I was a hostage in Iran 47 years ago. I was held in Evin Prison—one of the most notorious prisons in the country—and moved through other miserable, isolated cells across Iran. Those memories never leave you. That is why what I am seeing today fills me with rage and dread. The same system that brutalized prisoners then is now turning its full machinery of repression against its own people.
Under a deliberate nationwide internet blackout, Iran’s deep state—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular military (Artesh), and the political apparatus embodied by figures such as Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf—has moved to crush dissent through mass killing.
Videos emerging despite the blackout show scenes that are almost unbearable: confused and screaming families standing beside bodies wrapped in black bags, piled in makeshift medical centers, scattered across courtyards in the south of Tehran. These are not isolated incidents. According to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRNA), this violence is systematic and verified.
The regime insists on its familiar language of dehumanization, warning Iranians not to join “rioters,” “terrorists,” or foreign-backed “mercenaries.”
Moreover, President Masoud Pezeshkian has publicly drawn a line between “peaceful protesters” and those he claims seek to “disrupt the entire society.”
History teaches us what comes next when a government uses such words. This is not chaos—it is strategy. It is a full-throated crackdown meant to terrorize a population into silence. I have seen this regime up close before.
The world must not look away now.
Under a deliberate nationwide internet blackout, Iran’s deep state—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular military (Artesh), and the political apparatus embodied by figures such as Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf—has moved to crush dissent through mass killing.
Videos emerging despite the blackout show scenes that are almost unbearable: confused and screaming families standing beside bodies wrapped in black bags, piled in makeshift medical centers, scattered across courtyards in the south of Tehran. These are not isolated incidents. According to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRNA), this violence is systematic and verified.
The regime insists on its familiar language of dehumanization, warning Iranians not to join “rioters,” “terrorists,” or foreign-backed “mercenaries.”
Moreover, President Masoud Pezeshkian has publicly drawn a line between “peaceful protesters” and those he claims seek to “disrupt the entire society.”
History teaches us what comes next when a government uses such words. This is not chaos—it is strategy. It is a full-throated crackdown meant to terrorize a population into silence. I have seen this regime up close before.
The world must not look away now.
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