The end of illusions about Tehran

There are moments in history when repression becomes so total that it produces its own acoustics. A point at which fear no longer muffles anger, and silence itself begins to fracture. Iran is living through such a moment again.

Free Iran

The Islamic Republic did not emerge from an organic civilizational choice. It was the outcome of a catastrophic political miscalculation. Before 1979, Iran under the Shah was deeply flawed, authoritarian, and brittle, but it was also secular, outward-looking, and governed as a state rather than a theology. Women were educated and visible in public life. Minorities existed without permanent suspicion. Politics, however constrained, did not yet claim ownership over the human body.

The revolution that toppled the Shah was driven by a coalition history has since exposed as tragically naive. Marxists, secular intellectuals, students, feminists, and Islamists marched together, united less by a shared vision than by a shared hatred of the regime and a romantic belief that “anything” would be better. They were disastrously wrong.

The Islamists, led by Khomeini, never believed in coalition politics. They used the left as megaphones, foot soldiers, and expendable allies. Once power was secured, the revolution devoured its own. Communists were executed. Feminists were silenced. Student leaders disappeared into prisons or mass graves. Secular thinkers learned, too late, that ideology does not negotiate once it acquires guns and divine authority.

Western policy compounded the disaster. Under Jimmy Carter, Washington pressured the Shah, misread the revolutionary forces it was empowering, and weakened a secular regime at precisely the wrong moment. The assumption that clerical power could be moderated, managed, or civilized has been repeatedly disproven across regions and decades. Political Islam does not share power. It consumes it.

What followed in Iran was not a spiritual revival but a systematic suffocation of society. Religion became law, enforced with batons, bullets, and gallows. The state claimed authority over clothing, speech, thought, and private life. Women became symbols to be controlled. Minorities became permanent suspects. Journalists became enemies. Students became threats. The so-called morality police were never about morals; they were instruments of terror conditioning.

Prisons like Evin turned into factories of human destruction. Torture became procedural. Executions bureaucratic. Confessions ritualized. Loyalty demanded, never trusted. Fear institutionalized.

And as with all totalitarian systems, survival required external enemies. Israel. America. “Zionists.” “Western decadence.” Manufactured hatreds to distract from a country hollowed out from within.

For decades, the world responded to Tehran with statements, sanctions, and negotiations. Dialogues premised on the illusion that this regime could be reasoned with. That illusion has now collapsed.

In early January, during nationwide protests, the regime imposed a near-total internet blackout. What followed, according to multiple reports, were mass shootings of demonstrators across several cities. Tens of thousands were killed within a few weeks. Bodies were reportedly withheld from families, returned only in exchange for silence and money.

Negotiations continue to be floated, even now. But negotiations require interlocutors. You cannot negotiate with a regime that monetizes corpses, executes teenagers, and treats its population as a renewable resource for terror. At some point, diplomacy becomes moral abdication.

Meanwhile, the United States has begun visible military repositioning in the region. Carrier strike groups, air assets, and defensive deployments signal what policymakers are reluctant to say aloud: containment has failed. The regime understands only force, because it was born of force and sustained by it.

Iran’s youth are not protesting for reform. “Death to the Dictator” is not a bargaining position. It is a rejection of the system itself. These are generations raised under repression who have concluded that fear no longer protects them. When fear collapses, regimes collapse with it.

The uncomfortable truth is that Iran’s suffering has no global marketing campaign. No celebrity activism. No fashionable slogans. Standing up to genuine tyranny is inconvenient and unprofitable. It is easier to redirect outrage elsewhere. Hatred sells. Reality does not. So Iran bleeds quietly.

History, however, is unsentimental. It does not negotiate with tyrannies. It buries them.

The question is not whether this regime will fall. It is how many more people will be executed, shot, or disappeared while the world debates etiquette. At some point, military intervention ceases to be an escalation and becomes a moral correction.

Iran’s people are not asking for pity. They are asking for the removal of the machinery that is killing them. They are already in the streets. The world’s role is no longer to advise patience, but to decide whether it will continue to be a spectator to mass murder, or finally act.

History will record that choice.

Image credits:

Photo by Ollie Barker-Jones via Unsplash.