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From: saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Context of the Debate
Message-ID: <9525@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Oct-84 03:43:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.9525
Posted: Tue Oct 23 03:43:41 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Oct-84 05:07:13 EDT
References: <1052@ihuxm.UUCP> <1866@ucbvax.ARPA> <watmath.8973>, <1316@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 41


>>>the Shah of
>>>Iran, who, despite the claims of Khomeni, was a very good ruler,
>>>	Wayne
>>
>>I would recommend
>>that you read some of their reports on political repression in Iran
>>during the Shah's rule.  You might find there evidence of a few more
>>things he did wrong.
>>Sophie Quigley
>
>I'm afraid Sophie's right Wayne; I'm sure that, according to her defn.
>no one has ever been a good ruler.  But Sophie, consider this: don't
>you think that he was probably the best ruler Iran ever had, and is the
>best that could be hoped for today?
>
>	sdcrdcf!alan (Alan Algustyniak)
>
Indeed, even the US (gasp!) has recently been under attack by Amnesty
International because of their new medical techniques to administer the
death penalty.

I do not know enough about Iranian history to be able to compare its
different rulers.  For a while, towards the end of the shah's regime
and at the beginning of Khomeini's it did seem that it would be possible
to have some semblance of democracy in Iran. 

I do not think that Khomeini is much better than the Shah (actually I think
he is much worse), but he does seem to have a much bigger following
in Iran than the shah did, and no matter how despotic and cruel he is, he
is ruling Iran because the iranians wanted him.  So they've only
got themselves to blame for the current situation!  Hopefully this experience
will be useful in the next government transition.  I personnally do not
see any reason why things could not improve in the future.  The iranian
revolution is still quite new, and looking at history, one often finds a period
of very strong backlash after many revolutions (e.g the french and russian
revolutions) followed by a relaxation.  It is quite possible that the
Iranian revolution will follow a similar pattern, as it is possible it won't.

Sophie Quigley
...!{clyde,ihnp4,decvax}!watmath!saquigley