Where Will Iran Protests Lead? | Trita Parsi | TMR

Co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Trita Parsi joins the program to discuss the protests in Iran.

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We are back Sam Seder Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report. joining us now Trita Parsi. he's the Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute for responsible statecraft. Trita thanks for joining us again on the program. Thank you for having me. Let's just start with this I guess wave of protests. and protest movement I I think it's fair to call that developed or I guess I don't know you can characterize exactly how it sort of manifested itself after Mahsa Amini. She was a young woman who was detained by Iran's morality police and essentially killed in detention. fill that story out for us and then give us a sense of sort of like what has been building and for how long that this one particular death has sort of exploded this protest movement. I I think you're quite right about the way you're framing it because obviously there's a tremendous amount of anger as to what happened to Mahsa Amini and many others who have been harassed for a very long time by the so-called morality police. but this obviously goes deeper than that. because there have been such deep frustrations that have been building up for a very long time. and it's not just that the economic situation is disastrous, it's not just the repression of the regime. it's not just the mismanagement and the corruption. I also think very strongly that this new generation is out there protesting right now so if you take a look at the images you see there are a lot of young people. Many of these people were less than 10 years old when the 2009 protesters. This is a generation that essentially has lost faith in the idea that change can come through reform internally peacefully. and they have lost faith that it's not clear that they have an alternative path except for protesting. but precisely because they don't have faith in that reform option they're much quicker to go out and express their anger. and if you listen carefully to what the slogans have been previous protests started off as economic protests and as the regime repressed them you know you could see that their calls and their slogans became harsher and more forward-leaning. and eventually calling for the downfall of the dictatorship.