Iran and Tyranny before the War – and Tyranny during the War (Executions and Fear)
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Iran’s ailing economy was already igniting mass unrest across cities and neglected rural provinces long before America and Israel bombed Iran. Ordinary people, crushed beneath soaring prices, a collapsing currency, and vanishing living standards, increasingly confronted a regime that has perfected repression while failing to provide dignity or stability. These protests were not born from ideology alone, but from exhaustion, hunger, humiliation, and despair — and they exacted a terrible price, as the tyrannical state killed thousands in order to preserve its monopoly on fear and power.
Protests in Iran — and the bloodshed that inevitably follows them — have become tragically routine beneath the rule of the Islamic Republic. In 2022, the nation erupted in fury after the killing of Mahsa Amini, just 22 years old, one of countless innocents crushed beneath the suffocating machinery of moral authoritarianism. Her alleged “crime,” like that of so many Iranian women and girls, was failing to conform to the compulsory hijab enforced by the regime’s religious enforcers. The demonstrations that followed became one of the most formidable challenges to the ruling order in decades — a rebellion not merely against a dress code, but against institutionalised humiliation and state terror.
The latest protests, rooted primarily in economic collapse, initially lacked the same nationwide ferocity. Yet each fresh killing, imprisonment, and act of intimidation deepened public rage against a ruling elite increasingly detached from the suffering consuming the country.
During the early phase of the unrest, AP News observed: “The deaths may mark the start of a heavier-handed response by Iran’s theocracy over the demonstrations, which have slowed in the capital, Tehran, but expanded elsewhere.”
In Azna, in Lorestan Province — roughly 300 kilometres from Tehran — crowds reportedly shouted “Shameless! Shameless!” as gunfire echoed through the streets. The confrontation rapidly escalated because Iran’s security apparatus reflexively reaches for violence whenever dissent emerges. Force, intimidation, torture, executions, and fear remain the regime’s native language. Nothing fundamentally changes — not during peace, not during unrest, and not even amid the ongoing confrontation involving America and Israel. Long before the present conflict erupted, the state was killing protesters to preserve itself; during the crisis, the machinery of execution and repression simply continues uninterrupted.
President Masoud Pezeshkian is labelled a “reformist” by the narrow standards of the Islamic Republic. In reality, he possesses little authority to reverse the structural decay hollowing out Iran’s economy and political system. The collapse of the rial — which hovered around 1.4 million rials to one US dollar in early 2026 — lies far beyond his control. Iran’s economic devastation is not an accident of fate; it is the cumulative consequence of authoritarian rule, endemic corruption, ideological adventurism abroad, sanctions, suffocated freedoms, and the systematic prioritisation of regime survival over the welfare of the Iranian people.
The Guardian reported: “The protests come after a year of a record number of executions in Iran, with more than 1,500 people put to death in 2025 — the highest number since 1989. Human rights groups say the Iranian authorities have used the death penalty to instil fear among the population and crush dissent.”
This is the architecture of terror upon which the Shia Islamist state sustains itself: extreme concentration of power, enforced conformity, ideological absolutism, and the ruthless elimination of dissent. Just over three years ago, the regime killed Mahsa Amini (22), Sarina Esmailzadeh (16), Hadis Najafi (22), Nika Shakarami (16), and countless others — not because they posed a military threat, but because they embodied defiance, dignity, liberty, and the dangerous possibility of hope.
Amid protests fuelled by hunger, inflation, and despair, the ruling elite once again answered public anguish with bullets, batons, arrests, and executions. Early 2026 witnessed the deaths of new innocents — sacrificed not because they endangered the state, but because the state itself fears accountability, transparency, and the mere existence of free thought.
Accordingly, even during the present confrontation involving America and Israel, tyranny remains the defining reality inside Iran. Executions continue, dissent is crushed, and fear remains institutionalised. Yet the broader international response appears hollow and deeply selective. The European Union and several Gulf powers have projected caution bordering on paralysis, while both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation appear largely indifferent to the regime’s internal brutality so long as strategic interests are preserved.
Thus, in Iran, the struggle between power and people endures — and it is always the people who pay the price. The latest conflict merely exposes, once again, the moral emptiness and geopolitical cynicism that often define international reactions to Iranian suffering. Governments in both East and West denounce violence selectively, yet remain disturbingly muted when the Islamic Republic slaughters its own citizens to preserve an entrenched system of fear and domination.
Therefore, pity the brave people of Iran — men and women who seek nothing extraordinary beyond freedom, dignity, economic survival, and hope — yet who continue to be brutalised at home and abandoned abroad.
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