"Why do the Iranian people not revolt against the regime?"

From an Iranian blog...

There are people in the west who still say: "Why do the Iranian people not revolt against the regime?" I want to ask these people: When will western oil companies stop buying oil from the Ayatollahs and when will your governments stop making deals under the table with the Islamic regime? Islamic republic of Iran is the most advanced dictatorship in history. The Ayatollahs have taken their lessons from Niccolo Machiavelli, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and made violent governance into a science. There are multiple layer security apparatus and intelligence gathering organizations keeping taps on Iranians all across the world by assassination, execution, disappearance, torture, rape, intimidation and use of death squads inside and outside of Iran . Execution and torture is widely used in prison facilities in every corner of the country, many facilities built during Khatami's rein have capacities of 70,000 and more prisoners each, it has been witnessed that the prisons are similar to slaughter houses with corridors wide enough only for one person to pass at a time to and from cells. Now in Iran there are thousands of cameras, monitoring the movement of people in most important cities. I want to ask the people of the west what has happened to moral imperative?

H/T Serendip

The challenge is more complicated than the writer implies. Oil is a global commodity. The price is set by demand. China is not constrained by any "moral imperatives." Western oil purchases are seen by many as a means of limiting China's access to the same.

I wish I could propose a way to starve oppressive regimes into better human rights concerns, but the tactic often makes matters worse, as we have seen in Cuba, Iraq, and other less well-known dictatorships.

At this point I am interested in spreading the message that the leadership of Iran is not to be confused with the people of Iran.