This is an opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter. The author is responsible for the opinions in the article.
My family and I fled Iran for Sweden in 1987 – a year before the massacres in Iranian prisons in which thousands of political prisoners were executed without charge. 38 years later, we witness an equally devastating massacre.
On my Instagram feed I see pictures of lifeless bodies in black garbage bags, lined up one after the other. In a video clip, a father films himself desperately searching for his son Sepehr. “Where are you, Sepehr,” he screams desperately. He passes corpses, it never ends. The clip is twelve minutes long. When it’s over, I don’t know what I saw – only that something inside me changed.
According to Amnesty January 2026 will be the deadliest period in Iran in decades. Regime security forces have fired heavily on unarmed protesters, carried out mass arrests, carried out executions and suppressed protests amid internet shutdowns and curfews.
Nevertheless, attention to the systematic oppression in Iran among the Western public is noticeably limited – politically, medially and culturally.
In autumn 2023 the situation was different. When the protests broke out after the assassination of Jîna Mahsa Amini and the slogans Woman, life, freedom Across the world, something was happening that many of us in the diaspora had never experienced before. For the first time, we – Iranians both in Iran and in exile – felt not alone. The unimaginable oppression that the people of Iran have been living under since 1979 has become visible, acknowledged and can no longer be ignored. Our experiences suddenly had political weight in the public eye.
That feeling is gone now.
The protests in 2023 were life-threatening and brutally defeated. The oppression of women in Iran is systematic and pervasive – there is no doubt about it. But the protests could also be translated into a liberal narrative that the West recognized: the liberation of the individual, the body as resistance, symbolic actions that could support the aspirations of an entire people. A story that also included the white desire to save the brown woman from the brown man. It became understandable, shareable and morally clear.
What is happening now cannot be translated in the same way.
Pain that cannot be put into words, shared and consumed tends to lose its political impact
The current protests had their origins in an economic collapse – rampant inflation and a currency in free fall – but at heart, as in the past, they are a rebellion against a totalitarian system. Oppression and economics cannot be separated here. The strikes quickly grew into nationwide protests, with workers, students, minorities, shopkeepers and even religious groups taking to the same streets. What is being questioned is not a single reform, but a society in which the consequences of political violence, material vulnerability, social control and misguided sanctions are intertwined.
This is precisely why the protests are more difficult to fit into the Western narrative about Iran.
Resistance that can Understood in this way, cultural liberation is easier to support than protests that simultaneously expose class, sanctions, economic dependencies and the West’s own role. If the struggle cannot be reduced to a clear symbol, but points to structures that also affect us, interest often disappears.
It therefore says less about the situation in Iran than about the conditions of Western solidarity – as formulated in politics, media and cultural institutions.
I think of Susan Sontag’s description that our response rarely depends on the extent of suffering, but rather on how it can be seen, understood and disseminated. Pain that cannot be classified, shared and consumed tends to lose political impact – no matter how comprehensive it may be. The Iranian people are once again left empty-handed. The fight is no more complex than before. Only the Western view this time doesn’t know how to package the fight.
Read more:
Jila Mossaed: I’m tired of all the lies about the fight in Iran
