My dear friend Siyavash Doostkhah’s latest heartfelt thoughts and proposals in the face of the crisis in Iran – what lies ahead and what might be done?
A Heavy Heart: Grief, Rage, and the Dangerous Moment Iran Faces
Iranians are no strangers to grief. Our history is marked by cycles of invasion, destruction, and survival. From the Arab conquests of the 7th century to the Mongol devastations, from Ottoman–Safavid wars to Roman occupations, Iran has endured repeated ruptures that scarred its land and its people. Entire cities were erased, populations slaughtered, cultures threatened. Yet through all of this, Iranians survived, rebuilt, and carried forward a civilisational memory rooted in language, poetry, and resilience.
But what unfolded on January 8 and 9 marks a different kind of rupture.
This time, the massacre did not come from an invading army. It came from the security forces of the Iranian state itself.
Over the course of two days, tens of thousands of mostly unarmed protesters, overwhelmingly young people, were killed indiscriminately. Tens of thousands more were arrested. Many remain in detention. Some have already been executed in prison. Others were reportedly held, sexually assaulted over days, then killed, with families later told their children had died “during the protests.” Images of wounded protesters shot in the head, bleeding in the streets, have made their way beyond Iran’s borders despite internet shutdowns. Hospitals treating the injured were raided. Doctors and nurses were arrested and now face imprisonment or execution for providing care. Families were reportedly forced to pay what the regime cynically calls “bullet money” in order to retrieve the bodies of their children.
This is not crowd control.
This is not law enforcement.
This is state terror.
The Lie and the Evidence
In parallel, the regime’s propaganda machine has pushed a familiar narrative: that the killings were carried out by foreign agents, Mossad, Western intelligence services, seeking to destabilise Iran. But the facts dismantle this claim. If foreign agents were responsible, why are families being charged by Iranian authorities to release bodies? Why were hospitals stormed by Iranian security forces? Why are Iranian doctors imprisoned for treating Iranian civilians? Why are security units filmed firing directly into crowds? The regime’s story collapses under the weight of its own actions.
A Nation Watching Its Dead
As fragments of internet connectivity return, Iranians inside and outside the country are glued to screens, scrolling in dread. Many learn the fate of their loved ones not through official notification, but by recognising bloodied faces wrapped in black plastic bags circulating online. Grief has become continuous, cumulative, and collective. There is no return to “normal life” after this, not for anyone with a conscience. Only the most deeply indoctrinated supporters of the regime, or those who benefit materially from its violence, can pretend otherwise.
Grief Turning to Rage
This grief is now fused with something far more volatile: rage.
Anger is understandable. It is justified. Many Iranians, myself included, have carried anger for decades. The desire for revenge is not abstract; it is human. When a state blinds your children with pellet guns, when it rapes and kills them, when it lies to your face, rage is inevitable. But this is also where danger lies. Uncontained rage can topple a regime, but it can also destroy a country.
History offers no shortage of examples where liberation collapses into cycles of vengeance: revolutionary justice mutating into revenge killings, summary executions replacing courts, mobs replacing law. Once violence becomes the dominant moral language, it rarely stops where people hope it will. As the saying goes: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Iran already has thousands of young people who have literally lost their eyes to state violence. We must not build the future with the same tools that destroyed the present.
The Hard Question We Must Face Now
For years, many of us assumed that questions of justice, accountability, and reconciliation could wait until after the regime fell. Increasingly, I believe that is a dangerous illusion. We must start talking now about how violence will be contained after the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Let us be clear-eyed: peaceful protest alone is unlikely to dismantle a regime whose own leaders have openly declared that killing millions is justified to maintain power. Some degree of force may be unavoidable in stopping the regime’s machinery of violence. But what happens the day after matters just as much as what happens on the day of collapse.
If revenge becomes policy, Iran risks becoming a permanent killing field, a nation of perpetrators and victims locked into generational trauma.
Learning from Wounded Societies
Other societies have faced similar crossroads. After apartheid, South Africa chose the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over mass retribution. After decades of internal violence, countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia experimented, imperfectly, unevenly, with mechanisms designed to document crimes, recognise victims, and prevent cycles of revenge. More than 40 countries have implemented some form of truth commission. Their success depends on conditions, but they are most effective when they include:
- Independent legal foundations, not executive whim
- Public, transparent hearings
- Formal recognition of victims
- Reparations and institutional reform
The purpose is not to erase crimes, nor to demand amnesia. It is to make the truth permanent and unerasable, while preventing the future from being consumed by the past. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting. Forgiveness means refusing to let murder reproduce itself endlessly.
Choosing the Future
Iran now stands at a terrifying threshold. One path leads to liberation followed by fragmentation, revenge, and endless bloodshed.
The other leads to justice anchored in truth, accountability, and restraint, fragile, imperfect, but survivable. Choosing the second path will be one of the hardest acts Iranians have ever undertaken. It will require moral discipline at the very moment rage feels most justified. But if we fail to plan for peace while resisting tyranny, we risk replacing one horror with another.
Iran has buried enough children.
We owe them more than revenge.
We owe them a future.
Siyavash Doostkhah
CHATTING CRITICALLY 