Iranians Don’t Need to Prove Their Revolution to You

The uprising in Iran isn’t only against armed oppression; it’s also over narrative.

By Sahar DelijaniFebruary 1, 2026

• Politics

• History

TWO PROTESTERS SIT in the middle of the street, one tucked closely behind the other. Before them stand dozens of anti-riot guards, faceless in black armor, armed to the teeth, ready to charge. The protesters remain still, heads down, hands raised in victory sign—waiting, waiting, waiting.

On another street, an elderly woman staggers forward, hair in disarray, fist raised in the air. She keeps walking, shouting through the blood spilling from her mouth: “I am not afraid. I’ve been dead for 47 years.”

In the middle of a town square, protesters set fire to a banner bearing the image of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Lor women in black mourning clothes dance in the streets, a dance of anguish, of loss, of pain unimaginable, their bodies swaying in grief for their children felled by the regime’s bullets. Some lift their voices in an old song of resistance, a song my father, a Lor himself, used to sing when I was young: “My brothers are thousands upon thousands. My sisters are thousands upon thousands. They will rise to avenge my blood.”

Amid the sound of security forces firing into the crowd, a little girl’s voice suddenly cuts through, pleading with her father, a protester: “Baba, Baba, let’s go. That’s enough. Let’s go.”

A father walks among hundreds of bodies wrapped in black bags inside a makeshift morgue, calling out through his tears, “Sepehr, my son, Sepehr, where are you?”

I am not writing this essay as an author, nor as an activist, nor as a representative of the Iranian people. I am writing this as the daughter of former dissidents who lost the best days of their lives in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. As the daughter of a woman who was forced to give birth behind bars, interrogated while going through labor. As the niece of a man executed on a summer morning alongside thousands of others, his body swallowed by an unmarked mass grave. As the granddaughter of working-class grandparents who endured endless humiliations and hardships to raise grandchildren whose parents languished in the regime’s houses of horror.

I am writing this as a woman who has carried the inheritance of violence, repression and state-sponsored terror all her life, as a little girl who learned early the discipline of silence, who knew what could never be said to strangers about where her parents had been and what had been done to them. As a woman who cannot free herself from the wound, who lives it again and again, and who has made it her life’s work to speak of what dictatorship leaves behind, not merely in one family but passed from generation to generation.

In early January 2026, nationwide demonstrations over soaring inflation and economic hardship were met with one of the largest mass killings of protesters in Iran’s recent history. At the time of writing, approximately 20,000 protesters have reportedly been murdered by the regime’s forces, and hundreds of thousands injured and arrested. From inside the internet blackout, a few images have escaped: body bags stacked upon body bags in forensic hospitals, shell-shocked families walking between rows in search of their loved ones; lifeless bodies strewn across the streets, blood-darkened corpses left where they fell, unretrieved, meant to be seen, meant to teach the living what awaits them if they rise against the regime.

This heart-wrenching slaughter may only be comparable to another massacre in Iran’s long, violent history of repression: the mass executions of 1988, when thousands of political prisoners were executed by the Islamic Republic over the course of a single summer; they were charged with being “unrepentant in their war against God.” Among the executed: my uncle, and many uncles and fathers of children I grew up with. The 1988 mass executions marked a turning point in Iranian history, not just for their sheer scale and brutality but also for what they revealed: the Islamic Republic could act with impunity.

This revelation became the blueprint for power. In the decades since, the regime has refined its ruthless apparatus of oppression, upheld by a vast network of security forces, secret police, and intelligence services. Its tactics—assassinations, torture, imprisonment, exile—have evolved, but the machinery remains central to its grip on power and its scarring hold on the past, present and future of every Iranian.

Yet the people of Iran refuse to learn submission. The protests that erupted in January 2026 are part of a long, unbroken history of courage and resistance: from the student uprisings of 1990s over the closure of a reformist newspaper to the 2009 Green Movement sparked by a stolen election, from the nationwide general strikes in 2018 to the anti-regime protests in 2019—known as Bloody November, when more than 1,500 protesters were killed by security forces—and finally to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 against the mandatory hijab laws, which soon grew into one of the largest, most enduring and progressive protest movements in Iran’s postrevolutionary history, embodying a fierce call to rebellion against a theocratic, authoritarian, patriarchal military state.

The Iranian regime ultimately crushed the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, but Iran nonetheless emerged changed. Despite relentless repression since then—arrests, public beatings, floggings, forced psychiatric hospitalization for women who refused the veil, and countless acts of humiliation and torture both on the streets and in prisons—Iranian women, supported by men, have continued their fight and refuse to be pushed back. Today, the streets of Iran remain filled with women stepping outside without the mandatory headscarves.

Young, rebellious and iconoclastic, this new generation of protesters and activists has made clear that theirs is not simply a fight against guns and gunmen but a fight over narrative itself—one that has long been controlled and manipulated by the regime. For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to remake the nation in its own image: fanatical, patriarchal, bigoted. It has manipulated religious sensibilities, encouraged entrenched misogyny, exploited anti-imperialist sentiments, suppressed minorities, and ruled through fear. Yet these efforts have not merely failed—they have backfired. Each attempt to crush dissent only brings people back to the streets, in greater numbers and with deeper resolve.

It is, however, incomplete—and unjust—to speak of the history of Iran and of our region, of its cycle of violence, extremism, authoritarianism, and persecution, without acknowledging the blood-soaked imprint of imperialist powers on our bodies and lands, not only in Iran but also across the MENA region. We cannot speak of the rise of the Islamic Republic without returning to the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, orchestrated by the United States and the United Kingdom to secure their own interests in Iranian oil, shattering a people’s dream of democracy. We cannot talk of Iran’s catastrophic economic collapse without mentioning years of US-imposed sanctions. And we cannot speak of a regime emboldened enough to kill 20,000 people in just two days without reckoning with Israel’s Twelve-Day War mere months earlier, in June 2025—a war that consolidated the Iranian regime’s core, furnished it with the language of siege, and handed it the pretext of foreign intervention under which it unleashed slaughter and terror on its own people.

Israel’s attack on Iran may have been presented as a strike on regime targets and cloaked in the language of liberation, but in reality, it had a single aim: to recast Iranians as helpless victims, stripped of agency, who have tried but failed to shape their own destiny. Before the assault, the world saw images of fearless Iranian protesters confronting security forces, chanting, dancing, fists raised in defiance. Israel’s attack erased that image, replacing it with another: bloodied, helpless figures, mute in their pain and rage, waiting for salvation.

Israel’s loud public support for the protests now is yet another calculated attempt at debilitating us further: to exploit the internal tensions between Iranians, fracture our unity and undermine the worldwide solidarity that the Iranian people deserve. What interests Israel—and the global Right—is not a weakened Iranian regime but a weakened civil society, a fractured public, where people’s movements are worn down and made suspect. Israel does not become stronger if the Iranian regime falls; it becomes stronger when people’s struggles all over the region, including Iran, are discredited and dismissed, when democracy falters, when the voice of the people is buried beneath the batons and bullets of dictatorships or drowned in the toxic calculations of geopolitics.

Iranians know all too well that empire has never had their interests—or those of their neighbors—at heart. We have seen its violent footprint across our region. We know the devastation empire leaves behind, as we’ve seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. We know what it means when aggression is masked dangerously under the guise of solidarity, intervention under that of liberation, waged with the sole purpose of sabotaging progressive movements, undermining grassroots organizing, and incapacitating the collective labor of civil societies seeking to build power under surveillance, persecution, and the relentless onslaught of foreign aggression and destabilization.

Yet, this does not mean that Iranians—or anyone else—must accept repression and state violence or resign themselves to lives stripped of freedom, dignity, equality, and justice, all in the name of anti-imperialist posturing from a government that invokes resistance in language while deploying the same instruments of subjugation and repression against its own people. Nor, crucially, does it mean that when the people of Iran, or anywhere else in our region, rise against authoritarian regimes, they are merely acting out a Western script; that they themselves are devoid of will or the capacity to recognize oppression and understand the necessity of ending it. Such thinking assumes that dignity and freedom belong only to the West—whether in the hands of a warmongering empire or its apologists—while the rest of the world is reduced to pawns in a geopolitical game that decides which dictatorship to confront and which to excuse, as if liberation were not, simply and without exception, the demand that all tyranny must fall.

It is now January 2026. At the time of writing, the internet blackout imposed by the Iranian regime has entered its 20th day. Twenty days with little to no news of our loved ones inside Iran. Twenty days with little to no communication, a handful of images, a few broken signals, and almost no words from a nation of 90 million.

This time, it was the working class that rose up: the neglected towns, the disenfranchised, those living at the edge of economic and political despair, who have no one to defend them or speak in their name. This time, the regime responded with unprecedented violence. It killed more than it ever had before—at close range, firing into crowds, shooting young men and women, even children, in the head and the neck.

The regime has demanded that families pay for the bullets that killed their loved ones in exchange for the return of their bodies. It has forced grieving relatives to sign documents falsely declaring the dead members of the Basij militia in a grotesque attempt to inflate the numbers of the regime loyalists among the victims. As in the 1980s, young protesters who were arrested are tortured and coerced into false confessions, branded as Mossad agents, their broken testimonies broadcast on state television as evidence that the grievances of those 90 million people are nothing but a conspiracy.

Within the Western progressive and left-leaning spaces, many have, knowingly or not, lent their voices to this narrative. Those long associated with critiques of empire—rightly exposing the Western media’s hypocrisies and its complicity with imperialist powers—have either been conspicuously silent or, more troubling still, echoed the very talking points the Iranian regime has long used to justify violence and repression. Guided by a geopolitical logic that condemns only dictatorships aligned with the West while excusing those presented as anti-imperialist, they have failed to listen to the people themselves, to their demands, their grievances, their reasons for rising up. Instead of asking what the people are demanding, these forces redirect attention toward who is “behind” them, emptying the uprising of its very political meaning.

In this framing, the legitimacy of the movement itself is called into question: the protests are dismissed as Israeli-instigated, reduced to mere economic unrest attributed solely to US sanctions and not also to the regime’s systemic corruption and mismanagement, narrowed to the question of the veil rather than the misogyny and structural oppression of women and minorities, or treated as a passing moment of discontent instead of a decades-long struggle that no longer consents to life under tyranny.

What this reading of the world shockingly fails to grasp is that freedom, democracy, equality, justice, and dignity are not Western values but human ones. To demand them is not to succumb to empire but to refuse it, to stand in a shared space of struggle where oppressed people recognize one another across borders. Otherwise, it ceases to be resistance and instead becomes the continuation of the same cycle of violence and repression, merely perpetrated by internal structures of domination rather than by foreign powers.

The question, then, is not who wields oppression, but how it is brought to an end. We may all fear that the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom and equality will be exploited by imperialist forces and interests—it is a legitimate fear, one that few understand more intimately than Iranians themselves. But to reduce people’s movements to mere instigations by external forces is not only imperialist; it is also colonial. It denies people the capacity to judge their own lives—to know oppression from freedom, injustice from justice, stagnation from progress—and in doing so, it diminishes the very idea of liberation.

Like all people, Iranians must have the right to fight for their collective future. They must have the right not to always provide the world with neat, simplified answers—about what they want, how they should proceed, or what their struggle should look like. They must have the right to carry their struggle forward without being killed, either by bombs or batons, at each potential turn; without having their complexities, contradictions, hope, despair, desperation, and rage denied.

To deny people their complexities is to deny them agency. To flatten their struggles into binaries is to reproduce a colonial gaze—one that grants legitimacy only when resistance aligns with its preferred political narratives. This gaze is indifferent to life under dictatorship so long as that dictatorship speaks the right language. It excuses violence, normalizes repression, and renders tyranny acceptable when those forces serve a familiar cause.

Left unchallenged, this gaze does more than misread struggle—it endangers it. When we fail to stand with the people—firmly, unequivocally, and without caveats—we deliver them to the same imperialist forces we claim to protect them from. In withholding our solidarity, we erode their trust; in betraying the principles of liberation we profess, we expose a deeper hypocrisy, one that shows we are more interested in our narrative than in the lives of those whose narrative we presume to honor.

The painful story of entrapment between dictatorships and empire is not, of course, Iran’s alone. We live in a region already volatile and traumatized—our lands ravaged, our wounds kept open. We are caught between two narratives, two types of oppression, each casting us unfit to choose our own fate. But this is not the story of choosing between one tyranny over another. This is the story of breaking free, of resilience, of solidarity, of building power together through collective resistance and struggle.

In 2009, the Iranian Green Movement anticipated the Arab Spring, setting a precedent for challenging repressive regimes through civil resistance. Today, the region is ablaze, caught between the brutal forces of empire and the domestic apparatus of repression. What is unfolding can no longer be understood as a single country and a single future; it speaks to the political horizon of the region itself. It is as much about Iran as it is about Palestine, as much about Syria as it is about Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Kurdistan, Tunisia. It is about a collective future, a shared vision of dignity and humanity for every single person walking on those lands; about peace that guarantees justice, freedom that guarantees equality.

A people’s revolution in Iran will reverberate far beyond its borders, sending a tremor through occupiers and dictators alike. This is what every force of oppression fears most: the people themselves—when they rise, not with armies and weapons, but with fury, hope, courage and solidarity. They fear the shared power in fists raised to the sky, voices carried through the night, faces that may be buried but will never be erased from collective memory.

The Iranian people will continue their struggle for freedom no matter whether the world stands with them or not. What remains is our own choice of narrative—those of us bearing witness, those of us in the diaspora, those who speak in the language of justice: which narrative we defend and what we are truly willing to fight for. A narrative that refuses both bombs and bullets, both occupation and tyranny, both empire and its local enforcers. One that affirms a living civil society, not as a slogan or proxy, but on its own terms. A narrative that says yes to the people—that stands without hesitation on the side of those who are fighting for us all.

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All images courtesy of the author.