In the Name of the Best Within Us

Iranian Protesters Deserve Western Support

Paintings by @nimajamishi (IG)

What is happening in Iran is not repression in the ordinary sense. It is a massacre carried out deliberately by a regime that knows exactly what it is doing and has decided that its theocratic project justifies any level of unspeakable, barbaric savagery.

Under the rule of Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic has unleashed a campaign of terror against its own population. Over the course of just a few weeks, reports indicate that more than 16,500 protesters have been killed, and the number continues to grow.

This slaughter has been accompanied by an internet blackout designed to hide the scale of the crimes, isolate the population, and ensure that the dead disappear quietly. The blackout is not a side effect. It is part of the killing.

Those who are not shot in the streets are dragged into prisons and detention centres, where torture, rape, mutilation, and execution are routine. Families are denied information about the fate of their loved ones. Many never recover the bodies. Others are permitted to do so only after signing false declarations stating that the state was not responsible for the death. In some cases, families are forced to pay the regime for the bullets used to kill their children.

There are no words that fully capture the obscenity of this system. But one thing is clear: any regime that sends soldiers to gas, shoot and beat protesters to death has extinguished every last claim to legitimacy.

The Islamic Republic is not a government that has lost control. It is a government exercising control exactly as intended. Violence is not a breakdown of the system; it is its foundation. Fear is the currency through which obedience is extracted. Silence is enforced through terror. When challenged, the regime does not negotiate. It kills. If dying to oppose such a regime is a risk protesters are willing to assume, what does that tell us about what it must be like living under it?

Appeals to “sovereignty” in this context are grotesque. Sovereignty is not a magical shield that protects mass murderers from interference. It presupposes that a government exists to protect the lives of the people it rules. A regime that systematically hunts its own population has already destroyed the moral basis of non-intervention. What remains is not sovereignty, but organized criminal domination on a national scale.

Nor should there be any confusion about the nature of this regime’s hostility. The same contempt it shows toward its own citizens it directs outward toward Western societies by sponsoring terrorism. This is not accidental. The ideology of the Islamic Republic rejects individual rights, secular law, and liberal political orders in principle. Its internal repression and its external aggression are expressions of the same worldview. A regime that murders its own people without hesitation will kill others whenever it can.

For decades, Western policy has been built on the fiction that Iran is a normal state actor that can be moderated through incentives, negotiations, or gradual engagement. This fiction has failed repeatedly. Concessions have strengthened the regime. Diplomacy has bought it time – which it used to build nuclear weapons to take up against the West. Meanwhile, the machinery of repression has grown more efficient and more lethal.

Against this stand the Iranian people themselves.

They are not asking for reforms. They are not asking for better management of tyranny. They are asking for nothing less than freedom – and they are asking for it knowing full well what the cost may be. They protest while thousands are already dead. They protest knowing that arrest may mean torture, rape, or disappearance. They protest while the regime attempts to erase evidence of its crimes by cutting the country off from the world.

Pause and consider what this implies. Imagine hearing that entire families have been wiped out, that bodies are vanishing, that prisons are overflowing, and still finding the courage to walk into the streets and demand liberty. It is extraordinary moral courage. These protesters are not naïve, and they are not manipulated. They are acting because life under this regime has become worse than the risk of death. They are heroes.

For the West, this is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is also a matter of direct strategic interest. The Islamic Republic is a permanent source of instability, violence, and ideological aggression. As long as it remains in power, it will continue to export terror, threaten liberal societies, and slaughter its own population. Eliminating this regime would drive a stake through the heart of one of the greatest forces of evil on earth today: Islamic totalitarianism. The very existence of Iran as an Islamic state emboldens and inspires terrorists across the world, including ISIS, which inspired the Bondi Beach terrorists in December.

The West possesses overwhelming technological and military superiority. Used decisively, it can dismantle the regime’s ability to repress by destroying the infrastructure, command structures, and institutions that sustain mass violence. The objective is not occupation or social engineering. It is to break the regime’s grip and make space for the Iranian people to seize what they are already fighting for.

The message to Iranians should be unmistakable: You have our complete moral support. We see you, we believe you, and we will not stand by while you are slaughtered. A population willing to face live fire for freedom does not need much moral leadership – in needs the means of opposition. It needs a modicum of help from a Western military power.

We must give Iranians a fighting chance and reinforce our moral support at minimal cost to the West – and what is the cost of allowing the Islamic Republic to continue to exist?

Inaction is often described as prudence. In this case, it is complicity. Every day of delay adds to the body count. Every statement of “concern” issued while prisons fill and graves multiply is an evasion of responsibility.

The Iranian regime is not reformable. It is not misunderstood. It is a machine built to dominate, terrorise, and kill. Destroying it would not only save lives in Iran; it would affirm a principle the West claims to stand for but too often abandons when the cost is high: that governments exist for human beings, not the other way around.

The killings are continuing. The numbers are rising. The blackout remains in place.

History will not judge kindly those who knew this and chose to look away. We must demand military action from our leaders to help Iranians usurp their killers. We must demand it in the name of civilisation, in the name of freedom – in the name of the best within us.