Mick Hartley

The Iranian uprising against the Islamic Republic matters because it represents something historically unprecedented: a mass, indigenous revolt against an Islamist system by the very people who have lived under it for more than four decades. It is a comprehensive rejection of…

— Tahmineh Dehbozorgi (@DeTahmineh) January 25, 2026

Full text:

…It is a comprehensive rejection of political Islam as a governing ideology, articulated by millions who have endured its cruelty. In that sense, the uprising in Iran is a global reckoning.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has ruled through systematic violence. It has executed tens of thousands of political prisoners, including the mass executions of the late 1980s carried out after sham proceedings lasting only minutes. Peaceful dissent has been criminalized, with journalists, lawyers, students, and labor organizers imprisoned for speech alone. Torture—beatings, sexual violence, mock executions, and prolonged solitary confinement—has been a routine instrument of governance. These are not deviations from the system; they are its design.

Women have borne a particularly brutal share of this repression. The regime enforces compulsory veiling through surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, and lethal force. Women have been killed in custody for alleged dress-code violations, denied legal equality, and treated as wards of the state. Girls like myself have been shut out of educational and professional opportunities that existed before 1979, and women who resist have been publicly humiliated to deter others. When Iranian women rise up today, they are rejecting a system that criminalizes their existence.

The regime’s violence has never stopped at Iran’s borders. It has spent decades exporting terror as state policy, funding proxy militias, training death squads, and prolonging civil wars across the Middle East. These interventions have destroyed cities, collapsed economies, and displaced millions. The resulting refugee crises have reshaped politics and social cohesion across Europe, allowing the regime to externalize the human cost of its ideology.

At home, the state has hollowed out society through corruption and repression. National wealth has been looted by clerical and military elites while ordinary Iranians face inflation, unemployment, and collapsing infrastructure. Environmental devastation has been ignored because accountability would threaten regime power. When workers strike or farmers protest water theft, the response is bullets and prison cells.

What makes the uprising so significant is that it dismantles the regime’s central lie: that political Islam represents moral order or cultural authenticity. Iranians know from lived experience that it produces neither justice nor dignity, only fear and stagnation. By rejecting clerical rule and theological coercion, they are exposing Islamism as an authoritarian ideology sustained by violence.

This has profound implications for the West. For decades, Western governments treated the Islamic Republic as a stabilizing fixture, prioritizing short-term convenience over moral clarity. That approach has failed. Supporting the Iranian people is not interference; it is a refusal to subsidize tyranny through silence.

The Iranian uprising matters because it shows that Islamism can be confronted and rejected by those who know it best. The West should support this movement out of strategic and moral necessity. A free Iran would mean fewer proxy wars, fewer refugees, and the collapse of Islamism, which is one of the most violent ideological engines of human history. And time will remember who stood with the Iranian people when they revealed, at immense personal cost, both the true nature of Islamism and the possibility of defeating it.