If we’re being honest, we lost. We lost. The protests that erupted two years ago, after the morality police murdered Mahsa Amini, have withered under the regime’s brutal violence. Children as young as 10 don’t know what freedom is. They learn first about the 'Great Satan,' the 'Little Satan,' and about nuclear bombs. Iran's liberal youth once clung to hope.
Today, I’d describe us as having lost all hope. Our country openly supports organized murder squads like Hamas, and the regime has crushed us with the same brutality. There’s hardly a young person left who dares to speak or even think about protesting against the regime. Human rights, freedom of speech, the right to demonstrate—they’re all a catastrophe here. Only what the regime allows is permitted.
But that’s not all: many people in Iran can’t afford to live with dignity, or even buy basic food. Yet the regime has plenty of money to pay informants to report on what the protest movement may be planning. Their main strategy is planting suspicion among us, making us live our entire lives not knowing if we can trust our closest friend, our sister, or even our father.
In Iran, you’re scared to do certain things, because your whole family might suffer as a result, and you might be punished. Our sense of community as Iranians has collapsed: we used to open our shops at night because of the heat, sit outside, picnic, and play board games. That’s all gone. No one wants to take part in gatherings anymore, and everyone is suspicious of each other, afraid to come together.
We were naïve. We thought we had the strength and courage to change things. Now, most of us walk around feeling a guilty about the many lives that were lost in the name of this innocent protest. How many horrors did we witness? the heads crushed under batons, limbs broken, savage beatings—all in the name of this revolution? These images will never leave our memories. People and families lost their lives for a sacred cause—a cause we knew from the start had no chance of succeeding.
Sometimes, I feel like I have two souls. One wants to stay here, to keep fighting for my country, culture, and heritage, despite the regime’s spies planted everywhere. But the other one, just wants to escape to freedom, where I could think and act without feeling that I was constantly watched or judged.
"None of my generation will dare protest again"
The regime’s so-called justice grinds slowly. They want us to witness the trials, the executions, the imprisonments of protesters and their families, the forced confessions, and the release of people after months of torture. That’s how deterrence works. They are experts at crushing and intimidating anyone who wants freedom or refuses to submit.
Women once felt safe in their cars. Now, the regime has facial recognition technology, and security forces can beat, arrest, or drag women from their cars for violating hijab laws. At least one woman is paralyzed after police shot her in her car.
Iranian schoolgirls sing the protest song 'Bella Ciao' without hijabs
Sometimes we read the news here about the war in Israel and the accusations against it. We can’t believe it. We’ve never had any hope in our regime, but it seems no one in the world cares that crimes against humanity are part of our daily lives. We’ve failed to get anyone to help us. We’ve only garnered sympathy, not action. We've failed to build any alternative to the regime.
People in the West speak in slogans about freedom, justice, liberty, and women’s rights. But those things are easy to talk about in the West. We’ve been brutally denied the right to protest—through violent repression, horrific torture, and losses that will haunt us forever. We lost. We surrendered. We now live without dignity, hope, freedom, or dreams—that is now seen as a better option by many compared to what we tried two years ago.
Are we supposed to feed our children uranium?
We now realize all the rage we’d bottled up over the years erupted in the streets after Amini’s murder, and the regime crushed the protest completely. No one from my generation will dare try that again. Maybe we’ll join if the younger generation starts another revolution. They’re much more independent, more open to the world, and less willing to follow orders. They’re more rebellious. My only hope is that we inspired them and that we've shown them it’s possible to fight, to live without the hijab.
Last month, more than 100 citizens were executed, including at least six political prisoners. The economic situation is terrible: inflation is high, unemployment is rampant, but there’s still money for Hamas, Hezbollah, and nuclear weapons.
The regime knows that its only way to survive is by suppressing all opposition, and that’s exactly what it’s done. I hope this doesn’t last. I hope we return to the streets, despite the fear. But it seems to me, that we’ll only protest again when things get truly desperate—when there’s nothing left to eat. What, are we supposed to feed our children uranium?
We live in a terror state, one that imposes both physical and psychological terror on us. Soldiers patrol the streets, firing machine guns. Mahsa Amini was the symbol of our struggle, and now our struggle is dead, just like the symbol that inspired it.