It’s very strange to go “why isn’t the left doing anything about this conflict when they cared so much about Palestine?”

My government doesn’t fund Iran.

> It’s a shame that all those activist that would shred themselves for Palestine are absolutely quite about Iran

That's not a fair position, those people don't have the duty to make every wrong right. As an Iranian expat how much of your time and money did you invest in fixing Iran? Apparently there are 2 million Iranians in US and just over a million in Europe and a million more in the rest of the world. What did the 4 million strong Iranian diaspora did on that matter?

That's really an unfortunate statement. I see this talking point from pro-Netanyahu accounts, showing empty university campuses and I wonder if they are demanding right to kill more people under their control(since Iranians killed more people per day and Israel is mission out) or trying to smear the protesters(which I don't see how it make sense, you don't become hypocritical of you don't invest your time and money in every issue).

> because they see Mullah’s regime as one of their biggest allies when it comes to attack West/Israel/Free market

you are looking it differently, I disagree, I am one of those who supported Palestine.

Reason we are silent, because our governments already did what's needed from our side: heavily sanctioned the Iran, if I go and protest, what do I ask? To sanction Iran? They would laugh at me. Obviously, I am not going to protest and ask our government to go to war with Iran, which kills even more people.

Why is it different for Israel? Because our government supported it, we didn't sanction them, that was what we were asking for, while brutality was even higher than Iranian regime.

Not trying to downplay casualties, but just looking at relative numbers and methods, I don't see Iran bombing own people or killing 10% of its own population

Don't know about who exactly are the 'leftists' you are referring to but here's my take :

Palestine : Dont send bombs. Send Aid. Lift blockade so Palestinians dont suffer.

Iran : Dont send bombs. Send Aid. Lift sanctions so Iranian people dont suffer.

Interested to hear your take regarding the same.

Do you believe and call on the United States to bomb Iran. Which is the only real offer on the table.

This created absolute hell in Syria, Libya and other nations. Democracy was certainly not delivered.

Are you calling for the US to bomb Iran? Or are you against that?

If it was Israel attacking Iran, and my government still sends arms and financial support to Israel, then I would care. However, provided this is a country governing itself, it isn't my place to say squat. I'd help, if asked, but there's so much strife and massacre in the world that this doesn't really stand out. It is when my tax money pays for this kind of strife and massacre when I get quite vocal about it.

> those who are committing this massacre are MUSLIMS and support PALESTINE so this is a moral dilemma for the left lovers

I'm not sure if you're making this argument in good faith, but just in case. The iranian government has no love for socialists/anarchists many of whom have been executed (especially in the years after the islamic revolution) or live in exile.

From what politically active iranian comrades told me (in exile), the social movement in Iran is very much alive and there is an underground left-wing scene (for example an anarchist/punk scene). Likewise, the Jin Jiyan Azadi movement following the execution of Mahsa Amini is very much on the left wing, inspired by Rojava's democratic confederalism.

From a western european perspective (eg. me), the dilemma is not the one you presented. Sure some fringe groups have campist [1] tendencies, but that's far from representing the Left as a whole (which has historical links with the anti-islamist left-wing in Iran). The dilemma would be: how to support a people's revolution without supporting our own western empires making the situation even worse? The most moderate/imperialist liberals have learnt the lessons from the Taliban's comeback in Afghanistan and the return of black slavery in Libya: we can do better than bomb a foreign people.

Still, the demonstrations here in France supporting the uprising in Iran (at least those who are not organized by the fascists trying to bring the Shah's son to the throne) pretty much have the same crowd as the pro-palestinian demonstrations. I'd be curious, apart from obvious propaganda, where you'd find the idea that left-wingers wouldn't support overthrowing a tyrannical government.

(cue history course about the history of secularism and why opposing islamophobia is not incompatible with opposing islamism or any theological tyranny)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campism

> this is a moral dilemma for the left lovers!

I think your optics are skewed as to what is seen as "the left" in US centric ways. In my east european part of the world the perspective isn't shaped by ethnicity at all (except when the organized right does anti immigration manifestations), but with disgust of what authoritarians do around the world. The world seems to be in a simmering stage, and the fact that we have our Serbian neighbors continuously protesting for more than a year, dampens ideals of being able to effect change through protests.

How are the regime able to do this? Do a majority if Iranians support them? Too afraid? The only job is the government job? Why choose to partake in the massacre even if you are on Team Ayatollah? Do those guards not consider the people the kill as Iranians?

Palestinians should not view Iran as an ally, but an enemy of an enemy that looks to use them for their callous geopolitical goals.

So they would be better people if they didn't care about anything? Maybe, instead of getting mad that Palestinians are getting support that you think normal Iranians should get also, you could be constructive, and offer Americans some advice on how to pressure the Iranian government to stop the killing?

I can't say I've ever seen anyone claim Iran as an ally. As usual, plastic smoking perpetually online right wing trolls conflate support for the people in Palestine with support for Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah/whatever the right wing picks as it's bogey man of the day. You are not as serious person.

>It’s a shame that all those activist that would shred themselves for Palestine are absolutely quite about Iran

Did you consider if there are any differences between the two situations? The money I earn is not being seized to fund the Iranian regime. Government and other organizations in my country are not declaring a blank check in support of the Iranian government; they're not suggesting it's hate speech to merely question the Iranian government's actions and no one is being investigated, arrested, or deported for being skeptical of the Iranian government or it's violence.

lol @ “west/israel/free market”. I think you have an aliasing bug.

Why would leftists (or anyone) be confused who the bad guy is here? Generally as a rule of thumb for international conflict you can count on the left to be on the side of the underdog, no matter how naive a view that may be in a given circumstance.

You sound like a good candidate to go home and to fight. Don't volunteer US kids. We should have absolutely nothing to do with your ethnic wars.

Buddy I'd join the right wingers if they weren't wrong about abortion, freedom of religion, gay rights, trans rights, economics, racism, public safety, environmentalism, cars...

> It’s is a big tragedy and people are reluctant to talk about it because those who are committing this massacre are MUSLIMS and support PALESTINE so this is a moral dilemma for the left lovers! because they see Mullah’s regime as one of their biggest allies when it comes to attack West/Israel/Free market

Sorry this is BS. I'm very left wing but nobody I know on the left has any time for murderers.

The left is very principled. We don't have this loyalty thing that the right has. Loyalty to the party line no matter how insane. We don't have leaders that tell us what to think.

Yes I think Israel is very bad for what they're still doing in Gaza. Yes I think the Palestinian people deserve their own country. And really theirs, not that stupid resort Trump wants to make of it (where there seems to be no place for Palestinians except maybe as humble servants for the rich tourists)

But NO, I have no time for the mullahs and their security services and not for hamas either for that matter. Nor for the Taliban. They are monsters too. They are not our allies in any way and I'm hoping that Iran will become free. I even have nothing against Israelis, just their government/army

We measure people by our principles. Not by whatever side of some narratives they happen to be on. And there is no 'side' anyway. On the left we're more like an unorganized collection of people whose opinions happen to align.

I don't even support the party I vote for on every topic. I don't have loyalty, if I'm aligned with a group or party it's never unconditional. It's more that my own values currently align with theirs.

The problem with Iran is, protesting here on the streets is a bit pointless. With the gaza situation it puts pressure on our governments to sanction Israel. Like stopping doing business with them.

Protesting against the Iranian massacre won't do anything. Our governments already do no business there. The only thing it might accomplish is pissing the Iranian regime off but they won't give a crap what we think. There have been protests but yeah what can we do really?

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I disagree. There are deeper aspects in this tragedy.

I don't want to be called "leftist" because I don't want to belong to any tribe. But I do embrace a lot of the humanist ideals of the so called "progressives" and I think they might have some moral ground in here. But feel free to call me whatever you want.

In my perspective, the oppression in Iran is different from what is going on in Gaza. It is more like what happens in Belarus, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Turkey and Myanmar: it is an authoritarian government killing and oppressing their own people. I am not American but if the American government wants to kill innocent people in Minneapolis that is an American problem that the Americans should solve, because I respect the US sovereignty.

OTOH, I am ok with western interference in Gaza because Zionism is a racist project from one ethnicity against other, it is the racist government of a racist people committing genocide against another ethnicity. It isn't an internal issue of a sovereign state as much as apartheid wasn't an internal affair of the South African regime.

I came on here to say that point but you said it much better then i ever could. For the record i am unapologetically pro israel, and their actions in Gaza while regrettable were largely unavoidable.

What is striking is that the death toll in Iran from a couple of weeks of demonstrations is half as much as what Gaza suffered in 2 years of a devastating war. Even taking into account the difference in population this is shocking.

Well done to my fellow Hners for trying to gaslight op that the 2 are not comparable, when everyone here knows what is really behind this anomaly.

You have all my sympathy. Even Israelis understand the difference between the regime and the people of Iran. From a practical point of view how do feel the West should respond? Would you welcome American airstrikes? What do you feel about the looming possibility of another conflict with Israel?

The US liberal party worked with the conservative party to cause the conditions that furthered unrest. Sanctions.

And the US liberal party did similar attacks on the Palestinian people so it's consistent.

A massive proportion of the modern extremist violence around the world I've seen has been Islam. Not all Islam is bad but there's elements like Jihad, and Sharia law, that other religions don't seem to have in modern times.

It is a source run by expatriate Iranians of the diaspora.. the fact that so many people just discount their point of view it's pretty frustrating. If you speak to Iranians that you work with it's pretty illuminating

There are other sources, like this: https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

Actually, if anything, that makes it trustworthy because Saudi would like the regime to stay so that they can stay out of the oil markets and keep the prices high.

If you want a more neutal organization https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

It looks a LOT like a CIA front.

EDIT: Sorry... that is too strong... "state aligned influence media". Note that the headline might be true, or it might not, but that source is quite glowy.

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But note that the Tianenmen Square massacre was only one part of a larger nationwide protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Chinese_protests_by_regio... . There's no telling how many were killed or disappeared outside of Beijing.

One interesting thing about that incident I only learned recently is the chinese leadership was reluctant to use force and prevaricated for ages.

In the end they decided it was worth the risk and I guess they were right, because China survived that period without any rotation of elites and became more prosperous and powerful as a result, avoiding all the chaos of the former Soviet countries

most of the victims during 1989 Beijing massacre were NOT at the actual square, people should already stop using this simplified term which leads to confusion

but yeah, compared to what Israelis do in Gaza or Iran, even whole Beijing numbers are negligible considering China population

Unfortunately I would not be surprised if the real death toll is even higher. I have first-hand information. We are talking about indiscriminate shooting with heavy machine guns into peaceful protests, happening in every city of the country. The rule of law has completely broken down. The wounded avoid hospitals because they are afraid of getting killed there.

There was a lot of death in 2 days but the revolution started about a month ago so it's not just those two days. I think you could compare Gaza to a single Iranian city, but Iran is much larger than this. Another important distinction is that - no matter what your beliefs are - civilians aren't the target in Gaza, but they clearly are the target in Iran. If the civilians had weapons, it would be a different story.

I've read a ton of philosophy and something I don't really understand is that one nation killing another is more immoral than when a nation does this to their own domestic population.

Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct.

But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.

What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?

It almost makes Israel look like they are not there to wipe out Palestine

I can’t even imagine how this could be done. Nazi concentration camps would have had trouble killing that many in 2 days.

And only civilians, instead of half of them being armed and trained militants.

This is a country of 90 million, compared to Gaza which was 2million

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> with modern technology, and a ruthless enough autocracy, there is possibly no way out from under it. Technological progress only makes this problem worse.

US may not have autocrats, but it does have ruthless enforcers of "law and order" with access to advanced weapons. Its probably safe to say thst whatever the stated reason is for the 2nd amendment, it is going to be difficult or impossible to meet its objective if needed.

One could ask, who is giving Iran and North Korea this technology? Most of it they aren't developing themselves.

My cynical take is that this is the reason we're selling so many GPUs to certain foreign governments. Sure, AI is great for vibe coding and making cat videos but it's also amazing for tracking individual sentiment, influencing opinion on social media, creating fake news, and detecting threat networks. "Smart cities" are also Panopticons.

Towards the end it says..

Amiry-Moghaddam of Iran Human Rights said the death toll could be higher than 20,000, based on evidence reviewed by his organization.

Unfortunately that history includes nearly perfecting the use of torture thousands of years ago. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/torture-achaemenid-pe...

> Whether it leads to a violent revolution or a static police state like North Korea remains to be seen.

The official name of Iran is "The Islamic Republic of Iran" and it is a country ruled by sharia law. Countries ruled by Sharia are already totalitarian states.

Seems the regime is OK shooting their way out of this problem. How big are these protests? 30K isn't exactly a small number of protestors.

The coordination is the thing here, that's many units being instructed to carry through in the same manner.

As for the numbers:

  Interior Ministry reports say security forces confronted demonstrators in more than 400 cities and towns, with more than 4,000 clash locations reported nationwide

As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.

It's grim stuff.

Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.

The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?

You might check how the Mongols managed to do it on a much vaster scale 800 years ago. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Gurganj

The museum of the city has a paper with the order that every soldier would have to kill 400 people, by sword. Of course they were already captured but there were about 1 million people in that city. The city is still perfectly leveled after 800 years. Only a couple of buildings were left standing.

Mongols were very well coordinated. Iranian crowd control has had 45 years and several insurrections to train.

There were a lot of people with machine guns.

Quite a lot of detail in the nyt article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how...

They executed every protestor that was arrested or in the hospital (estimated at ~28k.)

I don't think killing that many people requires much coordination when one side has guns (let alone machine guns) and a lot of soldiers

Datapoints :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre 400-1500 civilian deaths by 50 British soldiers armed with bolt action rifles (tried to get machine guns on site but thankfully couldn't)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh Possibly single handedly killed an hard to estimate count of US soldier, but possibly in the hundreds (he had people supplying him ammunitions).

Crowds are just easy to thin with repeating firearms and a good supply of ammo...

The IRGC[0] and Basij[1] are not small organizations, deliberately targeting large crowds of unarmed civilians with automatic weapons will create massive casualties in a very short period of time, no explosives needed.

> Did the protestors get boxed in somehow?

That did also happen.[2]

> And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.

The IRGC's primary purpose is to protect the regime, I'm sure they would have plans in place for suppressing protests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/25/ira...

It's absolutely terrible but at the scale of a large country it's not logistically hard to get to that many deaths in a couple of days. Iran is a big country with population around 93 million.

The article says "36,500 killed in 400 cities". That's 91 people per city.

> And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.

No different from any other military operation to be honest. I'm not sure why you're incredulous about the death toll when a military is ordered to shoot to kill.

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The protesters were armed.

I would guess the actual numbers to be about 20-30% of this (which is still a lot). Consider the source.

FWIW, it's reported in Dutch news - https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/01/26/dertigduizend-doden-sla... - with reference to this time.com article - https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-... - and a lot of caveats about how the figure can't be verified.

I checked the reputable newspaper in my country. The only mention of it was on 23/1 where they reported 5000 casualties. EU is going to put together a range of (economic?) sanctions against the regime. US "armada" (quoted from the article) is underway.

It was probably the headline article for a couple of hours on the site. I don't remember extended coverage either so I looked it up.

What news are you reading? This is featured in virtually every Western media outlet. Maybe it's not so prominent in public discourse because it's sharing screentime with ICE's raids and NATO's rapid collapse.

There is also the issue of not being easy to confirm anything out of Iran right now, which is certainly concerning.

The New York Times' The Daily podcast had a very good episode on it a couple weeks ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/podcasts/the-daily/iran-p...

And there are many other legitimate questions: where are the celebrities speaking up to defend the cause of the iranian protesters? Where are the students in western universities protesting against what the iranian regime did? Where's the International Court of Justice's condemnation of iranian politicians? Where's the flotilla led by Greta Thumberg in support of the iranian people?

There are, IMO, very grave and very serious double standards at play here because I don't think we're going to see any of those.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how...

The BBC have been covering it in the UK. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cjnwl8q4ggwt

I barely see international coverage on NYtimes anymore. Just DC bullshit. I get more world news on the BBC pidgin instagram account. Almost 200 people were kidnapped in a village in Nigeria the other day, that type of thing used to be front page news around the world.

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because Iran's information control is working - the horrific images and numbers only arrived in the west once the protests were already mostly disbanded. It's not ongoing like e.g. the war in Gaza was, so it can only capture a moment of attention, not a sustained slot.

They're brown, unknown people. What did you expect?

I’m confused by the “at last”, it’s been consistently covered on The Guardian:

iran site:theguardian.com

There is a narrative that has been floating around and it seems like a Russian psyop designed to sow discord (not accusing you of being a bot personally), “the lefties are friends with Iran and don’t complain about their attrocities”, which is objectively false.

Indeed if you look at independent aggregators the latest article on Iran is more “left leaning” reported: https://ground.news/article/at-least-6-126-people-killed-in-...

I’m not sure if this is an honest question or not, but I’ll treat it as such, even though you could answer your own question quite easily. The West is not complicit in the actions of the Iranian regime in any way that is similar to the situation with Israel. We are not arming the Iranians with the weapons they turn on civilians: very much not the case with Israel. Israel is treated like a normal state, whereas Iran is an international pariah and the subject of crippling sanctions. I could go on. The point is that westerners protest the actions of Israel because we believe we are part of the problem and that our protest might make a difference.

In fact, we believe - quite rightly - that if the US had conditioned military assistance to Israel on appropriate care for civilians, then the awful tragedy that unfolded in Gaza could have been averted. Similar levers for changing the behaviour of Iran do not exist.

Because the far worse Palestine massacre was perpetrated by an ally of the West, defended by western politicians and opinion makers, financed with western money and armed with western weapons. Then it makes sense to protest against your country's complicity.

Protesting in your country against an enemy country that has been subjected already to all kinds of sanctions and military attacks makes little sense.

Oh, no, not this false dichotomy again!

People protest to affect political change in their own countries. For example, that's why Americans now protest against ICE and not against the secret police in Turkmenistan. In my country, the government recently signed a secret arms deal with Israel to sell it weapons. Weapons that are then used to maim children. I don't like that. Major politicians have said that Israel should be "thanked" for what it's doing in Gaza. I don't like that either. Hence, why I protest. If the Sionazi regime in Israel was isolated in the same way as the Islamic regime in Iran or the Taliban regime in Afghanistan people would protest less because there would be less political change to affect.

Because the western governments support Israel, thus a protests' goal is mainly aimed at changing that. How many westerns governments support Iran?

People have been protesting in the UK.

Fourteen arrested after protest at Iranian embassy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3g8glgxvo

Protester climbs on to balcony of Iranian embassy in London: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy09yvd57x2o

Silent protestors gather in solidarity with Iran: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4g1me23x7o

There's nothing western governments can do to stop this. There are no demands western people are making to their western governments. While for Palestine, people want our governments to stop giving bombs to the attackers.

There probably isn't the same awareness. This is the first I'm hearing of a massacre in Iran. It's so hard to keep up with the news these days and for many it's just recommended to avoid it because it's all outrage generation now. The EU has been massively occupied with threats to invade Greenland for the past month along with the subsequent media attention, so that has saturated the news cycle.

I don't remember my government sending bombs to the Ayatollah so they can keep carpe-bombing Tehran.

Protests serve to force your government to take action. i honestly at this point don't see what could mine to to stop this. Given the sanctions are not working, the only option to change Iran is maybe a direct intervention like Syria. And that sure worked great.

Because the people who funded and organized the pro-palestinian marches were backed partly by China and Iran.

There has been protests organized by the Iranian diaspora in Germany.

This has been said before on here, but the main reason here is because in the West (particularly the US and Germany) there was a large group among the general populace supporting the genocide in Gaza, but in the West there is no large group supporting the massacre in Iran. The latter is an extremely fringe position to hold on the level of flat-earthers. People either don't care or are against it. When there's such a consensus, there's less controversy, less to talk about.

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Palestine had a ton of easily accessible video evidence, and not just from the victim's side but also lots of "hot takes" from the Israeli side as well, lots of talk from Israeli civilians and government officials about how there are no innocent civilians in Gaza and other deranged plainly genocidal remarks. In other words, there can be no reasonable doubt about what was going on and the only question really is who's side you're on.

With Iran, there's not a whole bunch of similar material, the death count estimates vary greatly from source to source, and we've got an untrustworthy president beating a war drum which probably makes people a bit more skeptical.. Atrocity propaganda to persuade a democracy to enter a war is something attentive people will be familiar with; incubator babies being tossed on the floor, dissidents being fed feet first into industrial grinders, people remember these stories preceding other wars and remember that evidence for the claims never materialized. Then there's the whole geopolitical angle where the Trump administration in fact supports Israel and Iran happens to be one of Israel's most powerful regional opponents. There are plenty of reasons to temper feelings of certainty.

"Which means that either there is no such an internal pressure or the regimes are extraordinarily good at selecting and incentivizing people to maintain the status quo."

Or there is pressure and discontent, but simply not enough to topple the regime as it needs way more than 50% support for a internal regime change.

I have childhood memories of such a succesful change in eastern germany. Most people had enough for a long time, but they knew the sovjet tanks would come if they revolted. After it seemed the sovjets were busy on their own and won't come but rather did democratic reforms themself, but the GDR refused and stayed stalinistic - then the people went to the streets. And at some point those in power just gave up. Not really a consciouss choice, but they were visibly insecure and confused, so weak and fell. (But it was a close call, some wanted to bring out the machine guns as well)

The iranian mullahs were insecure, but they choose the violent path of dominance.

Not the same situation, as they did not rely on a foreign power like in GDR, but it seems they lost majority support a long time ago, but have a loyal enough religious base to use the weapons.

And yes, military and police who have family members on the streets will defect at some point and it seems that also happened in Iran, just not enough.

"Still, I think this is no excuse for foreign intervention and you should not do others what you don't wish on yourself. But at the same time if those regimes are indeed so effective, how do you get to help them? "

german here. Thanks for invading nazi germany and killing hitler. was very very nice. Thanks again

> Which means that either there is no such an internal pressure or the regimes are extraordinarily good at selecting and incentivizing people to maintain the status quo.

It depends a lot on how much power the people have. The more advanced and diverse an economy and the more qualified and educated the population are the more power they have. On one extreme you have countries like Angola with an economy consisting virtually only out of exporting oil. These countries only need a few qualified engineers for their resource extraction which they pay well and everyone else is entirely replaceable. That leads to extreme inequality between the leading political class that absorbs all the money and pays the military with it. As long as they pay and treat the military well enough they can just suppress the rest of the country. If people act up they can literally just kill everyone part of the rebellion. The political class, the military and the rest are just entirely disjunct classes of people with different incentives. The family of the militaries profit enough from the system to not excert pressure on their family member working for the military. It's the hand that feeds them.

On the other end you have countries with highly developed, specialized economies and a population that is educated enough to understand at least a few things about politics. There ordinary people have extensive training and work experience. You cannot just replace them. They can protest and go on strike and if you start killing everyone the economy will quickly start crashing down. Just pulling a few cogs out of the massively complex machine will stop it from working. And at that point it's not just a problem for the working population but also for the owning class and the pressure will propagate all the way up through the hierarchy. Also people can just leave. They have the economic means to and their qualifications mean that other countries have an interest in attracting already qualified people without having to pay for their education and traning first. That's what happened to east Germany and why they built the wall.

There are some methods of social control that can help to control a population beyond that. The key ingredient is surveillance, mutual control and seeding distrust. One person alone can never challenge the system. People need to organize. You can try to find the organizers via surveillance quick enough and get rid of them before they get dangerous. Also if a significant portion of the population is secretly informing the government people might be to afraid to organize as they distrust each other. That's how the Stasi worked in East Germany. For an extreme case of that see the Inminban[1] system in North Korea where people are bundled into groups where all surveil each other and report any dissident behavior. Failing to do so will lead to collective punishment for the whole group. It's a really perverse system that plays people against each other and their own interest aligning the incentives for the individual with the government rather than their class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inminban

> Hoping that people of Iran get freedom, peace and prosperity.

Yes, but not the kind delivered in an American/Israeli bomb.

The Khmer Rouge executed between half a million and a million Cambodians between 1975 to 1979[0]. These were the intentional killings, estimates range to as many as 2 million Cambodians or 25% of the population died as a result of Khmer Rouge polices.

The end of the regime was brought about by an incursion into the Vietnamese border town of Ba Chúc, resulting in the massacre of more than 3000 civilians. Vietnam invaded, toppled the Khmer Rouge and brought an end to the executions although civil war would continue for much of the next decade.

For these actions Vietnam was extensively sanctioned[1]. The parallels with ongoing conflicts today are hard to ignore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...

I can easily comprehend it, the history books are full of people killing large numbers of their own people. They just find some irrelevant differentiating factor that allows them to label the other as the outgroup and bring out the guns, the tanks, the ovens and the bombs.

This is a figure for the whole of Iran. So it includes not just the Persian-majority areas, but also the minority-majority areas (Azeris, Kurds, Balochs, Arabs, Armenians, etc). It would not surprise me if the death toll in the minority-majority areas were higher, and hence they contributed a disproportionate percentage of the total, since security forces would likely find it easier to do that to people of a different ethnicity and/or religion (some of these minorities are predominantly Sunni, Christian, etc) than to people more like themselves.

> I can't comprehend how a population can kill that many of their own people.

The notion of some well-defined "people" is a fiction that ruling powers use to keep humanity's innate tribalistic tendencies pointed outward at their adversaries.

The truth is that the powers-that-be consider themselves to be above "the people", and will dispose of you as soon as you become inconvenient.

They are “othering” the people actually, using very clear ideological and religious lines. That’s what I see and hear from the regime ad campaigns, propaganda, etc.

Iran is made of many different ethnicities, and there were reports of Arab militants that were brought in by the regime (it’s not hard to imagine given how reliant those organizations are on Iran for support).

It’s generally not very hard to incite violence across groups in the Middle East, especially when you consider how bad the outcome might be for the losing side. Case in point, the Alawites who lost control of Syria and are now persecuted by the new government.

It’s not necessarily the primary factor, but it’s worth noting that Iran is actually a relatively diverse country by the region’s standards. There are significant Kurdish, Azeri, Balochi, etc. minority groups, for whom the idea that they’re in the same “homeland” as the Persians is not necessarily given.

A lot of it is being done by mercenaries brought in from Afghanistan and Iraq

Now you see how easy it is for humans to "other" people to kill them

From the previous uprisings, the regime usually sends Arab mercenaries like Hizbollah. They don't speak Farsi and have no connection to the people of Iran.

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The invasion of Iran by the US is a fantasy. They'd much rather fantasize about invading Canada.

Why intervene? Iran was already struggling badly as a nation. Killing 2-30k civilians will not help improve a failing state.

How about plain civil disobedience? Like just stop working? It would need to get pretty extreme before the government had the audacity (and even capacity) to actually track you down to your home and arrest (or kill) you. Although this kind of coordination might be difficult with government control of communication media.

>the government can just hire mercenaries from outside the country.

Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy says you are inviting an overthrow of your government by doing this.

The mercenaries can flip sides if the opposite faction pays them and offers them better terms... or maybe the mercs just flip.

Hard to say how true this is.

Our Editorial Board has now obtained more detailed information provided by the IRGC Intelligence Organization to the Supreme National Security Council.

Other state institutions have also received differing figures from other security bodies. However, given the scale of the killings, deliberate concealment, and what appears to be intentional disorder in the registration and transfer of bodies – along with pressure on families and, in some cases, the quiet burial of victims – it appears that even the security agencies themselves do not yet know the precise final death toll.

In a report presented on Wednesday, January 21, to the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee seen by Iran International, the number of those killed was listed as at least 27,500.

According to sources within Iran’s Interior Ministry who spoke to Iran International on condition of anonymity, a consolidation of figures received from provincial security councils by Tuesday, January 20, showed the death toll had exceeded 30,000.

Two informed sources from the Supreme National Security Council also told Iran International that in two recent reports by the IRGC Intelligence Organization, dated January 22 and January 24, the number of those killed was listed as more than 33,000 and more than 36,500 respectively.

It was made up. "Iranintl" is literally a propaganda site.

Yes it does:

> [...] newly obtained classified documents, field reports, and accounts from medical staff, witnesses, and victims’ families.

No. Shut up. This has been confirmed by countless Iranians

Narrator's voice: "Unfortunatelly, they will be waiting forever, becase that help will never come."

From Hacker News guidelines:

> That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

There is a long history of major world events like this being discussed on Hacker News and it is accepted as on topic. There is also a long history of people who haven't read the guidelines asking what they have to do with tech.

No situation justifies external interference, especially not by the US, which has done more than its fair share of invading and then just making things worse for everyone, like in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US armada took a while to reach the Gulf. The air strikes will most likely happen this weekend.

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"Help is on the way" from the US is often not a great propositon. Doubly so today.

https://reason.com/2026/01/23/the-trump-administration-plans...

The US shipped the carrier battle group in the region out to support the Venezuela operations, and is deporting asylum seekers back to their deaths this week.

Nobody in the US has any idea what is happening in Iran. Judging by the weird, not very HN like threads on this post, sounds like we are going to.

The fact that he said that and then DID NOT topple the government in Iran is insane.. completely irresponsible, or rather responsible.. for those deaths.

The irony is that now those who are still alive in Iran might remember this and update their notion of US trustworthiness accordingly.

Do you think that the people encouraging ice protests share some culpability in the deaths of the other protesters?

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The US Navy has an entire battle group headed to the gulf along with aircraft being moved to Qatar. Something is brewing.

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Trump keeping his word would raise gas prices though. A problem when he's managing his 15 other unforced errors currently killing the economy. It's not easy being Tariff Man.

Israel has killed more than double that in Gaza, and that’s only what’s been confirmed as many bodies are under rubble and millions are left living in tents: https://aje.io/5b4h1e

This is a little different, this is probably an issue anyone of any side politically can agree is bad. A government is killing their own people in the tens of thousands. It is foolish to even waste time pointing fingers outside of the country in question in my eyes because its irrelevant, their current government is killing citizens in the right here and right now.

> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." [0]

However, it also says:

> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The idea that we can "avoid politics" while talking about the industry is ridiculous anyway...

it should especially considering questionable biased sources

When people, or communities, or companies, show you their true colors, believe them. Watch out for all those flocking in to explain how this is different…

adequate username

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/24/iran-rejects-un-rig...

what's wrong with it?

Is “the left” in the room with us right now?

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Disgusting to make that joke on a forum that strives towards reason and enlightenment. Disgusting to make light of 36,500 regular people potentially dead while seeking freedom and justice.

You confused the Quds Force with the IRGC. IRGC is involved in nearly everything in Iran.

> But these numbers are simply not credible.

Why do you think that?

> Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat.

Obviously Israel would see the Iranian regime as an existential threat when they quite openly advocate for the destruction of Israel[0] and have a nuclear weapons program.

> Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact.

Israel would almost certainly prefer a stable intact Iran with normalized relations.

> There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.

Israel and the US don't want to destroy Iran, they want Iran to stop funding terrorists and stop threatening regional stability.

> A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.

Why should the US lift sanctions while Iran continues to fund terrorists and attempts to develop nuclear weapons?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani...

Iran is the 17th most populous nation in the world, with 93 million people. These protests seem to be occurring across the entire nation. Another comment mentioned over 4,000 separate clashes. Other sources have already corroborated a lower bound in the mid-thousands. I think the burden is on you to refute these numbers by showing that the sources are deliberately misleading or finding a flaw in the methodology. Simply saying that you find them "not credible" and that some people might have a political motive behind sharing them is not an argument.

Note, I'm not saying that they have been confirmed, but I do not think that you have given sufficient cause for rejecting them out of hand.

> It's 40 beheaded babies all over again.

No official source ever claimed this. You are disgusting scum for promoting this lie.

Lying and trivializing the brutal murders of Israeli children and tens of thousands of Iranians civilians is utterly reprehensible.

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What does Israel have to do with this article? From what I gather, Iran International is owned by Volant Media, based in the UK, with funding from Saudi Arabia.

This entire comment section has a lot of polarizing statements that are unverifiable and can hide behind the fog of truth. Yours is not one. Yours is easily verifiably false:

https://www.google.com/search?q=israel+genocide+site:news.yc...

No different than any other war, the powers that be line up to psy op the public to support it. Interesting to see who the players are that are willing to amplify this overt propaganda. Sadly, looks like HN is front and center, right along with Reddit and basically every other mainstream US-based tech/news aggregator.

The iranian government is criminal, but it's absolutely not believable. The 6 months of the Anfal campaign where Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons killed between 50 and 100k people, the 2 years of the last gaza war with the carpet bombing killed 80k people, the tien an men massacre was in the hundreds, 4 years of civil in birmanie killed 80k people too

Fun fact, the clergy was a crucial part of the coup, backed by CIA. The same people in power now, btw.

Whenever I see mentions of the protesters asking for the Sha to come back, I can't but to worry for the future of Iran even if the protests succeed.

I never understood why some people get so fixated on one event in 1953, as if nothing else mattered after that.

Sure, it had a nontrivial effect. But it also happened in a time when Stalin and Churchill were still alive, there were 6 billion people fewer on the planet and the first antibiotics and transistors barely entered production. Korea was poorer than Ghana etc.

It is 2026, three generations have passed, and not everything can be explained and excused by a 1953 event forever. But it is convenient for autocracy advocates in general.

It reminds me of the worship of the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Again, as if nothing that happened later matters.

... Ok? This is not an airport. You do not need to announce your departure.

Bye

This is mainly on the security forces who kill people, then on the corrupt government that removes people’s freedoms and their power to decide their fate by free elections, etc. then on regimes apologists who try to undermine the suffering and then if you want to find whoever else that is responsible.

It's completely on EU, Canada, and Australia. Why didn't the new self-proclaimed leaders of democracy and freedom, now completely independent of the US, do anything?

Too busy making deals with China and India for Russian gas, I suppose.

>The silence of MSM (particularly the BBC) is eye-opening.

Daily reports from the BBC, and the rate of them is increasing

https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cjnwl8q4ggwt

Some of the headlines-

New Iran videos show bodies piled in hospital and snipers on roofs

'I saw people getting shot': Eyewitness tells of Iran protest crackdown An Iranian who got out of the country describes scenes of chaos as security forces opened fire in her home town.

Photos leaked to BBC show faces of hundreds killed in Iran's brutal protest crackdown

> It seems protesting a dictatorship, of whatever kind, is pointless and dangerous.

Dangerous, probably but they can't stop us all. Pointless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution.

> Meaning, the people should be able to defend themselves against the violence directed to them.

Yes. But not just and not mainly from your government: you are way more likely to get killed by criminals and/or terrorists then by law enforcement officers.

To put things in perspectice in the US there are more than 20 000 homicides per year.

And for women rape and rape attempts are scary, here are the numbers for the UK:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...

You cannot really compare 36 000+ people getting killed by an islamist regime that rules the country by sharia law with the number of people killed by law enforcement officers in, say, France or the US. Where the number of people being killed by officials, yearly, can be counted on one hand's fingers.

In the same vein, you cannot really compared terror attacks like the 2024 one in Russia where 145 people where killed in a theater or the 130 people killed by terrorists at the Bataclan in France or the 70 killed in Nice (my sister was there with her two kids that day and she saw the terrorist and her son is still, to this day, traumatized) with the number of people getting killed by law enforcement officers in a country like France or the US (I'm using these two as an example for they are country where, each year, a few people are killed by law enforcement officers).

Unarmed people vs terrorists with kalashnikovs: slaughter.

A great many are highly concerned, for example, that there are now sleeping islamists terrorists cells in the EU. Even mainstream media began reporting the concerns. There are regularly arrests and terrorists plots foiled. And Christmas markets and celebrations have been cancelled this year in many european cities because the risk of islamist terror attacks were too high.

When a country disarms its people, it doesn't just make them vulnerable to the governement's wrongdoings: it makes them vulnerables to criminals and terrorists too. Which, so far in the western world, is definitely a much bigger threat.

Now that said there are more than 10 billion ammo sold, each year, in the US, to civilians. If there's one country where either the government or the terrorists would have a problem should they go "all in", it's the US.

Even if there is exaggeration or inaccuracy in the reporting, the repression happening in Iran is certainly real and not a complete fabrication.

In 532AD the Nika riots[1] in Byzantium ended with 30,000 dead. That's with hand to hand combat at close quarters.

So while the source is biased the numbers are not intrinsically unlikely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

And I wonder why you’re allowed here.

It's even worse that that.

Unfortunately those videos exist. There are videos of relatives walking for hours from body bag to body bag to find the remains of their lost ones. There are videos of people with heavy machine guns shooting indiscriminately into peaceful protests. There are videos of executions. Everything has been recorded.

There is a reason why the Iranian government cannot activate internet and phones anymore. Once people can communicate again, they will count and document the true scale of events. Right now, it seems the Iranian government would rather give up on internet and telephones altogether than having anyone find out, which tells you just about how bad the situation is.

The videos are actually out there. Also remember that they cut the internet just to prevent more evidence coming out.