pastor of that church is a good thing?

No. It is not an abusive father situation. It is not a question of one man. It is not a question of one death. The white militias killed a hundred children in a single day. The white militias killed not only the pastor but his children and his grandchildren in a single day. They went after his fucking bloodline.

Context matters. History matters. You cannot hope to understand or explain the situation by just plucking the entire thing out of its entire context and distilling it down to a conversation about one bad man of an abstract group and the abstract group of people that abstractly killed him.