Under these conditions, it is extremely difficult to know what is happening on Iran’s streets. What reaches the outside world is filtered, partial, and often shaped by what the state permits or stages for circulation. This makes it necessary to ask careful questions of anyone claiming to report on “public opinion” inside Iran: What material are they working with? How was it gathered? What is being amplified, and what is being made invisible?

In recent months, state-produced videos, including rap performances presented as signs of resistance, have circulated widely. But those videos should not drown out the voices of young rappers inside Iran who have been punished, silenced, or destroyed.

One of them was Abolfazl Yaghmouri, a seventeen-year-old rapper from Karaj. Iran Rights reported that he was killed in Fardis, Karaj, by Islamic Republic forces during the January 2026 protests. According to the report, people around him were prevented from taking him to the hospital. After his killing, authorities reportedly pressured his family to say that he was either a Basiji, a member of the state’s paramilitary force, or that protesters themselves had killed him. He wrote his own lyrics and had turned his bedroom closet into a small studio.

He was seventeen.

The January massacre was followed by U.S.-Israeli bombs, destruction, the Islamic Republic’s internet shutdown, job losses, and worsening inflation. That is how I hear Saam’s song today: as a voice coming through exhaustion, blackout, grief, and the command to survive.

Below is my translation of the lyrics.

صدای من رو می‌شنوی از داخل ایران
پایتخت
امروز شصتمین روزه که ما در خاموشی به سر می‌بریم
ولی هنوز روحیه رو حفظش کردیم
محکومیم به دوام آوردن

You are hearing my voice from inside Iran.
The capital,
today is the sixtieth day
we have been living under blackout.
But we have still kept our spirits alive.
We are sentenced to survive.

ما دیگه نایی واسه فریاد نداریم
اگه اون‌وری، جای ما هم عربده بزن
ماها جانبازهای اعصاب روانیم
بعد ایستادگی‌مون جلوی ترکش ستم
انگیزه رو از دست هنوز ندادیم
ولی دردمون دیگه درمون نمی‌شه با هیچ دوایی

We no longer have the strength to scream.
If you are on the other side, shout for us too.
We are the war-wounded, scarred in nerve and mind.
After standing firm before the shrapnel of tyranny,
we still have not lost our will.
But no cure can touch this pain anymore.

ما شاید دیگه خیلی دووم نیاریم
شما ولی سنگر خالی نذارید
واسه اونی که تو این راه جونشو داده
پدر مادری که جوونشو داده
اونی که الان زیر حکم اعدامه
با رویای آزادی روحیه داره

Maybe we cannot hold out much longer.
But you, don’t leave the trench empty.
For the one who gave their life on this path,
for the parents who lost their child,
for the one now under a death sentence,
still keeping their spirit alive with the dream of freedom.

تو تاریکی بده بهم نور و نشون
شاید انرژی بده باز هم یه کم
کی دلش به حال ما می‌سوزه جز خودمون؟
گور بابای سازمان ملل
شدیم از درون منفجر
ته کوچه‌های این شهر بن‌بسته
دل‌هامون روشن به آخرین فرصته
یه وقت نگی اون هم ظلمات مطلقه

Give me a sign of light in the dark.
Maybe it will give us a little more strength.
Who feels for us, except ourselves?
Damn the United Nations.
We have exploded from within.
At the dead end of this city’s streets,
Our hearts are lit by the last chance.
Don’t tell me even that is nothing but darkness.

زخم تو عمق عفونته
باید از بیخ بکنیم به کل قطعش
این جنگ سر منفعت و قدرته
جوونی ما فقط این وسط مفت رفتش
خزونه حتی فصل بهارمون هم
رخنه کرده تو درونمون غم

The wound is infected deep inside.
We have to rip it out by the roots.
This war is about interest and power.
Our youth was squandered, sacrificed for nothing.
Even our spring has turned to autumn.
Grief has seeped into us.

برای تحمل درد شده توانمون کم
ولی ما محکومیم به دوام آوردن
دوران طلایی جوونی مون رفت
کاممون تلخ، روح و روانمون زخم
نمونده تو شهر آدم صبور و خونسرد
ولی ما محکومیم به دوام آوردن

Our strength to bear pain has grown thin.
But we are sentenced to survive.
The golden years of our youth are gone.
Bitterness on our tongues, our souls and minds wounded.
There are no patient, calm people left in the city.
But we are sentenced to survive.

On January 8 and 9, 2026, the Islamic Republic crushed widespread protests amid a nationwide internet and phone shutdown. The uprising had begun in late December, and by January 1, Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last shah, had entered the scene publicly. On January 2, he called for mass protest, insisting that the Islamic Republic could not suppress the streets if the numbers reached a million or more. Meanwhile, after four protesters were killed in Malekshahi, in the Kurdish province of Ilam, on January 3, and after Malekshahi hospital was attacked on January 4, Kurdish political parties called on January 6 for a strike across Kurdish cities on January 8. The point of the strike, rather than street protest, was protection: after the violence in Malekshahi, Kurdish parties sought to register dissent without exposing people to mass killing. Pahlavi then echoed the Kurdish call but redirected it toward widespread street protest on January 8. Even after the state’s violence that day, he repeated the call on January 9.

Days later, on January 13, Donald Trump posted that “help is on its way.” Months after the massacre, and more than a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, Trey Yingst reported on Fox News on April 5 that Trump had told him the United States had sent weapons to protesters in Iran through Kurdish intermediary groups, but that those weapons were never delivered. The next day, Trump repeated the claim himself, dropping the explicit reference to Kurdish groups while keeping the same structure: weapons had been sent, and they had been seized before reaching their intended recipients. That second version made it unclear which Kurdish groups he had meant—whether in Iran or Iraq, or whether he had meant Kurdish groups at all.

How the Claim Entered the State’s Narrative

The alliance of six Iranian Kurdish political parties formally denied receiving any such weapons. Yet within twenty-four hours, the Islamic Republic’s judiciary cited Trump’s words in official documents to justify the execution of Ali Fahim, a protester arrested in January. The state’s media moved just as quickly: Fars News presented Trump’s remarks as an admission that the U.S. had armed “rioters” through the Kurds, folding the claim directly into the state’s familiar language of sedition, separatism, and foreign conspiracy. That alone shows how quickly reckless statements from abroad can be converted into judicial and propagandistic ammunition at home.

But the Islamic Republic was not the only actor to put Trump’s words to use. His formulation also became usable for two seemingly opposed camps: parts of Iran’s monarchist opposition and segments of the Western progressive and anti-war commentary sphere. A line introduced through Fox News became a shared script through which different actors, for different reasons, relocated responsibility for the violence of January away from the state’s trigger finger and onto Kurdish groups.

Turning Kurds into the Alibi

During the January uprising, Pahlavi’s camp repeatedly invoked the prospect of external support while urging unarmed civilians into the streets. When the state answered with mass killing, he faced a crisis of credibility. Trump’s April 5 remarks provided part of the monarchist camp with a ready-made way to displace blame: help had been sent, the story now went, but Kurdish groups had withheld it. Moloud Hajizadeh, for instance, described Kurdish parties as “fascist thieves,” turning a logistical impossibility into a moral indictment. This allowed Pahlavi’s supporters to preserve the fiction of influence while redirecting responsibility onto Kurds. The rhetoric was often openly dehumanizing. Kurds were cast as the treacherous periphery, accused of sabotaging a national struggle for their own armed advantage. What matters here is not only that the claim is false, but what it does: it recasts Kurdish denial as proof of betrayal and helps mark the Kurdish periphery as a suspect, disposable space of violence rather than a population already subjected to it.

From Revelation to Speculation

More strikingly, the claim was also taken up by commentators speaking in the language of anti-war analysis. In his commentary, including on Democracy Now, Trita Parsi treats Trump’s statement as “a very important revelation” and as something coming “from the horse’s mouth.” The maneuver begins there: Parsi treats Trump as a firsthand source when it is useful, and rewrites him when it is inconvenient. Trump’s own sequence places the alleged weapons transfer after the January 8–9 massacre and says the weapons never reached protesters. Parsi first “corrects” the timing through speculation, suggesting that Trump must have misspoken and that the weapons were actually sent before the crackdown. He then says “either way,” as if that alteration were incidental, even though his argument only works if the chronology is changed. From there he moves beyond Trump entirely, constructing a much larger story: not only that weapons were sent earlier, but that they reached Kurdish armed groups, that those groups entered protests in Iran, remained dormant until the protests swelled, and were then activated to use systematic violence against both state and civilian targets. That is not an interpretation of Trump’s statement. It is a speculative narrative built by citing Trump, revising Trump, and then exceeding Trump.

This is also the point at which a familiar anti-Kurdish stereotype comes into view. Across Iranian, Turkish, and Arab nationalist discourse, Kurds are repeatedly cast as the armed, violent, and foreign-linked element that corrupts an otherwise civilian struggle, even as they are themselves among the most attacked and targeted peoples in all of these states. Fars News, Moloud Hajizadeh, and Trita Parsi all draw on that stereotype in different ways. What begins as a claim about undelivered weapons becomes a narrative in which Kurdish actors serve as the bridge between foreign support and domestic violence.

This is where the political work of the argument becomes clear. Parsi does not deny that the Islamic Republic killed protesters; on the contrary, he says it killed armed and unarmed people alike. But to reach that conclusion, he shifts the origin of violence away from the state and onto an alleged armed layer “within” or “underneath” the protests. That is exactly the move that makes the Islamic Republic’s violence look less like method and more like reaction. In this sense, he refines the state’s narrative for a Western audience. Araghchi described the protests as “ISIS-like, terrorist, and violent actions,” claiming that demonstrations that began over economic grievances were “exploited by terrorist elements” and turned into “armed riots.” Parsi’s language is less crude, but the underlying logic is strikingly similar: peaceful protest becomes infiltrated terrain, the state becomes a power that “didn’t make much of a distinction,” and massacre is recoded as indiscriminate overreaction under conditions of siege. That is why the problem is not only factual weakness. It is narrative laundering. In any other context, outlets like Democracy Now would treat Trump’s words as a source to be scrutinized, checked, and contained. Here, his statement is treated as a usable admission, then altered and expanded until it helps rehabilitate the core logic of the Islamic Republic’s own account.

Once an unreliable statement is repeated and recycled, circulation itself begins to stand in for proof. Bajoghli picks up Parsi’s formulation and pushes it further, claiming that Trump’s statement “confirms” a preexisting pattern in which the U.S. arms opposition groups and inflates atrocity narratives to justify intervention. In the same gesture, she recasts the staggering death toll in Iran as part of a “narrative war” meant to “whitewash Gaza.” This is a particularly cruel displacement. It turns Iranian mourning into a suspect political act and suggests that grief for Iranian lives comes at the expense of Palestinian lives, as though attention to one atrocity must erase another.

This is not incidental. On Democracy Now in 2020, in the aftermath of the November 2019 Bloody Aban crackdown, Bajoghli explained the assassination of Qassem Soleimani through “national unity,” the mobilization of a “transnational Shia community,” and “national sentiment” against the United States. In 2026, again on Democracy Now, after the January massacre, she returned to the language of martyrdom and Shi‘ism, describing Khamenei as a symbol of “martyrdom and resistance” with significance “within Shia culture.” The figure changes, but the logic does not. The Islamic Republic’s violence against protesters moves to the margins, while the symbolic figures the state claims as its own martyrs become the frame through which Iranian politics is explained. Shi‘ism and nationalism appear not as political technologies the Islamic Republic deploys, but as the very terms of explanation. The deaths the state causes recede; the deaths the state mourns become what analysis explains.

What is most striking in Parsi’s and Bajoghli’s narrative is not just that they repeated a dubious claim, but that they did so by brushing aside the painstaking work of human rights organizations that spent months documenting the January massacre. These organizations did not rely on rumor, geopolitical speculation, or after-the-fact guesswork. Groups such as Hengaw and Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses, verified killings and arrests, documented shooters positioned on rooftops firing directly into crowds with intent to kill, attacks on hospitals and the blocking of medical transfers, families searching through piles of bodies in morgues, extortion and coercion surrounding the recovery of bodies, mass arrests, forced confessions, internet and phone shutdowns, and threats of rapid execution under charges of “enmity against God.” They warned in real time that the state was building a security narrative to justify harsher repression and explicitly cautioned against replacing the language of criminal repression with the language of war. To set that record aside in favor of Trump’s vague and self-serving remarks is not just a methodological error. It dispossesses an entire population of the institutions it has built to document violence, preserve testimony, and push back against the Islamic Republic’s systematic practices of silencing and erasure.

The Questions No One Asked

Kurdish journalists and intellectuals asked the questions that neither Fars nor monarchists nor Parsi nor Bajoghli asked or answered. Shahed Alavi laid out the practical absurdity: which parties, through what routes, were supposed to receive large quantities of arms and move them across mined borders saturated with IRGC and army forces, under constant drone surveillance, into cities like Tehran and Karaj, well beyond the organizational reach of any Kurdish political formation? How were protesters to be identified, the weapons delivered, the recipients trained? Alavi’s questions are not peripheral. Yet they were never raised by those who treated Trump’s statement as revelation. The Kurdish scholar Kamran Matin read the statement differently. In his account, Trump was less describing an actual transfer of arms than signaling that U.S.-Kurdish cooperation remained a possibility, while also covering his broken promise to protesters with an after-the-fact explanation that placed the failure on Kurds. The Economist had called Reza Pahlavi, who had summoned people into the streets in January with promises of American support, a “useful idiot.” In Matin’s reading, that same promise was now being recast as attempted delivery, with Kurds made to absorb the blame for its failure. Kaveh Kermanshahi, for his part, pointed to the consequences of that claim’s circulation: even after Kurdish parties formally rejected it, it continued to move across opposed political camps, feeding renewed Kurdophobia and furnishing the Islamic Republic with fresh justification for continuing military strikes on Kurdish party offices and camps.

Conclusion

What the circulation of Trump’s statement shows, in the end, is not only the danger of misinformation, but the way different kinds of bad analysis can present themselves as expertise. On one side is a monarchist politics so invested in preserving Pahlavi’s credibility that it displaces failure onto Kurds, finding in Trump’s statement a convenient match for its own chauvinist suspicions toward Kurds. On another is a style of commentary that treats Trump’s statement as a meaningful admission while ignoring the documented record built by victims, witnesses, families, Kurdish journalists, and human rights investigators. There is also a simpler failure at work: when the subject is Iran, outlets and commentators who would never treat Trump’s statement as a primary source end up doing exactly that, because Iranian human rights investigators, Kurdish journalists, and witnesses are not part of their source networks in the first place. And the damage does not stop at commentary. Within hours of Trump’s statement, the Islamic Republic’s judiciary cited it in an official document to justify the execution of Ali Fahim, a protester arrested in January. A claim introduced through Fox News, then repeated across commentary abroad, arrived in Tehran as evidence in a death sentence.

Sharif is my undergraduate university, where I studied physics. Its pre-1979 revolutionary history was also the subject of my postdoctoral research from 2021 to 2023, during which I collected oral histories from alumni who had studied there before the 1979 Revolution. They came to feel like classmates from another era. Our conversations often lasted nearly three hours. Their experiences were often very different from mine and yet, in strange ways, deeply familiar. I had spent years working on the social and intellectual history of the 1979 Revolution in my doctoral research; now I was encountering that history through Sharif, as the interviewees walked me through a campus I already knew from the inside. Through them, I learned stories of students who had left hard-earned professional paths to work as construction laborers so they could better understand the lives of the working class and become better revolutionaries; students who had lost classmates to SAVAK, prison, or disappearance, and who sometimes had to pause, while recalling those memories, to smoke a cigarette before continuing. There was so much intimacy, so much care.

My relationship to the institution became layered over time. Places where I had memories with my own friends became overlaid with the lives of the alumni I had interviewed: what each corner had meant to them politically and intellectually, the courses they had taken in different parts of the campus, the strikes and protests they had joined, the shabnameh they had distributed there, and the forbidden books they had hidden and read.

In recent years, I had already been seeing the campus through fragmented videos coming out of student protests during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, as well as through more recent videos from commemorations for killed protesters. But two days ago, seeing parts of the campus I know intimately, places I carry in memory, reduced to destruction, was devastating.

Today I came across this video. One day after the US and Israeli attack on Sharif and the destruction of part of its buildings, a professor in the mathematics department continued teaching his graduate course in randomized algorithms online from the damaged Technology Building.

The video was posted by OnNewsMedia on Instagram

The transcript of the video reads:

“… I pray for dignity and strength for our country, and for Sharif University of Technology—our home, a place whose spirit we carry with us wherever we are, and a place we continue to claim as Sharifees [members of the Sharif community]. I hope Sharif continues to grow and thrive. Last Sunday, when I was with you and talking about what I would cover in today’s session, I found myself quietly wishing that I could hold this next class at the university, in my own office. At the time, it didn’t feel like a realistic wish. I didn’t think it would be possible. But now I’m proud to say that I’m holding this session from my office, here at the university’s computing center, in the Information and Communications Technology Center—right here in the beating heart of the university’s research and teaching. What happened here yesterday might look, at first glance, like the destruction of a building. But that’s not really what this is. This is something much deeper—a kind of naked barbarity, something that could only come from a “Stone Age” mindset, utterly devoid of civilization. These are people who call themselves human, but there is nothing human in what they do. If this is what they mean by humanity, and they think we fall outside of it, then all they have done is rearrange the meaning of words.”

What the Street Was Already Saying

Over the last several years, especially after the presidency of the reformist Hassan Rouhani (2013–2021), as the limits of reform from within the state became increasingly clear, Iranians in the streets—and in statements issued by labor unions, student groups, and teachers unpaid for months—made clear that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear, military, and regional policies were not in their interest. They saw those policies as exposing society to sanctions and the threat of war. While the state insisted that “nuclear energy is our absolute right,” protesters answered with a bitter reversal: “nuclear energy is our absolute pain.” In recent years, they chanted, “Leave nuclear policy alone and do something about us”—haste’i ro raha kon, fekri be hal-e ma kon, or “Stopping nuclear energy—this is the national slogan.” Worker activists pushed the reversal further in a joint statement issued a few months after the twelve-day war of June 2025, insisting on ghani-sazi-ye zendegi, the “enrichment of life,” instead of uranium. “Water, electricity, and life are our undeniable rights,” they wrote, turning into organized political language what others had already been chanting in the streets. “Defending our livelihood is our undeniable right.” And more explicitly still: “Ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment are not our choice; the enrichment of our lives is our undeniable right.” What began as a slogan of sovereign entitlement was turned into a language of social suffering, shifting the meaning of enrichment from uranium to livelihood, from state ambition to the material conditions of life itself.

Both in the streets and in political statements, people condemned the vast budgets directed to proxy groups and regional conflicts. “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran,” first heard during the 2009 Green Movement, questioned the Islamic Republic’s patronage of resistance movements in the region. The same accounting appeared in the streets during the November 2019 uprising known as Bloody Aban. Among the slogans heard then was: “Our money is gone; it’s been spent on Palestine.” Such slogans mapped the deepening rift between state and society, pitting the survival of the Iranian household against the state’s ideological expansion abroad. What had begun as a chant became organized social criticism, as worker activists made the same point more explicitly: “With the massive budgets spent on ultra-reactionary terrorists in the region, every hardship of our lives and livelihood could be resolved.” When the state became deeply involved in the Syrian uprising, protesters responded with “Leave Syria alone and do something about us”—suriyeh ro raha kon, fekri be hal-e ma kon. And when the state justified its presence there as a fight against ISIS, the reply came back: “Basiji, Sepahi, you are our ISIS,” naming the Basij paramilitary and the Revolutionary Guards themselves. These slogans did not all mean the same thing to those who shouted them, nor did they come from a single ideological camp. What they shared was a recurring line of grievance: the sense that everyday life was being sacrificed to state ideology, militarization, and regional war. The state was spending on proxy wars and political spectacle while ordinary people were left with unpaid wages, blackouts, inflation, water shortages, and a steadily collapsing social life.

As these policies exposed society to impoverishment, sanctions, and the threat of war, broad parts of Iranian society came to see the state itself as waging war on them. As one coalition of labor groups put it in the summer of 2025, “by cutting off water and electricity, abandoning society in the depths of insecurity amid the scorching hell of summer, and imposing backbreaking prices, the ruling power has launched a relentless war against our livelihood.” They continued: “We are no longer willing to pay the price for the policies of rulers who care only for advancing their warmongering and militarism. They have turned our lives into a dangerous game and brought the threat of war to our very doorstep.” Nothing exposed this more starkly than the contradiction between a state that insisted it need not fear war or seek resolution and the lived reality of abandonment. As Nasrin Sotoudeh said in an interview on March 30, 2026, “The city [Tehran] is abandoned. It is a city where, during an attack, no air-raid sirens sound, no shelters exist, and no necessary guidance is provided.” She went on: “The government that foolishly pursued nuclear energy as a source of electricity has, through its idiotic stubbornness, put the country’s entire power grid on the brink of destruction. The government that for half a century chanted ‘Death to this country’ and ‘Death to that country’ has now placed us in the shadow of death.”

This was the language Iranian society had already been speaking for years. The question is why this language was never taken up in oppositional politics and what structural conditions made that failure so total.

Why No One Carried the Demand

Three kinds of political groups might have carried this speech into politics, and each failed in different ways. The first was the reformist and anti-imperialist left wing of the opposition. Many in these groups wanted human rights improvements, more press freedom, and a less repressive state. In that sense, they were genuinely critical of the Islamic Republic. But their critique stopped at the border of foreign policy. Nuclear energy was treated as Iran’s right, the missile program as necessary deterrence, and proxy warfare as a way of keeping war outside Iran. As a result, the very things Iranians in the streets were criticizing—proxy wars, military spending, and the nuclear gamble—were not things these groups could consistently turn into political demands. While they criticized slogans such as “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” as nativist or insufficiently internationalist, they often showed little regard for the destruction the Islamic Republic’s policies brought to the Arab world, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. These countries became sacrificial geography for someone else’s sovereignty. Anti-imperialism stopped at Iran’s border. Beyond it, Arab societies became expendable to the Iranian state’s ambitions. More than indifference was at work here. For this milieu, the victims of the Islamic Republic’s policies often became a justifiable cost because their political framework had already decided whose suffering counted. In that moral economy, the Islamic Republic’s violence could be excused as collateral to a larger anti-imperial struggle. These populations were not only subjected to the violence of their own states, but also caught within the asymmetries of US and Israeli power and the regional fallout of the Islamic Republic’s own militarized response to that order. Iranians, Syrians, and Lebanese civilians were thus repeatedly instrumentalized: by states, by geopolitical struggle, and by the discourses that obscured how these forces became entangled.

The broader Iranian left faced its own internal paralysis, split into fragments that could not speak to one another, let alone to the street. One part—more radical and embedded in labor and grassroots politics—had been hollowed out by decades of state violence. Surveillance, imprisonment, and organizational attrition had pushed these activists into a state of enforced invisibility, stripping them of the infrastructure needed to shape public life. A second part had retreated into a high intellectualism; though theoretically sophisticated, relying heavily on translation of Western philosophy, its language was so far removed from the material urgency of the street that it became a form of academic exile. Between these poles, the broader left remained fragmented and politically unstable. Some currents drifted back toward reformism, while others remained captured by anti-imperialist commitments that blunted criticism of the state’s regional and military policies. This susceptibility to oscillation, combined with repression on one side and abstraction on the other, left the left unable to consolidate a language that could carry the street’s grievances into a coherent oppositional program. The left, in short, arrived at this crisis as a broken instrument: one part silenced by the state, another estranged by its own abstraction, and the rest either drifting toward reformism or anti-imperialism or failing to build a durable political form adequate to the demands already being voiced from below.

The second group was a broad liberal milieu, often the closest to the streets and to activist networks inside Iran. This was a broad umbrella, stretching from social democrats to more conservative currents, but held together by a shared commitment to liberal values and to a secular democratic future beyond the Islamic Republic. Yet outside the country, many of them were active primarily as human rights advocates, journalists, and documenters of repression. So despite their commitment to moving beyond the Islamic Republic, they were structurally occupied: documenting abuses, maintaining archives, and reporting events as they unfolded. This work was necessary, but it consumed their labor and left little room for the slower work of building coalitions, formulating demands, and shaping a political narrative around what people were asking for. Human rights discourse has its own grammar—victim, perpetrator, violation, record—and while that grammar is indispensable for documenting abuse, it does not on its own produce coalition, strategy, or political program. The voice of the street passed through them and became record more readily than demand.

The third group was the monarchists. Here, something unexpected happened. Precisely because they lacked strong ideological filters and responded more populistically to public language, they also lacked the reflex to sort street speech into acceptable and unacceptable categories. They listened, and they repeated what they heard. Where the liberal milieu preserved the speech of the street as record, the monarchists turned it into slogan and repeated it in a form that resonated most with the street. For that reason—not because of a developed political program—they became the group most closely aligned with the language of the street, including its critique of militarization and economic strain. This is also why accounts that explain monarchist traction primarily through satellite television and media manipulation remain inadequate: they miss the deeper historical context and conditions that made this language resonate in the first place. That proximity was also shaped by the monarchists’ relationship to the pre-1979 period, imagined as a time of modernization, national development, and a foreign policy of dignity, in contrast to the Islamic Republic’s permanent condition of crisis, sanctions, and war. This made them especially receptive to criticisms of the present. But they were not capable of building from that receptivity. They could not build durable coalitions with other opposition groups. They relied on outside forces that had no intention of realizing their political horizon, while the oppositional spaces around them remained vulnerable to infiltration and strategic distortion by the IRGC. So even where they seemed closest to the street, they could not reliably turn its language into an independent and sustainable politics.

Some factions within this milieu did openly welcome the US-Israeli attack, speaking in a triumphalist register that was politically reckless. That posture reflected not only an absence of political judgment but also a raw desire for retribution among those who had watched the state massacre their neighbors in January 2026 and saw no internal path to accountability. In this, they were amplifying a real sentiment—the search for a “final” exit when all others had been bloodily closed—but without the political infrastructure to navigate where such desires lead once attached to imperial military power. Yet to treat these voices as the authors of the war is to exaggerate their power and deflect attention from the forces that actually made it possible: the Islamic Republic’s own policies, the long-standing rupture between state and society, and the calculated interests of US and Israeli state power.

Who Gets Blamed When the War Arrives

Besides the absence of a political program, this failure of mediation is also visible in some of the anti-war commentary produced in the US context, where estrangement from the language of Iran’s streets often gives way to a narrowed reading of Iranian society through the twin lenses of desperation and manipulation. In this displacement, more energy was often spent scrutinizing the emotions or rhetoric of Iranians than pressuring the Islamic Republic over the policies that were bringing war ever closer. In this frame, the Islamic Republic appears mostly as a corrupt and repressive backdrop, insufficiently analyzed in its own right as a producer of war, militarization, and social devastation. Iranian suffering is explained primarily through sanctions and economic pressure, while the turn of some Iranians toward monarchism—or, after the January 2026 massacre, toward imagining military intervention as a possible opening—is attributed chiefly to media manipulation.

Beneath this displacement lay a consistent posture toward Iranian society itself. First, a paternalistic anti-war posture: Iranians were treated as too desperate or too wounded by violence to know what was good for them. In this frame, the task of the anti-war commentator was to withhold endorsement from those feelings and correct them from a position of superior judgment. Second, a pedagogical posture, at times with unmistakable civilizing overtones: the problem was understood as one of manipulation by outlets such as Iran International and a lack of proper political consciousness. In this frame, the commentator did not merely disagree with Iranian reactions; they imagined themselves as bringing a truer politics, a more mature anti-imperialism, or a more enlightened political literacy to a society presumed not yet to understand its own predicament. Whether paternalist or pedagogical, both postures shared the same assumption: that Iranian society required correction from outside rather than recognition as a political subject in its own right. The demand Iranian society had been articulating for years, at enormous cost, went unheard because too many listeners had already cast themselves as its teachers rather than its students.

The January 2026 massacre matters here because it did not create the rupture between state and society; it exposed it with catastrophic clarity. After thousands of protesters were killed by the state, many Iranians changed their assessment of what remained possible within the existing order. But that response did not make war possible. What made war possible was the long-standing rift between state and society produced by the Islamic Republic’s own policies—a rift the state tried to conceal through blackout and narrative control, and that others failed to translate into politics. The problem, then, was not that people exhausted by state violence were induced to see war as liberation. It was that a long-articulated social demand against the Islamic Republic’s own war-making capacities was never fully heard, carried, or turned into politics by those outside. Once that history is stripped away, attention shifts too easily from the state policies that made catastrophe possible to the post-January feelings of the people forced to live with their consequences. And now, after the war erupted, the same people in the streets who had long warned against these policies are often blamed: for being manipulated, for imagining something potentially liberatory in military intervention, or for the war itself. But this gets the sequence backward. These people did not bring about the war, and they have no power to stop it now. The real question is why, when society was speaking in an anti-war language from below, so few outside were willing to carry that language and turn it into politics.

What we are left with is an orphaned demand. The demand for the “enrichment of life” over uranium exists; it is voiced clearly and repeated at enormous personal cost, yet it remains politically unclaimed. This ghosting is a double erasure. Inside Iran, the state produced it through massacre, silencing, and information blackouts, making society present in its suffering but absent as a legible political subject. Outside, the organized opposition—in its various currents—could not convert that presence into politics: the demand was received, documented, and at times amplified, but it was never carried into coalition, program, or effective pressure. The society massacred in January 2026 is now also the society blamed for the war. It was silenced so that others could speak for it, and then held responsible for what was spoken in its name. That is what it means to be a ghost: not absent, but denied the recognition that would make presence politically real.

When protesters were killed on January 8 and 9, 2026, the public pointedly refused the state’s lexicon and did not call them shaheed (martyr). That displacement became even clearer in late February, when the Supreme Leader was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike and officially declared a shaheed by state media, confirming what the earlier refusal had already announced: that the word had become the establishment’s property. In many recent commemorations, those killed by the state are called jāvid-nām (everlasting name), farzand-e mihan (child of the homeland), or jān-fadā-ye mihan (one who gave their life for the homeland) instead of shaheed—a word many now feel has been captured by the state and by the founding narrative through which the Islamic Republic legitimized itself. At first glance, the turn toward mihan (homeland) can look like a simple secular-national substitution. Yet one strand of this reorientation—sharpened during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement after the killing of the Kurdish woman Jina Amini—reimagines national community laterally, through vernacular voices and mother tongues.

This expanded archive includes newer forms of vernacular performance such as rap. The rapper Bacheh Lur (“Lur kid,” invoking Luri identity), in a video posted to Instagram in January 2026, covers his face with a scarf associated with Kurdish and Luri dress and situates himself in Khorramabad: “the mountains are tall and the valleys are deep; be careful not to fall, all of you together.” From within that swaggering warning to the state and its forces, he also names the pain of the city as inseparable from his own: “These are the pains of my city, as wide as my heart.” He recasts gharbzadegi (West-struckness) as ghamzadegi (grief-struckness): “bro calls me gharbzadeh [West-struck]; I myself have become ghamzadeh [grief-struck].” If gharbzadegi named, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s influential 1960s critique, a condition of alienated and imitative modernity, then this reformulation suggests that inherited idioms of social diagnosis have lost much of their explanatory grip and that grief now names the truer mark of the present.[1] Yet this grief is articulated from the mountainous world of Khorramabad, through a register in which local landscape, wounded attachment, swagger, masking, and vernacular visual codes make sorrow and defiance audible at once. The song closes with his certainty that one day he will be arrested for his singing. Defiance and its cost are held in the same breath, and when words give out, he ends the song with a scream.

This vernacular reclaiming extends beyond melody and into the street’s own language, where rejection of the Islamic Republic is increasingly voiced through a profane lexicon. Since the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, chants have circulated that use explicit curse words, insult the nāmus (honor) of officials—most often the former Supreme Leader and his office—or crudely desecrate state symbols. This lexicon ranges from culinary satire to explicitly sexualized insult, often mobilizing inherited traces of patriarchy against the state’s claims to sanctity. Its force is therefore double: it profanes the regime’s sacred self-presentation, but does so by drawing on codes in which the degradation of female kin becomes the medium of humiliation. In this context, profanity functions as an immediate weapon, valued for speed, force, and collective cadence; it strips the regime of the reverence on which its authority depends. Banned words return the way banned songs do, as collective public repertoire. A regime that claims sacred authority is dragged down into the dirt of the street, even as those forms of insult remain entangled with the very patriarchy many many protesters seek to undo.

The state’s reaction to this tonal rupture clarifies what is at stake for its self-presentation as sacred authority. In a widely circulated response, the pro-regime speaker Hesamuddin Haerizadeh describes Women, Life, Freedom movement as the moment when “fohsh sho’ār shod”—when obscene cursing became a protest slogan—chanted collectively and amplified online. He lingers on the fact that it surfaced at Sharif University of Technology, among students widely known as nokhbeh—the country’s top STEM talents—and treats that detail as proof that a line had been crossed in public life. He recodes this profane register as a civilizational threat, pairing fohsh (obscene cursing) with fahshā (sexual indecency) and naming both as pornocracy: the rule of base desire over sacred order. Citing Usul al-Kafi, he casts fohsh as shamelessness (bi-haya’i) and even as “partnership with Satan.” In this frame, the chant becomes evidence of corruption at the level of origin and lineage—a failure of “purity of lineage” (tahārat-e nasab)—so that profanity appears as a symptom rather than as politics. By recasting the political chant as a symptom of tainted lineage, the state attempts to move the conflict out of the realm of grievance and into that of pathology, rendering the protester not a citizen but a corruption to be purged.

Re-singing a regional song, taking up a banned popular archive, or chanting in a profane register becomes a way of reclaiming a home the state can no longer credibly narrate as its own. Families keep their children’s deaths from being absorbed into the state’s narrative by mourning in their own idioms, while strangers take up those forms as a shared claim without erasing the differences that shape them. That plurality is the force of the moment, even as it remains exposed to renewed projects of homogeneity—whether through state repression or through reactive nationalism within the opposition, which welcomes vernacular culture only when its political claims are muted. The turn to the vernacular is thus more than a cultural shift: it is a tactical evacuation of a contaminated linguistic order. What emerges from that evacuation is a home reclaimed from the ruins of a poisoned language, but one still pressed on multiple sides by violence and the costs of refusal.

1: Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness), trans. John Green and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1982).

2: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6–7.

3: M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270–272.

When the state saturates inherited words with the memory of its violence, those words become unreliable as public idioms of grief and resistance. Part I traced that damage at the level of inherited idioms; Part II follows its rerouting into the body, through which grief is carried and made public.

At the funerals of protesters killed by the state during the January 2026 uprising, mourners gathered at gravesides and turned to bodily gesture: they danced, clapped, ululated, and played music in a space where sorrow and Qur’anic recitation were expected. The street had already made the body the primary ground of confrontation, as protesters advanced against armed forces with nothing but their bodies. At the graveside, it became the medium through which grief was carried when inherited idioms had failed and public mourning had to proceed under threat and surveillance. In March 2026, on the last Thursday of the Iranian year, mourners gathered at Sepehr Shokri’s graveside to commemorate Sepehr, who had been killed during the January 2026 protests. Facing threats of further violence from state forces, his mother cried out: “You have weapons; my son only had a chest. He came forward with his chest alone.” Her subsequent declaration—“we have nothing left to lose”—names a condition in which state violence and absolute dispossession leave the bare body as the final ground of confrontation. Arman Gorjian’s father names a related dispossession at his son’s graveside: “We have reached absolute poverty. We doubt your Islam… I had seen dance ceremonies, but I had never seen a mother dance at the grave of her dead child.” His phrasing links two shifts: the dispossession of inherited idioms, as the state’s Islam no longer functions as a credible language of resistance, and the emergence of an unprecedented bodily grammar of grief. For both parents, what remains is not joy but a condition of absolute poverty. In one scene, the poverty appears as the body stripped to exposure; in the other, as language stripped of credibility.

Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows what this “absolute poverty” sounds like when language itself gives out. Taha Soleimani had been missing for twenty days after his arrest. When his family finally received his body, it bore the marks of torture. He was dead. His uncle begins to speak—“my nephew was lost”—but as he tries to continue, to name what has happened, he runs out of words. He falls into a thick, suffocating silence. He raises his hands and asks those around him to clap. They begin at once, together, as if the cue were already familiar. The clapping breaks the silence and gives it a pulse. Grief becomes collective without a slogan. Rhythm here is not joy but kinetic testimony.

Taha Soleimani’s funeral

Several commentators have read the dancing and clapping at the funerals of protesters killed by the state as soog-e shad or joyous mourning. Nahid Siamdoust, for instance, frames them as an extension of the “affective politics of joy” she traces in Iran’s alternative public sphere. In her reading, because women’s public dancing in streets and buses previously formed “joyous counterpublics,” the funeral dances must arise from that same genealogy. But this commits a category error: it treats resemblance in gesture as proof of shared intent. A dance on a bus and a mother’s movement at her child’s grave may resemble one another in form, but they are not the same act. One is an elective claim to visibility; the other is an embodied testimony unfolding in a space saturated by loss and surveillance. The “joy” frame rests on an assumption of expressive abundance—a sudden, self-assertive break into visibility—yet these funerary gestures emerge not from surplus but from scarcity and devastation.

If Taha Soleimani’s funeral shows how rhythm fills the space where language breaks down, Arshia Barari’s shows the bodily cost of that shift. His mother dances and suddenly collapses, a gesture grief alone might produce, but one that carries more weight here. The body is being asked to bear more than grief alone: catastrophic loss, refusal of the state’s script, and the burden of making that refusal publicly legible. The collapse registers a limit, a point at which the body, made into a medium, can no longer bear all that is being asked of it.

This embodied shift is at times strategic. At the chehelom (fortieth-day commemoration) of Sepehr Shokri, a family member asked the crowd to stop chanting political slogans. The threat was clear: if the chanting continued, security forces would return and smash the gravestone. In place of slogans, he redirected grief into sound, urging mourners to clap and perform kel zadan, the high-pitched ululation often reserved for weddings. Rhythm here is a rerouting produced under coercion, a way to keep mourning public without handing the state material it can seize and punish.

These funeral gestures do not replace older idioms of mourning. In a widely circulated clip, at the chehelom of Ilya Ojaqlou, his mother dances and then, mid-motion, breaks into matam-like self-striking, an embodied form of Shi’i mourning lament. Her body buckles and others rush to hold her up. The abrupt pivot shows that dance and matam can coexist in the same body, in the same moment, blocking any easy reading of the dance as joy. In another viral video from the chehelom commemoration of Hesam Asivand in Lali, Khuzestan, mourners perform sineh-zani, the rhythmic chest-striking associated with Shiʿi mourning for Hossein, for Hesam. As a male relative strikes his chest with increasing intensity, his body lurches and sways until he nearly collapses, and another mourner steps in to hold him. Mourning for Hossein and mourning for the present dead converge here at the level of gesture. Karbala returns here as an embodied grammar of grief: the hand no longer keeps time with a distant sacred story alone, but registers the pain of a contemporary crime. In repurposing sineh-zani for those killed by the state, mourners turn a sacred repertoire long claimed by the establishment against the establishment itself.

At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom. Screenshots by the author.

At Rostam Mobarakabadi’s February 2026 chehelom, the graveside becomes a site where disparate idioms of mourning are recomposed into a vernacular ritual language. Rostam’s mother holds his portrait high, her steady posture giving the image a public bearing. Together, body and photograph testify to her son’s life ended by state violence. Beside her, a female relative keeps time with a gesture that sits in the tense middle ground between dast zadan (clapping) and matam, weighted by a downward beat that echoes sineh-zani without becoming it. She claps with a heavy, percussive force, a pulse drawn inward toward the heart rather than outward in celebration. The murdered son’s name is Rostam, invoking the hero of the Shahnameh, and the anthem sung at the graveside calls up Kaveh the Blacksmith against Zahhak, the tyrant of Persian epic. The scene does not belong to a single tradition; it is a vernacular synthesis in which Shiʿi cadence, dance, and the Shahnameh’s mythic register layer without resolving their tension. By casting the street as a “trench” and the present ruler as Zahhak, the lyrics draw on an epic vocabulary of revolt to name injustice and commemorate the dead without returning to the state’s idiom.

Taken at face value, testamentary requests for music, dancing, and joy can mislead. Mehrzad Nazari, killed during the January 2026 protests, wrote in his will that his family should abstain from crying, mourning rituals, Qur’an recitation, and prayer, and instead play music and remain joyful. Before his execution during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, Majid Reza Rahnavard similarly asked that his funeral be marked not by sorrow but by dancing and happiness. The “joyous mourning” reading folds such requests too quickly into a narrative of affective rupture. The problem is methodological: by taking these requests at face value, Siamdoust’s reading approaches these funerals through a prior thesis—an “affective politics of joy”—so that the archive of funerary videos can only confirm what the framework has already rendered legible. The result is an erasure: by gathering these heterogeneous practices into a single story of “joyous” renewal, the framework obscures the coercion, devastation, and “absolute poverty” that pressure these bodies into motion.

What recurs across these scenes is not a single logic of rupture and refounding but a pressured recomposition. The Lur tradition of dancing at funerals is itself a mourning custom, not a joy tradition. Nor do these scenes resolve into the “authentic Persian culture” against state-imposed Islamic culture that the framework assumes: sineh-zani returns as an embodied Shiʿi repertoire, and Rostam Mobarakabadi’s chehelom layers Shiʿi cadence, Shahnameh epic, embodied gesture, and protest poetics without privileging any single tradition. Under duress, regional mourning customs, inherited sacred repertoires, and embodied improvisation are brought into proximity by loss, generating fragments of new political idioms assembled unevenly. If anything links these disparate acts, it is the condition named by Arman Gorjian’s father: “absolute poverty,” in which mourning and refusal must work with whatever remains.

But the body is not grief’s only medium. Part III turns to the vernacular infrastructures through which grief travels sideways into regional mother tongues and vernacular repertoires, where belonging is rebuilt under pressure.

In the aftermath of the January 2026 massacres in Iran, I kept returning to the way people reached for words and found the old ones no longer fit. Since the 2009 Green Movement, expanding state violence and unmet demands have produced not only anger, but a deep repulsion toward the world the state has built—its rituals, imagery, and inherited idioms. As the state repeatedly captures those forms and saturates them with the memory of its violence, shared political vocabularies have become unreliable. This essay asks how grief and political refusal find a voice when inherited idioms can no longer be fully trusted. To pursue that question, I turn to the Karbala narrative—the Shiʿi story of Hossein’s martyrdom, which for decades served as a public grammar for naming injustice in Iranian political culture.

For decades, the story of Hossein—the third Shiʿi Imam—served as Iranian society’s public grammar for naming injustice. Hossein refused to pledge loyalty to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler, and was surrounded and killed in Karbala; his death became the central Shiʿi story of shahādat (martyrdom). In the years leading to the 1979 Revolution, Karbala circulated as a widely legible idiom of resistance. The pre-revolutionary Iranian thinker Ali Shariati crystallized this by distinguishing between a “Red Shiʿism” of protest and a “Black Shiʿism” of state ritual, in which mourning for Hossein is absorbed into institutional order. In 1974, the Marxist poet Khosrow Golsorkhi identified himself with Hossein before a military tribunal, casting the Shah’s court as Yazid’s tyranny (see section 7). These episodes show that Karbala could function as a shared political language even for the nonreligious.

After the Revolution, the Islamic Republic claimed Karbala as official property, and after 2009 that capture made the idiom increasingly unreliable as a shared language of refusal. As former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei put it in 2013, “Military war, intellectual war, spiritual war, social war: the combination of these is called mujāhadat [struggle]. Whoever is devoted to Imam Hossein is devoted to political Islam… Islam is muqātila [combat].” In official discourse, attachment to Hossein is thereby fused to a condition of permanent struggle. In February 2026, in his final public address, Khamenei invoked Hossein’s declaration at Karbala—“someone like me does not pledge allegiance to someone like Yazid”—conscripting the sacred grammar of resistance into the state’s confrontation with the United States. After his death, state media declared him shaheed, saying he would be gathered in the hereafter with Hossein. The state’s Islam invokes familiar idioms, which is precisely what makes this capture so dispossessing.

When Karbala is invoked by those who kill, its vocabulary can no longer serve unambiguously as a grammar of resistance. In a recent video, the sister of Reza Naseri, who was killed in June 2025 by the state’s paramilitary Basiji forces, sits beside his grave and says: “My brother was killed by someone who goes on pilgrimage to Karbala every month, who constantly invokes the name of Hossein.” Under such conditions, symbolic abandonment is not always a sign of total rejection of faith; it can also be a refusal to inhabit a political vocabulary now compromised by its association with violence.

The rupture also surfaces in mourning rituals for people. In one account, as mourners stood to recite namāz-e mayyit, the traditional prayer for the dead, a veiled aunt shouted: “Don’t pray... There is no God… my son… his stature… his big colored eyes… he was 23 when they killed him… don’t pray, there is no God.” The accompanying line—Sūg-ash az īmān obūr kard-e būd—is stark: her grief had passed through faith, and faith could no longer hold it. In many such funerals, the dead were buried without Islamic prayers, their send-off carried instead by greetings and slogans. Even ritual had become unevenly inhabitable.

When Sepehr Shokri’s father wanders through the morgue to find his son, he calls out, Sepehr-e bābā, kojāyi? (Daddy’s own Sepehr, where are you?) and Bābā Sepehr (Daddy Sepehr). In the emotional grammar of Persian, calling the child bābā collapses the distance between parent and child, making the father’s own sense of self inseparable from his son. His kojāyi? is both lament and protest, naming the violence that has imposed an absolute absence where a beloved should be. In the cold of the morgue, with nameless bodies stacked on the floor and labeled “rioters” or “foreign agents,” this familial language becomes an authoritative register for naming injustice and refusing the state’s final word on who his son was.

Yet if Karbala has become unreliable as a vocabulary of resistance, devastation can still force its return. As Sepehr’s father passes among the bodies, he cries, “Karbala injāst, mardom” (Karbala is here, people). In that cry, sacred ground is relocated from the state’s staged rituals to the cold floor of the morgue. Unlike Shariati’s “Red Shiʿism,” this is not a political program but an unscripted reflex, a fragment of an older idiom returning under pressure.

A rap song by Shahmir, circulating on Instagram in February 2026, invokes Sepehr’s father: “Nonstop, his voice echoes in my head, asking where Sepehr-e bābā is.” The artist then names the consequence of this grief: “Tasuʿā and Ashura”—the two peak days of ritual mourning for Hossein—“no longer have meaning.” In declaring those days meaningless, Shahmir suggests that the inherited religious frame has been overtaken by the present. He re-pins grief to the specific dates of recent state killings: “18 and 19 Dey [January 8–9, 2026] have become tāsiān and dāghiyān.” By displacing Tasuʿā and Ashura with these Gilaki terms, Shahmir reroutes grief away from a distrusted religious idiom and into vernacular speech. Tāsiān names the hollow cold of a home emptied by loss; dāghiyān names a restless, burning agitation. As Gilaki is tied to Gilan, these words, paired with the allusion to burning, gesture toward the violence and fire in Rasht’s bazaar. In this new chronology, the inherited calendar loses its authority, unable to contain the magnitude of the present. What follows is not the disappearance of the sacred, but its dispersal: the inherited idiom splinters into a plurality of vernacular names, times, and languages.

At the chehelom (the fortieth-day mourning commemoration) of Nehayat Rahimi in February 2026, her mother adopts the physical grammar of a taʿziyeh (a ritual play centered on Hossein’s martyrdom), pacing in circles with her daughter’s photograph. She begins by invoking the foundational treachery of Shiʿi memory—Imam Ali struck from behind by Ibn Muljam—only to subvert it. Because Nehayat, too, was attacked from behind by the state’s security forces in Gorgan’s Kaj Square, her mother declares, “Compared to Ibn Muljam, you are the coward,” recasting those forces through a foundational scene of Shiʿi betrayal. “Who is the Yazid of this era? The ones who martyred and turned forty thousand dead into everlasting ones.” She then reassigns Karbala’s coordinates: the sahrā-ye Karbala (desert of Karbala) is no longer a distant site, but the pavement of Kaj Square, just as Tasuʿā and Ashura are reattached to the dates of the 2026 killings. This is not an isolated gesture. Other bereaved mothers, such as Kamelia Sajadian, whose son, Mohammad Hassan Torkaman, was killed during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, similarly reattach Ashura and Karbala to the time and place of their children’s deaths, prying the idiom from state custody and turning it into a vernacular geography of loss.

What this archive reveals is not the disappearance of Karbala, but the damage done to it as a public idiom. Victor Klemperer’s account of poisoned language helps explain how states damage public language from within, as ideology enters everyday speech through repetition until words begin to carry the force of the state’s violence. Like the “tiny doses of arsenic” he describes, swallowed unnoticed until a toxic reaction sets in, poisoned words eventually come to feel dangerous to use.[1] In contemporary Iran, the inherited idiom of Karbala as resistance and refusal has been marked by the memory of state violence and absorbed into the state’s ritual theater. Yet damaged idioms do not simply disappear. At times, people refuse them, as when families reject the namāz-e mayyit and instead send off their dead with slogans. At other times, they displace them, as when Shahmir replaces the inherited sacred peaks of Tasuʿā and Ashura with the vernacular of tāsiān and dāghiyān. In Bakhtinian terms, these acts reconfigure Karbala’s chronotope: the fused time-space that determines, in narrative, what happens, where, and to whom. Borrowed from physics and adapted to literature, the chronotope names the way time and space are bound together in narrative form.[2] In this archive, the chronotope helps clarify how shifting these coordinates makes their suffering narratable and their dead nameable. By relocating Karbala from inherited ritual settings to the morgues, pavements, and graves of the present, and from liturgical recurrence to the dates of state killing, the bereaved pull the sacred into the immediate reality of their own lives. They decide anew when Karbala happens, where it unfolds, and who—in the face of the state’s dehumanizing labels—has the final right to name its dead. Yet given the unreliability of inherited idioms, political grief also migrates into embodied and vernacular forms—not as a retreat from language, but as its reinvention. Part II follows that movement into rhythm and the body; Part III follows it into the vernacular infrastructures through which belonging is rebuilt.

[1]: Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 15–16.

[2]: Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–85.

Despite the Islamic Republic’s transformations since 1979, one governing reflex has remained: it rules through the language of external crisis—war and later supplemented by the nuclear file, regional conflict, and sanctions. Among other uses, these arenas provide the script for explaining away domestic dissent. I call this the geopolitical alibi. Over the past two decades of protest, including the recent January 2026, the alibi has operated through a consistent double move. When the state kills, it frames bloodshed as foreign-authored: the US and Israel are blamed for both the conditions of unrest and the violence itself, either as direct perpetrators or as the unseen hand that forced the state to act. When people protest, the same logic flips onto the crowd: protesters are recoded as infiltrators: foreign agents, domestic spies, or manipulated proxies. Either way, uprising and massacre are made legible as someone else’s war.

In late December 2025, as inflation surged and the rial collapsed, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Alaeddin and Charsou centers shuttered their stalls in a strike that spread rapidly from market districts to universities and across Iran, shifting from economic grievance to a crisis of legitimacy. As opposition figures abroad joined in, Reza Pahlavi called for coordinated demonstrations and urged people to occupy state institutions. At the peak in early January, the state enforced a nationwide communications blackout, severing internet and phone networks, sealing the country inside the regime’s broadcast frame as a lethal crackdown unfolded under constrained reporting.

Part I: Manufacturing the Alibi

The geopolitical alibi took shape through four moves. First came renaming; then war-framing; then rationalization, both administrative and sacred; and finally dehumanization. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei distinguished between the protester (mo’tarez) and the rioter (eqteshashgar). Within days, unrest became fetneh—foreign-backed sedition—then was folded into the narrative of the 2025 Israel–US war against Iran. State officials blamed the bloodshed on infiltrators—spies and terrorists—who allegedly hijack peaceful civic protests and commit “ISIS-like” acts. In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Araghchi claimed Israel was engineering “maximum bloodshed” to bait the US into conflict with Iran. He performs a double erasure: he replaces the state’s trigger finger with a phantom foreign hand, then casts Iranian lives as a US “red line” for war even as the Islamic Republic treats those same lives as expendable domestic targets. The state is no longer the aggressor; it is the victim on its own soil. Once blood in the streets is framed as a “strategic trap,” every bullet fired is repackaged as national defense. The alibi keeps its “anti-imperialist” branding precisely as it enables mass killing at home.

Alongside the war frame came a colder logic: administrative rationalization. In a leaked audio file, the son of Iran’s former ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Ghadiri Abyaneh argued that eliminating protesters “on the spot” would have been cheaper than arresting them one by one and building case files that invite international pressure. Violence appears here as efficiency and cost management. Others supplied sacred cover. Former IRGC commander Hassan Abbasi invoked Qur’an—“Fight them until there is no more sedition (fitna)”—to cast protest sites as battlefields and dissenters as divinely sanctioned enemies, while regime-aligned preacher Hesamoddin Haerizadeh called the streets “war zones” and urged forces to kill with “pure intention.” Dehumanization completed the sequence. In Rasht, a security official described protesters as drugged and possessed, wearing “Jewish amulets,” even “zombies,” a trope that stages infiltration while drawing on an older antisemitic repertoire of the hidden agent. The citizen is recoded as a contaminant, so elimination can be narrated as “cleaning up” rather than killing.

Part II: When the Alibi Becomes Critique

A significant body of English-language commentary, regardless of intentions, reproduces the state’s interpretive lens. Instead of treating repression as a deliberate domestic technology of rule, these accounts relocate causality outward—into regional war, sanctions, opposition escalation, or foreign infiltration. Sanctions do brutalize ordinary life—and, in the regime’s own hands, become part of the crisis terrain through which it rules; the problem is when analysis turns “sanctions” into explanatory cover rather than context. In that displacement, state violence loses intentionality and appears as contingency. The geopolitical alibi travels easily in English, where it can acquire critical authority and become the default frame even for critique. What follows are several modes through which this grammar reappears.

1. Infiltration as explanation: recasting street dissent as enemy action

Consider Hamid Dabashi, who mobilizes the language of “anti-imperialism” to validate CIA-adjacent rumor and invert victim and perpetrator. He argues that what is unfolding in Iran is not protest but an “Israel-instigated revolt,” led by “Mossad agents in the streets of Tehran” hiding among demonstrators. As evidence, he cites “Israeli flags”—an analytically implausible detail offered without verification. In a setting where such a display can be fatal, neither covert operatives nor protesters have reason to advertise it. The claim demands evidence; none is provided. The effect is straightforward: protesters are recast as infiltrators and street dissent is reframed as “enemy action,” implicitly legible as something the state may crush by force. Dabashi then extends the move outward, claiming Israel stokes unrest “to distract attention” from Gaza. Yet it is Dabashi’s own framing that performs the displacement: Gaza becomes the screen through which the Islamic Republic’s violence recedes from view, the state’s trigger finger is backgrounded, and the state’s violence in Iranian streets is narrated as someone else’s plot. Most revealing is the epistemic pivot this requires: a scholar known for anti-imperialist critique effectively treats Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, as a key reference point for describing Iran’s streets. This is the geopolitical alibi at its most complete: the state kills, the crowd is renamed the enemy, and responsibility dissolves into geopolitics.

2. Contextual Erasure: Sanctions and War as Causal Cover

A second mode buries the state’s trigger finger under a mountain of sanctions and geopolitical tension until the state’s agency disappears. In an Al Jazeera interview, Narges Bajoghli frames the uprising through a “catch-22”: the economy cannot stabilize without sanctions relief, yet sanctions relief is cast as unattainable without foreign-policy surrender. The frame recodes the state as the trapped manager of an impossible situation, so violence begins to read as byproduct rather than choice—and it takes for granted the state’s premise that its regional posture is nonnegotiable, while the costs are invoiced to ordinary Iranians. Instead of staying with the present violence Iranians are facing, the commentary pivots to the specter of “Iran turning into Syria,” where state violence becomes security and accountability dissolves into catastrophe management. Even her dismissal of Reza Pahlavi as a figure “elevated in the media” folds opposition back into foreign manufacture: dissent is never fully domestic. Similarly, a Washington Post analysis treats the state’s war narrative as explanatory context rather than as propaganda that does political work. “The Iranian state sees these protests as part of the ongoing war,’ Bajoghli said. ‘We got a ceasefire of bombs and missiles flying but there was no real end to that conflict.’” Once that war frame becomes the dominant lens, the line between domestic dissent and foreign attack blurs: the state no longer appears as an initiator of violence, but as a besieged victim responding under siege.

3. Proximity as Proof: Anecdote as Security Claim

The next mode asserts authority through the prestige of proximity. Writing in The Markaz, M. Nateqnuri adopts an evidentiary shortcut: under total blackout, “I heard” and “friends told me” are treated as proof. Yet no single observer inside an information vacuum can plausibly identify anonymous actors’ training and organizational ties across a continental geography, much less watch those claims scale up into nationwide diagnosis. Still, the piece moves from proximity to certainty with remarkable ease: “Friends who work in Tehran hospitals told me that people reported protesters and security personnel with strange accents, giving credence to the presence of foreign boots on the ground.” In a multilingual country like Iran, “accent” is a socially saturated and often classed marker—used to police status and belonging, especially in Tehran. To weaponize it as evidence of foreignness is to convert an existing social prejudice into a security claim. It even presents the internet shutdown as a form of intimacy—“strangely calming,” enabling presence with “ourselves and each other”—a striking aestheticization of enforced isolation during a mass killing operation. What’s happening here is eyewitness laundering: scattered, unverified anecdotes are inflated into a diagnosis of “trained agitators” and “foreign cells” at the very moment when even local events are structurally difficult to verify. The piece shifts causality away from the state’s machinery and onto shadowy outsiders, so massacre reads not as a planned technology of rule but as a tragic response to provocation.

4. Premature Diagnosis: Disqualifying a Movement in Formation

A fourth mode shifts causality away from the state’s machinery and onto protest strategy. It runs on a simple story: the regime is always ready to crush, but the killings supposedly begin only after the movement “changes character”—from civil dissent to violent confrontation, often coded as masculine or militarized. In this frame, massacre becomes the victims’ tactical failure: if protesters had chosen better slogans, better aesthetics, or “less provocative” forms, the state’s bullets might not have followed. The effect is a reversal of cause and consequence. State violence is treated as an outcome, while the crowd’s style is treated as the trigger. Under blackout, thin cultural cues are then read like forensic evidence. A Lori song, “Daya Daya,” despite its layered history—from World War I anti-occupation contexts to 1970s leftist repertoires—is reduced to evidence of “militarized nationalism.” Monarchist imagery and AI-generated Persian grandeur are read as a coherent far-right ideology, not as improvised symbols of a youth under siege, publicly insulted, and reaching for national dignity. By forcing a heterogeneous uprising into a global far-right template, these commentaries pre-disqualify it. They cue the reader to conclude that because the movement’s strategies, slogans, and aesthetics were “wrong,” the state’s violence was inevitable, and solidarity optional.

Part III: Breaking the Alibi

To stage the difference between outside analysis and some of the inside narrations, I use one case: Ali Shakouri-Rad, a reformist politician and former Tehran representative in the Sixth Majles. I single him out because his testimony is unusually comprehensive and aligns with patterns echoed by activists and former reformist officials inside Iran. He was arrested after the testimony circulated—an index of the cost attached to saying plainly what outside analysis so often relocates elsewhere.

Shakouri-Rad argues that the security state opened the uprising and timed its escalation. By using Tehran’s Bazaar as an ignition point and waiting for late December, which is the end of the academic semester in Iran, as students dispersed and universities closed, the regime attempted to stage-manage the crisis—vent pressure in a controlled dose and provoke confrontation on its own terms. In this view, the state is not the victim of a plot; it is the arsonist who lost control of the fire it helped start. “Loss of control,” in his usage, is not a vague description of spread. It names a political miscalculation: participation exceeded what anyone—including the security apparatus—anticipated, especially after Reza Pahlavi’s call widened the field beyond the regime’s expected limits.

He then turns the regime’s “foreign plot” narrative into a rhetorical boomerang. If Mossad or opposition “cells” truly operated across roughly four hundred cities and around nine hundred protest sites, the state is not absolved—it is indicted. A regime that advertises multiple omniscient security bodies cannot plausibly claim ignorance while alleged networks form and weapons circulate nationwide. Either the story is false, or the apparatus is incompetent, or it is compromised from within. His question is blunt: where were the security institutions, and why has no one resigned or been held accountable? From there, he shifts the frame from excess to method. Violence, for him, is not simply a response to unrest; it is a repeatable technology—something injected into protest scenes to manufacture the pretext for repression. He cites a doctrine from a journal connected to Imam Hossein University that recommends “creating killings” among one’s own forces and staging transgressive acts—killing a Basiji or police officer, burning a mosque or shrine, even burning the Qur’an—so that protest can be recoded as “riots” and crushed. On this view, the geopolitical alibi is not only a talking point; it is an operational script that generates the “evidence” repression then claims to answer.

He reads official speech through the same lens. When Masoud Pezeshkian repeated lurid accounts of “ISIS-like” violence on television without asking the only question that matters—where the security institutions were—Shakouri-Rad calls it an insult to the public’s aql, its basic capacity to reason. A state that grounds its legitimacy in the promise of security cannot narrate spectacular violence and simultaneously decline to explain how, by whom, and under whose authority it unfolded.

Shakouri-Rad’s interpretation is echoed in field testimony gathered by Mina Khani, a senior member of Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. In interviews she conducted across multiple cities, she told me many described a recurring pattern: on the first nights of protest, small groups—perceived as unusually coordinated and seemingly trained—set fires and escalated confrontation, then vanished by the second night. Among interviewees, a common interpretation was that these figures were provocateurs linked to state institutions. Even if the security state miscalculated the uprising’s scale, these accounts suggest the crackdown itself was not improvised. Khani reports widespread perceptions of prior preparation: pre-positioned body bags; coordinated laser targeting by one unit as another fired; plainclothes Basiji embedded in crowds before attacking from behind; assaults on wounded protesters inside hospitals; the internet blackout; and the use of the information vacuum to broadcast images of dead protesters in body bags and parents searching morgues. Whatever awaits independent verification, the consistency of these accounts across interviews reinforces Shakouri-Rad’s core claim: the violence bore the marks not of reactive “counterterrorism” against foreign forces, but of rule.

Conclusion

By framing repression as “reactive,” some English-language analysis strips the Islamic Republic of agency. It treats the state not as a political actor choosing violence to keep power, but as an organism responding to external pressures—sanctions, war threats, and regional conflict. It turns the regime’s foreign policy into holy script and geopolitical “tension” into a law of nature. It repackages causal displacement as “context,” and it treats the regime’s war frame—the claim that protests are a continuation of the US–Israel conflict—as explanation even when it is doing propaganda’s work. Once causality is moved outside Iran, responsibility shifts from the security apparatus that organizes the crackdown to distant policymakers, until the crackdown looks like circumstance instead of decision. The result is a second dispossession of Iranian citizens. They are reduced to geopolitical debris, and their protest is cast as an echo of global conflict rather than a struggle that can be understood on its own terms. To accept this alibi is to repeat the regime’s double move at the level of interpretation: it replaces the state’s trigger finger with a phantom foreign hand and rewrites uprising as infiltration, so that even killings in broad daylight become someone else’s war.

Recent discussions explain the visibility of pro-monarchy slogans through external forces such as Israel’s misinformation campaigns, satellite television, and foreign-funded media. By locating the explanation largely outside Iran, these accounts avoid asking how and why such symbols have become visible within Iranian society itself. This habit has a longer history in writing about Iranian political thought: intellectual currents critical of the Pahlavi state in the 1960s and 1970s have often been described as imports from Germany, while today some critics claim that monarchist opposition to the Islamic Republic has been manufactured by Israel. In both cases, foreign origin substitutes for historical explanation. Others dismiss monarchism as a marginal reaction born of despair rather than political substance. But treating monarchism either as an artificial imposition or as a political mistake keeps harder questions off the table: if this support is merely a foreign mirage or a fringe cry of despair, why has it persisted and grown for nearly a decade—becoming a visible language of rejection in some streets—while other political traditions have failed to offer a convincing alternative? I argue that to grasp this moment, we need to read it historically and attend to the emotional responses shaped by lived experience, rather than attributing it to external manipulation alone. I begin by treating collective emotions not merely as immediate reactions, but as clues to how people make sense of political history. I then trace a brief history of recent dissent and conclude by asking how these movements might be better coordinated and more clearly expressed.

Several accounts from Iran in recent days describe public anger as the immediate force driving people into the streets, despite the fatal risks involved. Over the past decades, each wave of protest and its demands has been met with state violence intended to produce fear and silence, even as the underlying reasons for protest have worsened. As a result, anger has accumulated over time and hardened into a durable sense of repulsion directed at the political and social world the state has created. A well-known example helps clarify how these collective emotions take shape. The killing of Jina Amini provoked immediate anger, fueling mass protests that demanded accountability, named a wrong, and showed how harm ran through the state’s entire structure—from street-level repression to violence inflicted in detention. What many came to reject was no longer a single policy or institution, but the entire world that made such brutality possible. In this shift, anger at specific injuries hardened into repulsion toward a political order experienced as uninhabitable. This repulsion reaches beyond the Islamic Republic’s leaders and policies. It extends to its language, imagery, and rituals, and to the world it has built over decades. While anger has driven political action and public articulation against the establishment, repulsion has produced something else: a refusal to inhabit the state’s universe or imagine a future under its rule.

Beyond the imposition of death through killing and ongoing executions, state policies such as crisis-driven foreign policy and the resulting economic hardship are widely experienced as assaults on livelihood, joy, and national welfare. Over time, society’s responses to these practices have contributed to the formation of social norms centered on reclaiming Iran as a nation committed to the well-being of its people, with a right to life and joy. These norms are visible in everyday acts and symbols, from the prominence of “Iran” in protest slogans to public affirmations of joy and life, including families dancing at the funerals of those killed. In some of these funerals, this turn toward dance also marks a refusal of official religious language, which the Islamic Republic has claimed as its own and imposed on society, so people reach instead for dance as a gesture the state has long tried to police. These commitments are also visible in organized campaigns against execution, such as Karzar-e Seshanbeh-ha-ye Na-be-Edam (the No to Execution Tuesdays Campaign), and in demands for accountability led by families of victims, including Madaran-e Dadkhah (the Justice-Seeking Mothers). Yet the same anger and repulsion that generate these norms also impose limits. Under these conditions, political resources are often discarded simply because they resemble the language, symbols, or historical lineage of the Islamic Republic. As a result, strands of Iran’s own revolutionary and oppositional thought have become difficult to inhabit because they echo a political vocabulary now experienced as intolerable. In this landscape, the post-1979 political order is rejected wholesale, while the pre-1979 period is selectively idealized, setting the conditions under which monarchist symbols begin to circulate not because of their political substance, but because they appear unburdened by the language, history, and collective emotional weight produced by the Islamic Republic.

After the 2009 Green Movement, as demands for reform were met with intensified repression and key reformist figures were placed under house arrest or imprisoned, anger and repulsion toward the state deepened. The Pahlavi period also remained a point of comparison in popular imagination, well before the rise of diaspora satellite channels. As an older activist who lived through the 1980s told me, jokes circulating as early as the late 1980s captured this comparison. In one such joke, the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi appears in Iranians’ dreams and asks for Ray-Ban sunglasses in his grave. When asked why, he explains: “Because you all keep wishing light on my grave, after seeing how dark life has become for all of you.” Many people contrasted their present conditions with the pre-revolutionary era in everyday terms—currency value, social freedoms, mobility, and a sense of national standing and future possibility. These comparisons were not simply abstract nostalgia; they were grounded in daily assessments of life chances and state performance. As reform lost credibility as a viable path forward and public violence intensified, the Pahlavi past increasingly came to function not only as a memory of “before,” but as an imagined alternative beyond reform. In this sense, the growing presence of monarchist slogans is less a return to monarchy than a search for an exit from a political order experienced as irredeemable.

If reform has lost credibility, why has this language of rejection attached itself to the Pahlavi rather than to other political alternatives? The answer lies in the systematic narrowing of the political field over the past four decades. After the 1979 Revolution, melli (nationalist) currents—most visibly associated with the National Front—were swiftly criminalized, while the melli–mazhabi current was gradually suppressed, effectively removing liberal-democratic visions of social justice from the political field. The faction of the Islamic Republic that had suppressed these currents later reemerged in the 1990s as reformists and attempted to revive—or partially recycle—elements of the very traditions it had previously banned. These efforts, however, were repeatedly constrained and ultimately dismantled. Following the violent suppression of the 2009 protests, the reform project was rendered politically inert and further hollowed out during the presidency of Hassan Rouhani (2013–2021). At the same time, reformist political thought itself contributed to the narrowing of Iran’s political field. In the late 1990s, reformist journalists and thinkers retrospectively pathologized the 1979 Revolution, portraying it as inherently violent and reinforcing a broader trend that recast much of 1970s political thought as nativist or anti-modern. In particular, they blamed the revolutionary fusion of Shiʿism and Marxism in the 1970s for the emergence of religious despotism after 1979. This mode of critique contributed to a flattened political landscape in which alternatives were discredited in advance, leaving society increasingly dispossessed of its political inheritance.

The Left entered this narrowed terrain already shaped by decades of constraint. Following the severe criminalization of the post-1979 period and the mass executions of the 1980s, what remained of leftist politics was structurally weakened. Those executions disproportionately targeted multiple factions of the Left, severing organizational continuity and wiping out much of its leadership. In the reform era, a second blow followed at the level of narrative: as the 1979 Revolution was retrospectively framed as inherently violent, reformist commentators often treated the Left, especially its most radical strands, as the engine of that violence. This did more than criticize past strategy. It helped turn “the Left” into a moralized shorthand for extremism, emptying its ideals of social justice and reducing a complex political tradition to a caricature. In doing so, reformist commentators not only reduced the Left to a caricature of violence; they also helped make the Pahlavi era appear, by contrast, as a more “normal” alternative, thereby easing the later return of monarchist symbolism. In subsequent years, the Left’s limited appeal was not only due to repression and erasure, but also to the weight of unresolved historical legacies. For many, the anti-imperialist rhetoric of some factions of the Left came to resemble the Islamic Republic’s own language. Other strands remained burdened, in hindsight, by a pre-1979 culture of revolutionary austerity and by the Left’s accommodation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership during the 1979 Revolution. At times, factions of the Left dismissed popular political expressions as false consciousness, while other currents retreated into detached intellectualism, addressing Iran’s crises by translating Western theory rather than sustained engagement with lived experience. Taken together, these historically layered constraints limited the Left’s ability to reconstitute itself as a widely trusted political language.

This political vacuum—understood not as an absence of resistance, but as the erosion of shared political languages and future-oriented horizons—was produced through more than repression alone. Over four decades, the Islamic Republic dismantled oppositional traditions through multiple, overlapping processes. Some lineages were eliminated materially through criminalization, imprisonment, and execution, severing organizational continuity. Others were eroded more subtly through the production of a political common sense that defined reformism, gradualism, and electoral participation as the only legitimate horizons of political action. When hardliners later closed the door on reform, the narrowing that reformist discourse had already helped produce meant that few other alternatives were available as a shared public language. At the same time, the saturation of public life with violence and coercion produced a further form of dispossession: surviving political languages became difficult to inhabit because they came to resemble the state itself—an object of deep repulsion. In this climate, resemblance functions as a liability. Traditions that share a historical genealogy, vocabulary, or symbolic register with the existing order—even when oppositional—are rejected as intolerable reminders of a system experienced as incompatible with life.

This helps explain why the political vacuum persists even where resistance is visible. Inside Iran, a wide range of political movements and organizations exists—women’s rights groups, student organizations and networks, labor organizations, Kurdish and Baluchi grassroots movements and networks, and environmental justice initiatives—but the conditions of repression make sustained coordination across sectors dangerous, limiting the articulation of a shared political horizon. Outside Iran, many former reformists—now working as journalists and human rights advocates—share broad commitments to a democratic and secular republic grounded in political pluralism, even as they differ over economic and social models, from socialist to more liberal visions. Yet, lacking a mandate for collective coordination and planning, they have not coalesced around durable channels of connection with organized groups inside the country. If this vacuum of articulation is to be disrupted, opposition politics must move beyond defining itself primarily through rejection—of the Islamic Republic, of reform, or of monarchy—and toward articulating the political order it seeks to build. That requires sustained conversation across fragmented sites of struggle around questions that have largely remained suspended: constitutional design; economic and infrastructural development; gender and ethnic justice; and environmental survival. Only through the labor of building such an alternative—plural, internally contested, and grounded in lived concerns—can meaningful dialogue emerge across different oppositional currents, including those drawn to monarchist symbols.

The front for a democratic republic must be more than a political coalition; it must serve as a shelter for language and collective emotions. Because, in society’s view, the dominant language of politics has been contaminated by the Islamic Republic, such a front cannot simply recycle inherited vocabularies and ideas—whether the caution of reformists or the state’s own jargon of “anti-imperialism” and “resistance.” Instead, it must listen to society to forge a new language, or reclaim existing concepts by stripping them of state narratives, while validating widely shared demands for happiness and normalcy—meaning a life not lived under constant, state-produced crisis—alongside individual liberties and social justice. This approach respects the hard-won wisdom of a nation that, having lived through the 1979 Revolution or grown up in its long shadow, has grown skeptical of grand narratives. Society no longer accepts abstract ideologies of utopia; instead, it demands to know—in simple language free of jargon—exactly how day-to-day life will be reorganized to establish justice and dignity. This project requires fully incorporating the claims of political actors inside Iran—including women’s movements, labor organizations, environmental activists, and ethnic networks and organizations—and establishing a fundamentally different relationship to society. A democratic front cannot be built through dismissal, superiority, or mockery, even when popular responses appear politically imperfect. The exhaustion visible across Iranian society is itself a form of knowledge: it reveals the limits of recycled ideas and voices that speak over people rather than with them. As long as political vocabularies remain inattentive to lived experience, their repetition functions less as critique than as another form of repression. Monarchist symbolism has gained traction precisely because it acknowledges demands for normalcy—from everyday happiness to an end to crisis-driven foreign policy—rather than minimizing them. A republican alternative will not succeed by rejecting these desires, but by taking them seriously and rearticulating them—not as a return to the past, but as a future-oriented project grounded in the insistence that life itself must be livable. It is time to stop explaining society’s shifts through mass manipulation. We need to read these shifts historically, take collective emotions seriously as a record of lived history, and ask what kinds of renewal—of language, politics, and everyday life—Iranians are already trying to build. The task now is to listen carefully and think with the people of Iran, not over them.

The most recent state crackdown on Iranian protesters stands among the most violent suppressions of public dissent in Iran’s modern history. Protesters have been killed, blinded, and mass-arrested. As the state imposed a sweeping information blackout and advanced claims blaming foreign agents for the violence, this brutality has nonetheless been met with a striking absence of sustained outrage in spaces that otherwise position themselves as opponents of state violence. Among Western progressives, the response has largely been silence. Among commentators shaped by post-9/11 anti-war politics, often operating within the same progressive milieu, the response has frequently taken the form of deflection. And among regional media aligned with the “Axis of Resistance,” coverage has echoed the Iranian state’s own framing rather than expressing solidarity with those targeted by its security forces.

This absence of solidarity is especially jarring given how quickly outrage emerges in other contexts. When, for instance, Israel attacked Iran in 2025, condemnation was immediate and widespread across many of the same spaces. As the Iranian state escalated its internal violence beginning in late December, attention largely dissipated. In many cases, this refusal to recognize Iranian protest does not stem from indifference, but from ethical commitments—anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and regional political allegiance—that shape how different audiences interpret state violence and resistance. Rather than amplifying the voices of those facing extreme repression, these commitments cast doubt on their political judgment, producing a refusal to accept recent Iranian protests as a legitimate political struggle at all. How did a set of ethical commitments meant to oppose domination come to foreclose recognition of a popular struggle against one of the most ruthless, crisis-driven governing regimes in the world?

Who Gets to Resist?

To understand why Iranian protest is so often rendered illegible, it helps to begin with a simple comparison. Imagine two protest movements in non-Western states. In the first, the movement is led by an Islamist organization and framed as resistance to the United States or Israel. In the second, the movement is directed against a domestic Islamist authoritarian regime and advances demands for rule of law, civil liberties, gender justice, and secular governance. For many Western progressives, the first movement is immediately legible as “authentic resistance.” The second is far more likely to be met with silence or suspicion.

This disparity cannot be explained by geopolitics alone. It reflects a deeper framework of political recognition shaping which demands are seen as legitimate and which are treated as derivative or externally imposed. In principle, claims to legal equality, bodily autonomy, and political freedom are understood as universal. In practice, however, these claims are often treated as Western in origin and ownership, and therefore suspect when articulated outside Europe or North America—especially when they challenge a state already positioned as anti-Western or anti-imperialist.

Under these conditions, non-Western movements gain recognition most readily when they emphasize cultural or religious particularity or define themselves explicitly against US or Israeli power. Movements that speak instead in the language of law, rights, or secular politics—especially when directed against an anti-Western state—are far more likely to be questioned. What emerges is a logic I call repressive authenticity: political legitimacy is granted only when distance from the West is visibly performed. Difference becomes the price of recognition. Within this framework, anti-Western states themselves are read as authentic embodiments of tradition and resistance, while those who oppose them are cast as inauthentic or foreign.

This reflex draws on a real historical experience. The language of universal values has often been used to legitimize colonial domination and imperial intervention, and skepticism toward that language is warranted. Postcolonial critique emerged to expose how European claims to universality were historically entangled with empire—not to reject universal ideals as such, but to show how they were selectively enforced and weaponized against non-Western societies. The problem arises when this historical insight hardens into a rule of recognition. Once universality itself is treated as inherently Western, any non-Western appeal to universal principles is read in advance as imitation or coercion. What began as a critique of domination is transformed into a filter that determines which struggles can be recognized as political at all.

This logic breaks down most clearly in the case of Iran. When Iranians demand a secular state or bodily autonomy, they are not borrowing a Western blueprint. They are responding to their own political history—shaped by the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), the Islamic Revolution (1979), and lived experience under Islamic authoritarian rule. Similar political demands can emerge in different societies without producing the same outcomes; they are taken up, reshaped, and contested through distinct histories and struggles. At the same time, treating the Iranian state as the authentic expression of Iranian society reduces Iranian political culture to Islamist authoritarianism. In this frame, the state appears as the “real” Iran—anti-Western, Islamist, and undemocratic—while protesters are cast as alien to their own society, their dissent treated as suspect or illegitimate. What disappears is the recognition that critique, dissent, and demands for change have long been part of Iranian social and political life.

The Politics of Deflection

A distinct response emerges from a strand of commentary forged in the shadow of the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” Its hesitation to confront the Iranian state has a specific genealogy, rooted in the convergence of two historical currents: the external threat posed by the Bush administration’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric and the internal promise of reform associated with the Khatami presidency (1997–2005) and sustained through the Obama era’s emphasis on engagement. Across these moments, a common framework took hold: a strategic wager that meaningful change in Iran would come through the gradual empowerment of reformist factions against hardliners, insulated from the destabilization of war. Within this framework, the primary threats to political freedom were identified not as the authoritarian state itself, but as external sanctions and the prospect of military intervention. Criticism of the state’s internal repression was therefore often treated as politically dangerous, liable to undermine diplomacy or provide rhetorical ammunition for advocates of regime change.

Even as the possibility of internal reform has largely collapsed, this reflex persists. When protests erupt, the violence is not denied, but quickly displaced by geopolitical explanation. Attention shifts to the harms of sanctions and the history of Western imperialism and manipulation, at the expense of sustained engagement with the immediate, state-inflicted violence unfolding on the ground. This is not to deny the destructive effects of sanctions, which the Iranian state has repeatedly instrumentalized to deepen crisis and consolidate control. But when every domestic uprising is interpreted primarily through the lens of external intervention, Iranian capacity for political action is rendered suspect.

This suspicion is reinforced through a striking double standard in evidentiary practice. In these US-centric commentaries, references to the CIA or Mossad—sources that are typically treated with skepticism in other political contexts—are invoked as credible indicators that Iranian protests are externally instigated or manipulated. Claims attributed to these agencies are used to cast doubt on protesters’ political independence in ways that would be dismissed outright in other protest contexts. What is at stake is not the empirical question of foreign interest or interference, but the selective elevation of intelligence narratives to delegitimize domestic dissent. Iranian protest is thus treated as guilty by association, its legitimacy eroded through sources that elsewhere would be considered epistemically suspect.

Framed as anti-racist or anti-war advocacy, this mode of interpretation produces a broader abstraction that flattens the specificity of Iran’s political and economic crises. Comparisons to police violence elsewhere or invocations of imperial crimes are often deployed to challenge American exceptionalist portrayals of Iran’s state as uniquely violent. Yet this rhetorical move recasts repression as a universal condition rather than a concrete political emergency, redirecting attention away from the specificity of Iranians’ lived experience. The effect is an implicit demand that Iranian society absorb the violence of its own government in the name of a broader struggle against global imperialism, because such violence is supposedly no different from what exists elsewhere. In this frame, protest ceases to register as a struggle against authoritarian rule. It is reclassified as a geopolitical risk, something to be managed rather than supported, reducing Iranian protesters to variables in a strategic calculation rather than recognizing them as political actors in their own right.

Loyalty to the Axis and the Erasure of Protest

A related but distinct logic operates within media and intellectual spheres aligned with the “Axis of Resistance,” where hesitation to confront the Islamic Republic’s violence stems from regional geopolitical loyalty. Within the framework of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” Iran is understood as the backbone of regional struggles against Israel and Western power. Solidarity is therefore structured as a zero-sum calculation: to legitimize an uprising against the Iranian state is to weaken the infrastructure of resistance itself. Within this framework, Iranian protests must be denied political legitimacy. Uprisings are reframed as US–Israeli conspiracies designed to undermine the Resistance from within. Iranian society appears not as a political actor with its own history and grievances, but as a terrain on which larger geopolitical battles are fought. Iranian lives are subordinated to regional strategy, and solidarity with the oppressed is blocked by allegiance to a patron state.

Conclusion: Recognition Before Agreement

The question, then, is not why people disagree about Iran, but why Iranian protests so often fail to register as protest at all. Across different political contexts, the same outcome emerges through different logics: universal demands are treated as foreign, state violence is abstracted into general conditions, and popular resistance is subordinated to geopolitical calculation. What these responses share is a refusal to recognize Iranian protesters as political actors engaged in a struggle of their own. Recognition does not require agreement. It requires acknowledging that Iranian protests are real, legitimate, and rooted in a history of repression that cannot be dismissed as imitation, error, or strategy.

— Forough Farrokhzad, “Earthly Verses,” 1964

As this essay was being written, during the early stages of the street protests, Iran entered a severe information blackout. Internet access and phone communication were cut nationwide. The only text messages that reached people came from the state, warning that leaving home could cost them their lives. When fragments of information finally reached the outside world, those inside Iran described the streets as sahneh-ye jang—a scene of war. People who had been seen only days earlier standing in the streets, shouting slogans, suddenly reappeared as corpses—sealed in black plastic, laid on floors, or stacked in the back of trucks—while families walked among them, searching faces for signs of recognition. Among these images were a mother searching through bodies for her child, and a sister holding her sister’s corpse. Witnesses described military-grade weapons fired into crowds, security forces raiding hospitals, and doctors threatened or arrested for treating the wounded. Violence extended even beyond the living. There were reports that families were told they could retrieve their children’s bodies only if they paid for the bullets that killed them. Many could not afford the fee. They were left suspended in grief, denied even the right to bury their dead.

As information circulation came under siege, officials attempted to impose narrative control. They blamed foreign agents for the killings, yet offered no explanation for the internet shutdown, the attacks on hospitals, or the monetization of death through the forced sale of bullets. What emerged was an apocalyptic landscape in which the state governed through the threat of death and through death itself. This scene recalls a world imagined more than half a century earlier by Forough Farrokhzad in her poem “Earthly Verses.” In that poem, children imagine tomorrow only as a black stain in their homework. “The sun was dead,” she wrote, and “the earth no longer welcomed the dead.” Today, that future-as-black-stain has materialized as the bodies of protesters sealed in black covers. The state now appears to be actively erasing the nation’s capacity to imagine a shared and livable future. This raises a fundamental question: why is the Islamic Republic waging its most destructive war against Iranian society, and why are so many people willing to risk death to confront it?

This violence did not emerge suddenly. Its conditions were laid at least as early as 2009. After the suppression of the Green Movement, demands for reform were met with repression. Over time, repression—never absent from the system—was increasingly made publicly visible, emerging as the dominant principle structuring state–society relations. This shift also took an economic form. In 2010, the Supreme Leader introduced what he called eqtesād-e moqāvematī, or the “Resistance Economy,” framing hardship and deprivation as a permanent way of life. At the same time, the state pursued an aggressive foreign policy designed to keep the country in a constant state of emergency. Under the banner of the “Axis of Resistance,” Iran expanded its military involvement across the region, transforming ideological ties into a coordinated security and military network.

Meanwhile, nuclear negotiations were repeatedly presented to the public as a promise of future relief. In practice, years of deadlock enriched those who profited from sanctions while remaining closely involved in the negotiation process itself, creating material incentives for stalemate rather than resolution. This orientation endured despite widespread popular demands to end external interventions and halt the diversion of national resources—demands crystallized in the slogan, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” At times misread as isolationist, the slogan expresses not hostility toward other peoples but a refusal to be sacrificed to a foreign policy of permanent crisis. By tethering regional resistance movements to the survival of a government widely experienced as destroying Iran, the state has turned them into symbols of the very system threatening the nation. Any meaningful reassessment of this strategy, however, threatened the establishment’s governing identity and the interests that had become dependent on emergency rule. As a result, repression at home and crisis abroad hardened into the establishment’s primary means of governing and reproducing authority.

In recent years, this strategy has begun to unravel rather than consolidate. The “Axis of Resistance” has frayed; nuclear sites—after decades of sanctions and stalled negotiations—have been bombed; and Syria, once described as Iran’s “35th province,” has slipped from the state’s control. Together, these projects have come to symbolize a government acting against what many perceive as national interests. As a result, many Iranians experience an entire generation as having been sacrificed to a permanent state of crisis—a strategy they neither chose nor believed in, and one that has ended in ruin.

Over time, large segments of society have come to view the state not as a protector of the nation, but as an adversary locked in a confrontation that threatens collective survival itself. This sense of danger is reinforced by grim demographic projections and an accelerating environmental crisis. Warnings of population decline, drying rivers, deforestation, and severe water shortages are widely understood as signs of a system that consumes the basic conditions of life in order to stay in power. Land and water depletion have thus come to stand for a form of rule that exhausts the nation’s capacity to sustain itself over time. The state’s war against society is increasingly understood as a failure, and it has produced deep public anger. This anger finds its clearest expression in street slogans such as, “We fight, we die, we take Iran back,” which frame protest as a self-sacrificing struggle over the nation’s survival and continuity.

We know from earlier scholarship that in the early twentieth century Iran as a homeland was often imagined through the figure of a suffering mother—fallen ill by corrupt rule, an allegorical body in need of citizens’ care and protection. What marks the present moment is the collapse of this allegory. That collapse lies in the disappearance of distance between symbol and life: the homeland is no longer imagined as if it were a woman, but appears as an actual woman whose body is destroyed by the state. No longer figured as illness to be cured, the homeland appears as a woman citizen who is killed.

Under conditions of permanent war, this breakdown has produced a new existential sensibility: the sense that the homeland itself is being martyred by the state. Across protest art circulating during Woman, Life, Freedom and the more recent street demonstrations, this sensibility takes a striking visual form. Iran repeatedly appears as a bodily outline—murdered—its territorial contours inseparable from a woman’s body. In some images, the nation is held and mourned; in others, it is immobilized or crucified within its own borders. Most devastatingly, the figure standing in for the homeland is not symbolic but a recognizable citizen—often a woman whose death renders the nation itself grievable. Here, allegory no longer mediates violence; it collapses because the homeland and the body through which it was imagined are killed together.

The homeland is thus figured through the woman protester murdered by security forces. Her death does not merely symbolize the nation’s condition; it is the nation’s condition. The state that claims to be the guardian of the homeland is instead its executioner. The murdered woman protester is not singular or exceptional: she stands in for the nation not as an abstract emblem, but as a citizen, binding the fate of the homeland to the lives of those—women and men alike—who are killed in its name.

While the Islamic Republic grounds its legitimacy in the martyrdom of the 1979 Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, the dominant national imaginary today inverts the state’s own ideological language. Martyrdom no longer legitimizes power; it indicts it. By killing protesters demanding a livable future, the state appears not as the steward of continuity but as the agent of national death—the killer of futurity itself. The political stakes, therefore, exceed economic crises. This shared existential threat explains why recent protests have bridged ethnic and linguistic divides, binding multiple struggles in Tehran to Kurdistan, Baluchistan, and Khuzestan. The danger is understood as a threat to collective survival. To protest, then, is to physically interpose one’s body against this perceived extinction and to defend a homeland that has become inseparable from the citizens being destroyed in its name.

Subscribe now