The biggest lie told about Iran is that its future must come from the rulers who suffocate it or the powers that threaten it from outside. This false choice is repeated with different accents and different flags, but always produces the same result: the Iranian people appear only as a collection of victims to be managed, spectators to be spoken for, or bodies to be saved, punished, disciplined, bombed, or represented by others. The only possibility that is constantly overlooked is the only one that matters: that society itself can become the architect of its own liberation.
This is the thread that connects forces that otherwise oppose each other. The Islamic Republic, Israel, the United States, and Europe are not identical subjects. They have different interests, different languages of legitimacy, different methods of coercion, and different strategic objectives. However, they converge on one decisive point. None of them wants an Iran transformed by the organized self-activity of workers, women, students, teachers, nurses, oppressed nationalities, precarious youth, and the poor. What they can tolerate is repression from above, sanctions from outside, technocratic transition, elite replacement, controlled collapse, or geopolitical realignment. What they cannot tolerate is a society capable of liberating itself.
To define this as a counterrevolutionary convergence is not to say that all these powers are equivalent to each other. That would be simplistic reasoning. Counterrevolution is not uniformity. It is a shared hostility toward autonomous popular power. Each of these actors, in its own way, blocks the emergence of a people that governs itself rather than being governed, represented, disciplined, or saved by others. Their differences are real. Their convergence is also real.
But counterrevolution does not always take the form of open repression or foreign attack. Sometimes it takes the form of rescue, transition, or national rebirth. The history of the Islamic Republic tells us that revolutionary language can be used to confiscate the revolution itself. The Pahlavi current gives this logic a new guise. Its language is secular, national, and modernizing, but its structure focuses on “maximum pressure” from outside and a rigorously managed emergency phase from above, in which stabilization, elite planning, and international coordination take priority over the undisciplined democratic activity of society. Once again, the people are praised as a source of legitimacy, but kept at a safe distance from real constituent power.
The Islamic Republic is the most obvious enemy of Iranian self-determination because it has spent decades destroying the social capacities necessary for freedom. The problem is not just censorship, meaningless elections, or the habitual violence of a police state. The deeper problem is that the regime wages a permanent war against the infrastructure of collective political life. It crushes independent trade union organization, turns universities into security zones, punishes women who refuse obedience, imprisons dissidents, executes opponents, surveils families, and repeatedly atomizes society so that fear can replace solidarity. In January 2026, the UN Human Rights Council described the crackdown on national protests that began on December 28, 2025, as a violent repression that caused the deaths of thousands of people, including children, with the arrest of thousands more, the use of live ammunition against protesters, and severe disruptions to communications. The Council extended the mandate of the fact-finding mission and called for investigations into killings, torture, disappearances, and arbitrary detentions.
This is important because freedom does not arise solely from moral desire. It requires social institutions: associations, trust, shared experiences, protected spaces, memory, courage, and the acquired habit of acting together. The Islamic Republic does not merely deny freedom as an abstract principle. It attacks the material and political conditions that make freedom possible. A society exhausted by precariousness, terrorized by prisons, and fragmented by surveillance is easier to govern. The regime knows this perfectly well. Its project has never been solely ideological or theological. It is also administrative, economic, and security-oriented. It seeks not only obedience but also disorganization.
Over the past ten years, this has happened several times. From the uprising of December 2017 to January 2018 to Aban 2019, from the thirst uprising in Khuzestan and the water protests in Isfahan in 2021, to Donna, Life, Freedom in 2022, and the massacre of January 2026, every time society has taken to the streets, it has been met not only with bullets, arrests, and torture, but with a broader mechanism of paralysis. The Aban 2019 showed the formula with brutal clarity: the internet was deliberately shut down while security forces killed protesters and bystanders. Subsequent waves of unrest have also been met with lethal force, communications blackouts, and the language of emergency. The result is as political as it is psychological. Anger does not fade, but is repressed, transformed into fear, anxiety, waiting, and isolation.
However, foreign powers denouncing the regime do not speak from the perspective of popular emancipation. Their problem with Tehran is not that ordinary Iranians have been denied the power to shape their collective future. Their problem is that the regime lies outside their preferred security architecture, resists their strategic designs, or destabilizes the regional balance in ways they find unwelcome. When the White House frames Iran, it does so primarily through terrorism, proxy warfare, nuclear development, missile programs, and threats to US forces and allies. Even when it notes that the regime mismanages resources while the population suffers, the people appear as evidence in a case of state threat, not as subjects of transformation.
A people can be invoked endlessly in official language, but at the same time be denied any real capacity to act in history. Washington can condemn repression and continue to imagine Iran primarily as a problem of deterrence, security, regional order, and strategic leverage. This framing can produce sanctions, covert actions, diplomatic pressure, military threats, and fantasies of a “good” regime change. But it cannot produce self-liberation from below, because that is not what it wants or can see. It does not recognize workers’ councils, neighborhood assemblies, feminist revolt, or mass democratic organization as the heart of the matter. It recognizes states, armed actors, alignments, and threats.
Europe has a more moderate tone, but it is not fundamentally different in structure. The European Union talks about solidarity with the Iranian people, freedom, dignity, and human rights. But its effective tools are restrictive measures, sanctions regimes, export controls, and diplomatic posturing around security issues. In January 2026, the EU Council announced new sanctions for serious human rights violations in Iran, while linking its policy toward Iran to Tehran’s military support for Russia and missile and drone programs considered a threat to EU security. The same package combined human rights sanctions with restrictions related to Iran’s military position and regional role.
Sanctions can be a response to real crimes. But the political horizon remains narrow. Europe does not imagine Iran in terms of self-determination through the question: how can Iranian society itself become capable of governing its own destiny? It imagines Iran through containment, non-proliferation, diplomatic pressure, and calibrated punishments. It is remote management, wrapped in liberal vocabulary.
Many protagonists of the uprising within Iran are well aware of these traps. The Charter of Minimum Demands published in February 2023 by independent trade unions and civic organizations did not call for salvation from sanctions, bombings, or elite trusteeship. It called for freedom of organization, the abolition of repression, equality for women, the redistribution of plundered wealth, and direct participation through local and national councils. In June 2025, independent trade union organizations, including the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company union and the workers of Haft Tappeh, once again rejected both war and the Islamic Republic, openly declaring that they had no illusions about the United States and Israel, just as they had none about the regime, and insisting that the people could only determine their own destiny through organization, mass mobilization, and direct collective participation.
The case of Israel is even more striking. Its official rhetoric portrays Iran as an existential and imminent threat, primarily through its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, and consequently justifies military action. Official Israeli materials on the June 2025 campaign stated that Operation Rising Lion was launched to neutralize this existential threat posed by the Iranian regime. The same materials insisted that the war was against the regime, not against the Iranian people.
But this formula contains an ideological trick. Saying “not the people” while bombing the country, shaping its future by force, and subordinating its social life to the logic of a regional war is not neutrality towards the people. It is another way of denying their capacity for political action. The people are once again treated as a passive object: perhaps they are not the target, but they are certainly not the subject. They become the backdrop to a war between states. Even the most refined language of precision, deterrence, and self-defense leaves no room for an Iranian society to emancipate itself on its own terms.
The point becomes even clearer when considering the international response to the war and repression as a whole. In March 2026, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran strongly condemned the attacks on Iran by Israel and the US. Months earlier, the same mission had warned that, following Israeli airstrikes in June 2025, the human rights situation in Iran had deteriorated dramatically due to internal repression that had restricted civic space, undermined due process, and eroded respect for the right to life. The sequence is sad but instructive: an external attack does not liberate society. It often reinforces the logic of siege, expands repression, and provides the state with new justifications for crushing internal dissent.
That is why the central question is not which power speaks most elegantly or which is most adept at weaponizing the vocabulary of rights, security, civilization, or law. The central question is whether Iranian society is allowed to exist as a real political force. A society capable of liberating itself is dangerous to every regime and every empire because it refuses to remain raw material for their projects. It cannot easily be reduced to a client, a proxy battlefield, a spectacle of exiles, a moral pretext, a site to be bombed, or a bargaining chip. It introduces a third force into a field built on false tracks.
This is what all counter-revolutionary powers fear. The Islamic Republic fears it because a genuine mass organization would end its monopoly on violence, ideology, and political life. The United States fears it because a truly independent social revolution cannot be relied upon to align itself with American interests. Europe fears it because popular rupture transcends the scripts of technocracy, diplomacy, and controlled transition. Israel fears it because its strategic framework is organized around state threats and military neutralization, not emancipatory transformation from below.
A free Iran, if it ever exists, will depend on the degree to which ordinary people rebuild their collective capacity to act: to organize, to refuse, to remember, to protect each other, and to invent institutions beyond theocracy and imperial oversight. This is the real scandal for all the powers surrounding Iran. What they fear most is a society that no longer waits to be ruled, saved, or interpreted by others, but instead becomes capable of determining its own destiny through revolution.
IMAGE CREDITS: © Salampix/ABACAPRESS.COM via ANSA
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Scrittore e giornalista indipendente, è un rifugiato politico ad Atene, in Grecia. Scrive regolarmente di Iran, Medio Oriente, violenza ai confini e condizioni dei rifugiati in Grecia e in Europa.