Its shadow/
had swallowed the entire city;/
we thought/
it was a mountain…/
until it collapsed, and we saw/
it was a bubble/
blown straight from the mouth of darkness!/
Let them say that death is the end,/
but I say:/
The death of a dictator/
is the only day when calendars/
truly feel the touch of spring./
Baktash Abtin*
The omnipotent tyrant who ruled over the lives and deaths of Iranians for over thirty-six years is dead, and I wonder what his voice would be like when, and if, he had to talk from the defendant’s dock and not from his usual throne of blood?Would he be overwhelmed by the prosecutor’s relentless cascade of questions? Would he stumble into the legal snares so carefully laid by the sharp-minded lawyers of Madaran-e-dadkhah (Mothers seeking justice for the executed and the disappeared)? Would he lose his composure and allow a glimpse of regret, shame, or sorrow to surface? Might we see that he, too, is merely a human? Fragile, vulnerable like the rest of us, and not the godlike figure he once seemed to be? Or could he sit there, cold and unmoved, as story after story of suffering, torture, and death executed by his
regime upon many Iranians unfolded before him? Would he appear just as cold-hearted as he did during the days of the Corona pandemic? When he appeared before the television cameras, raised his finger, and declared that importing American and British vaccines was forbidden?
I wanted to know how the man who, in over thirty-six years of absolute rule, never once sat down with a journalist, not even with the national broadcasting agency whose director he himself chose, would answer challenging questions. Could he ever assume responsibility for any of his choices?
During his reign, he only talked to Iranians through callosal of Bayanat (pronouncements). Never answering or assuming any accountability or responsibility. This must have had to do with how he saw his relationship with the people he ruled. He was the closest thing to God, and the people were a clueless mass of minors in need of his Velayat (guardianship). He seems to have truly believed in this dynamic, as he once said:
“Three or four years ago, in this backyard, we prayed with IRGC commanders, then I sat on the steps and made a warm and captivating speech, without any prior thoughts. God Almighty was talking. It was my tongue, but the words of God.”
Gorg-Padmak: Putting words on a massacre
Those who saw Karun’s face described it with a local expression used by villagers of Kerman: Gorg-Padmak. Gorg-Padmak describes a state befalling a lamb who suddenly sees a wolf. Frozen with eyes bulging out of sockets, while being ripped apart effortlessly. Karun was nine years old when he was killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s intelligence service agents in 1998. To his murderers, those who stabbed him over ten times, he was merely a collateral to the main target, who was his father, Hamid Hajizadeh, A poet and a teacher. Karun and Hamid were two of the many victims of the so-called ‘serial murders in Iran’. A misleading term given to a series of political murders and forced disappearances orchestrated by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry between 1988 and 1998, targeting political dissidents, public intellectuals, poets, writers, and translators. The unresponsive God who presided over Iran for thirty-six years deflected blame for the murders onto the regime’s supposed enemies, even though the victims precisely matched what he over the years persistently labelled as agents of a ‘cultural camisado’. The true number of lives claimed by these murders remains uncertain. The estimated toll stands at around eighty, though the full extent may never be precisely known.
In the aftermath of the massacre of 8th and 9th January 2026, I, like many others, could not put words on what had unfolded in Iran. The horrifying flood of images, videos, and stories that rained onto social media after the nationwide internet shutdown was lifted imposed a state of Gorg-Padmak on many inside and outside the country. Soon, this shock was replaced with feelings of shame amongst many who lived in the relative safety of exile. Can we, those who were not in harm’s way, genuinely be petrified too? If not, why are words so out of reach for so many exiled Iranians? Why are thoughts so blurry and fragmented?
Researchers have shown that, unlike the popular assumption, those who observe extreme violence from the presumed sanctuary of distance and through the video streams are not untouched by what they see. High-definition videos and images deliver violence with clarity. You can zoom, rewind, and replay moments of violence. No need to reconstruct anything from memory. No room to forget. Every time you will discover a new harrowing detail. You may not have lived the events, but their images live in you. A traumatic intimacy is forged between the watcher and a violence that is on loop in the distance. Safety is an illusion. When it comes to violence in our time, no one is beyond the reach of what they witness.
“ It is not your memories which haunt you // It is not what you have written down // It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget // What you must go on forgetting all your life.” So says James Fenton in A German Requiem.
Enemy of your enemy is the impossibility of ‘us’ and our collective demise
The massacre of 8th and 9th January in 2026, by any count, is the bloodiest in the modern history of Iran. If we consider details such as the spread of violence (across 400 cities), the time it took (8 to 10 hours in two nights), and the fact that it was perpetrated by a sitting ruling regime, then it is one of the largest bloodsheds in the three thousand years of Iranian history. The true number of lives claimed in those nights remains uncertain. The governmental toll stands at around 3117, part of the opposition claims the number to be around 30 – 40000, and a human rights organisation (Hrana) claims to have verified and fact checked at least 7007 dead and disappeared people, with 11744 more cases still under review. According to the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, 230 of these victims are schoolchildren. Like the serial political murders, the full extent of this massacre may never be precisely known.
After the massacre, a vulgar spectacle unfolded during anti-Islamic Republic protests across the world. On the one hand, the exiled royalists took to the streets of their new home countries, celebrating and waving a colourful selection of flags, including those of the ancien régime, its notorious secret police (SAVAK), as well as those of Israel and the United States of America. All with an unshakable conviction that with the generous assistance from Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, their homeland would be liberated, and their beloved former crown-prince (Reza Pahlavi) would assume the throne that his father vacated for the Ayatollahs in 1979.
On the other side of the political spectrum stood Western anti-imperialists and Palestinian liberation activists, watching in disbelief as streets that for the last two years have been filled with waving Palestinian flags during anti-genocide protests are now crowded with Israeli flags, accompanied by chants supporting the military invasion of Iran by none other than the very perpetrator of the genocide in Gaza.
In response, the self-proclaimed anti-imperialists started to downplay the massacre of Iranians or make it secondary to the decades of sanctions and the expansionist project of the imperialist, genocidal states. To complete their disregard for Iranian lives, they repeated state propaganda: “The protesters were killed by Mossad agents who were both provoking the protests and escalating violence by killing the protestors and police forces.” Iran, for the Western anti-imperialists, seemed to be a country of 90 million people who lacked any political agency. Just days after the massacre, Tehran municipality put up a banner: “These are not people.” Then Bassam Haddad, founder and editor of Jadaliyya, a respected ezine focused on postcolonial and critical analysis of Middle Eastern politics, in a tweet downplayed the scale of suffering, suggesting the regime’s violence is grossly overstated:
“According to Laura Loomer and Shah (the blessed) enthusiasts (especially in America) 16.8 billion Iranian Protesters have been killed in the first 27 minutes of the protests against the regime.”
For the Islamic regime in Iran and for the Western anti-imperialists, the only true agent of history is the Western superpowers. A twisted orientalist logic masquerading as anti-colonialism, where political relevance is an exclusive privilege of states and Western people. The banal politics of “enemy of my enemy” has rotted both sides.
Yet the images coming out of Iran showed heaps of corpses in pavements and morgues that were overflowing with bodies. Those who shared stories of what they witnessed in these morgues described systematic humiliation and torment of the survivors and their families – rituals that seemed to have resurfaced from the dark decade of the 1980s in Iran.
The officials were asking for Hagh-e-tir (price of bullets found in each corpse) in exchange for handing over the bodies. Others recounted instances of abuse, including throwing bodies in front of families, telling them to “remove the trash they have raised’.
In one of his latest and more threatening Bayanat, the tyrant who is no more said: “The God of 1981 is the same God as today.”
In the collective memory of the Iranian Left, any mention of the 1980s evokes a decade of endless darkness and tears. By the end of this decade, the Islamic regime carried out an extensive extrajudicial execution of political prisoners across the whole country. The true number of lives claimed during the 1980s prison executions is unknown. The estimation is anything between 3000 to 30,000 dead and disappeared. Like other occasions, it is likely that we never precisely know the full extent of this massacre either.
The victims of the 1980s massacre were mainly members of the Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) and the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). Both groups, Omid Montazary reminds us, had a long history of solidarity and political relations with the Palestinian liberation fighters. For example, Ali Akbar Safaie-Farahani, the co-founder of OIPFG, fought in 1969 alongside Palestinian fighters. George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), wrote an introduction to a foundational theoretical article of OIPFG –The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of Survival – written by one of the most revered martyrs of the Iranian communist movement: Amir Parviz Pooyan.
This bond forged in common political horizons was abandoned after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran. The first foreign guest of the Islamic revolution was none other than Yasser Arafat. A new enemy has emerged for the Palestinian liberation’s enemy. Thus, when in the 1980s the Iranian regime killed the Fadai’s and Mojahedin en masse in prisons, no protests were made by their political cousins in the PFLP.
Now decades later, the progressive Iranian leftist and feminists lament a past where transnational solidarity was the currency of the Left. We lost a long time ago. We are feeling its pain today and in isolation from each other. As Sahar Delijani wrote for Le Monde: “If the genocide in Gaza was a litmus test of our humanity, the Iranian people’s struggle against tyranny has become a test of our politics. A measure of how far we are willing go – to justify war, to excuse dictatorships, to rationalise repression, to erode a collective fight for liberation. And in that test, we failed.”
Today, it is the Iranian royalists’ version of “enemy of my enemy” that brings timber to the fires burning in Iran.
Now War, now Death
A friend said:
“The same bombs that killed Vali-e-Faghih (clerical guardian) have also killed more than 165 girls in a primary school in Minab, a small town in the South of Iran. And I am crushed to see how these lives are brushed away as an inevitable cost of the transition to “democracy” through bombs.”
“Their school was located near an IRGC compound.” So would say another friend, an Iranian apologist for the invaders of Iran!
Who among us has the energy to argue for rules of international law and proportionality in attack? Who cares anymore for international law in the post-genocide world anyway? Amongst all this chaos, bombs, and misery that unfolds upon us, we have lost something more precious: the capacity to feel each other’s pain.
In a symbolic, yet not so smart move, the spokesperson of the Iranian government held his last press meeting in a school damaged by US and Israeli bombing. Gesturing towards the inhumanity of Iran’s enemies. Yet how can we fail to remember the schoolgirls of Shin-Abad village, who in 2012 burned in their classroom, two lost their lives, and twenty-nine survived with severe burns to their faces and hands? In a country with one of the world’s largest gas reserves, their school was not connected to the national gas pipeline. An old kerosene heater caught fire and burned their classroom. A tragedy all too common in Iran’s poorest regions.
Do we forget that, during the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, a sinister wave of chemical poisonings swept through girls’ schools across Iran, sending a message that the regime would take revenge even from school children? Should we forget the teenage girls executed during the 1980s prison massacres whose bodies never returned to their families, if we wish to also mourn the loss of 165 schoolgirls in a poor southern province of Iran? And if we mourn them, do we have to side with the despots who brought a country of 90 million to the verge of annihilation?
On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli missile strike. He died as a martyr for his supporters. To an 86-year-old man deeply committed to Shia’ theology, death as a martyr is a gift. It is a continuation, a multiplication, albeit in a twisted and more radicalised form. Those who must deal with the consequences of this ideological rejuvenation are the very people who, despite thirty-six years of oppression and suffering, continually struggled to topple him.
Now that the Iranians go to the morgues across the country, searching amongst black body bags, they would struggle to remember from which disaster they are collecting the remains of their loved ones. For the survivors of more than a hundred years of Iranian struggle for freedom, the choices on offer are now between a brutal internal oppression with a renewed ideological commitment around its latest martyr or a long-term instability, war, and regime change through American and Israeli bombs.
No, it’s not fair
no blood ever prints in its true colour
in the pages of the newspapers.
Baktash Abtin*
* Baktash Abtin, poet and documentary filmmaker, died on January 8, 2022, in custody after prison authorities denied him adequate and prompt medical care.
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