"The fall of the Iranian regime would be the Berlin Wall moment for the Middle East. "Needs to happen."~ Neil Stone
"[P]eople with empty hands took to the street chanting for freedom, dignity. They want to have a normal life and they are being killed by IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards. "I think this is the Berlin Wall moment in Iran—if the international community gets united the same way when they were all united to help East Germany to bring down the Wall. Now Iranian people are trying to bring the wall of dictatorship down. We need to see action from Europeans [and from the] free world, otherwise ... they will kill more innocent people."
~ Masih Alinejad on the nationwide protests
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As very much as I want this to happen the fact is that the bastards have survived several of these uprisings and the international community has been missing in action every time. In fact in 2009 Obama left the protestors hanging because he though the way to stop the Ayatollah's nuclear weapons program was an agreement, so he let their internal suppression slide.
But it also doesn't help when people misinterpret history, especially revolutions. As Simon Schama said of the Peasants Revolt, in his great TV series, A History of Britain, it wasn't peasants but people who had a lot to lose from proposed new taxes.
Same thing with Berlin Wall, as explained by a history of the collapse of those Soviet Satellites in 1989, Uncivil Societies. The TLDR take I have on that and the implications for Iran, Regime Change: Persia:
it wasn’t the oppositions that had a glorious revolution in 1989 – aside from Poland, where the Solidarity movement was a large and organised opposition to the government, the rest of the Warsaw Pact had no oppositions to speak of outside of relatively small groups of intellectuals and other dissidents – it was the Establishment (the “uncivil society” of the book’s title) that destroyed itself. The systems were not overthrown but collapsed as long-standing problems suddenly meshed with short-term problems.
Those problems ranging from the usual central command and control economies, a hard-cash crisis because they'd borrowed heavily from West, the promotion of unthreatening midwits, a lack of confidence in their own systems, and finally Gorbachev as the tipping point.
And so to Persia:
.... perhaps the key difference is that the Establishment in Iran has not yet given up mentally, despite all the above; they still firmly believe in their Islamic Republic and unlike many of the East European communist leaders back in the day, likely face death if they just give up. They’re going to hang on to the last, desperate millimetre of fingernail grip.
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