Whether it be Hong Kong or Iran, or well, in dictatorships. A lot of times I see a ton of people coming to the street and basically shouting stuff.
This by itself doesn’t really do much, it doesn’t do any work, and is solely reliant on if the entity you are protesting to listens or not.
As is often the case, they just get met with armed personnel, and beaten up, and that’s that.
Which in cases like Iran went up to like 30k or more deaths.
But like, what is the exact mindset of this? If there are that many people willing to do stuff, in many cases, the majority of the population being in favor. Why don’t they go rob/take over some police stations and places with weapons. Then basically force their demands one way or another? Like establishing your own gov, and beating anyone who disobeys you including the current gov?
Now I am aware, revolutions of this type also happen. But I am not exactly sure why this is just often not the case, and people just go and… shout pointlessly in streets? What is the deciding factor?
You already got some good writeups so I just want to point out that the 30,000 Iranians dead claim is highly dubious. The evidence genuinely boils down to, “this person said so”. Think for just a second how long it took the official death toll in Gaza to reach 30,000. It took them months to accept that number in Gaza but in Iran it took just a few days. Compare the levels of devestation. Does it really make sense? Consider that the companies telling you these things are owned by people who directly benefit from US imperialism.
Well, the Iranian government itself claims around 3k, and based on what we know they have kinda every interest to downplay it (they literally shutdown internet during it), so you know if they are claiming thousands, it’s gotta be bad.
HRANA published a detailed report containing around 7k deaths, with names and other info such as age, and a lot of times pictures, and at the time of that report, an additional 11k were also to be confirmed. They aren’t just pulling it out of air, they list the literal names.
The UN estimates it to be in the tens of thousands.
According to Times, they have info from two senior official of Iran’s ministry of health that it’s around 30k.
The guardian, again, based on various info from morgues, medics and graveyard staff, estimates around 30k.
Iran International based on similar things claims more than 36k.
Put together all the various footage of dead bodies and stuff (BBC says 300 were in just one mortuary), and you see that the number isn’t just pulled out of nowhere, with multiple things backing it up.
It’s not that hard to kill that many if you open free fire onto large concentrated gatherings of people. Iran has a population of around 80m, 30k is around 0.03% of the population. A football stadium alone can hold 100k people. Imagine you have gatherings of thousands, and you have armed squads, machine guns or whatever just shooting, and you see how those numbers aren’t really that hard to reach.
You are comparing the wrong things. Gaza is more bombing of stuff and some war going on here and there, and less deliberate killing of people who have all gathered in one place. It’s not really a “let’s go and slaughter masses” thing. Yes, people die in situations where bombs fly around, but it’s more of a… side-effect, and people can evacuate places. It’s also not an intense all-out war situation either.
You should compare more to stuff like El Fasher massacre, which also has reports of tens of thousands of people being killed in a matter of days.
You could also compare it to more intense stuff like the Rwandan genocide, which had around 500k-1m people killed in around 100 days.