The information and sources are there for you to search, and it's up to you to determine who you find credible and why.
The same intelligence community bragging that they're embedded among the protestors and engaging in covert-action (oxymoronic as it sounds) to bring about regime change?
https://archive.is/20251230221603/https://www.jpost.com/midd...
https://x.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659 https://x.com/mikepompeo/status/2007180411638620659
https://archive.ph/2026.01.25-142822/https://time.com/735763...
Iran official figures put it around ~3k actually.
That said it's been pointed out to me that my link is statements by anonymous government officials, which is not the same thing as "official Iranian government numbers".
> The 30,000 figure is also far beyond tallies being compiled by activists methodically assigning names to the dead.
The official government estimate is still 3,117 btw.
The truth is we'll likely never know for sure the real number and any outlet reporting anything else without qualifications is being dishonest.
I am very skeptical tbh seeing all this unfold. The propaganda push from media over this is off the charts on this.
A counter-perspective on these figures and their sources :
https://x.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/2017089536686211440#m https://xcancel.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/20170895366862114...
This here is the same death toll in two days.
The same is true for the Russia-Ukraine war, btw. There have been 1300 victims per day for over 3 years. Russia is not trying to minimize casualties.
Why is it surprising that it results in an extreme difference in death toll? Or at least, in the rate of killing.
Or as another point of comparison (according to Wikipedia) : The bombing of Dresden went over three days and cost 25.000 lives. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually resulted in 100.000 immediate deaths.
All those locations - the Donbas, Gaza, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were complete wastelands afterwards.
This makes it hard to believe for me. That being said, 3000 would still be absolutely gruesome.
Iranian Islamic guard was slaughtering people in dense crowds in the middle of skyscrapers. That certainly makes those numbers realistic to me.
Gazan health authorities were releasing the names of their dead, and this was met with great skepticism and qualification in Israel and the West (until this week when Israel just accepted at least tens of thousands died).
Random, inflated numbers from anonymous sources pop up on Iran and they're instantly quoted as fact.
Also - some of the rebels have guns and have been using them, so some of these dead are from shootouts.
Time Magazine is reporting[0] that local Iranian health officials have given that number.
[0]: https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
We know: We know: a government whose sole purpose is to protect its people has committed the mass murder of unarmed civilians. has committed the mass murder of unarmed civilians.
That’s all there is to know to make a judgement about what has happened.
But if it's 5-10-20 or even more k, how much difference does it make? The crime of mass killing and collective punishment is still as gruesome either way
Figures thrown around like 12k/20k/30k in 2 days - frankly beggar belief. Compare it to the recent (and ongoing) massacre of Gaza. which at its peak we were talking 1000-2000 deaths per day. The Israelis were dropping 2000-pound bombs and shelling non-stop until the entire strip into rubble. Reaching similar numbers against armed protestors without resorting to heavy weapons doesn't seem plausible. On top of it, 100s of thousands of injured (claimed along with the deaths). Again in 2 days. Even in a country of 90 million, can you imagine the utter pandemonium in every hospital. Mass graves. The blood and bodies at the squares. It would be visible from space. It would impossible to conceal. You have to go to Babi Yar in WW2 to get similar figures.
Beyond that its hard for me to tell. I dont trust any of this, given the interests and parties involved and the sources pushing these narratives . The legacy media is in full-blown propaganda offensive. The accounts and claims seem to come from a constellation of anti-regime NGOs, activists, Israeli lobbyists, neocons and intelligence agencies. Statements and actions of western and Israeli leaders make it abundantly clear this is an armed regime-change operation backed by numerous US, Israeli and western-backed proxy groups. US carrier strike groups have finally arrived in Gulf of Oman and suddenly the news stories pick up again. A month ago the same CSG was off the coast of Venezuela while the nobel prize was being awarded to an opponent of the Venezuelan government. Now that same nobel-laureate is meeting up with Reza Pahlavi and opponents of the Iranian government while Trump is sabre-rattling again. It all feels like deja-vu all over again. Netanyahu and the Israelis really want their Iran war and they need the Americans to carry it home for them.
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/02/01/763331/Iran-officia...
A familiar tactic to many governments around the world.
> Iran is operating in at a scale so far beyond anything ever seen in the US that it's completely dishonest to compare the two.
The person you're responding to didn't mention the US, but it's telling that that's where your mind goes to.
Imagine negotiating with Hitler to give up his V2 missiles and nuclear plans while the Holocaust was taking place. History will judge us for negotiating (and therefore, legitimizing) with the islamic regime that's occupied Iran for 47 years.
The current realpolitik geopolitical fate for Iran is to be suppressed and relegated, regional players don't want to redistribute power / influence to accommodate Iran. Bluntly Iran is too big allow to flourish, but not so big it cannot be suppressed. That's Iran's fate under current dynamics, no one wants to save Iran, they want to neutralize Iran, naive to pretend otherwise. Iran is no longer in the minority of potential strategic intervention successes, its in the bucket of dozens of countries US intervention fucked over because that's the strategic end goal is for these countries to remain weak. If Iran wants bigger lightcone, it needs to fight for one.
But it was asked what else the West could do beyond what it’s already doing.
It might be possible to do a targetted kidnapping/assassination without provoking a war. Or it might not be. Such actions become unpredictable fast.
"Genocidal" is not an order of magnitude; it's a description of purpose. What's going on in Iran is an atrocity, but it's not "genocidal."
>History will judge us for negotiating
We're not the world police.
That has been the bargain since WWII though. Pax Americana meant the US owned and enforced a global order, in return international trade and finance ran on its platform. Most Americans can't fathom how bad the alternative is to not being the world police.
I imagine you saying this in 1940, to a german jew refugee. Would you do it? Would you say this to a jewish person in WWII, to justify non-action?
Well, not anymore after that speech from the Canadian Prime Minister!
we share a planet
Then why did you overthrow their elected government in 1953? Which also set the country firmly on the path to the current regime.
Oh, well that's alright then. Hey fellers, we got off on a grammatical technicality.
> We're not the world police.
It's your mess, now clean it up.
>It's your mess, now clean it up.
The US is under no obligation to the people of Iran whatsoever. If we take action in Iran, it will be solely to our benefit, and it may or may not improve those peoples' lives. In all likelihood, it will be another Libya or Afghanistan situation in which we take what we want and leave a power vacuum in our wake.
Yes sir.
On a second thought - who the fuck are you to tell the country with the biggest dick what to do. We'll be putting 100% tariffs on you.
> The British historian Martin Gilbert believes that "many non-Jews resented the round-up", his opinion being supported by German witness Dr. Arthur Flehinger who recalls seeing "people crying while watching from behind their curtains". Rolf Dessauer recalls how a neighbor came forward and restored a portrait of Paul Ehrlich that had been "slashed to ribbons" by the Sturmabteilung. "He wanted it to be known that not all Germans supported Kristallnacht."
This passage is particulary eerie IMHO, since I've been reading "I don't condone this" of current world events over and over.
> In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, the psychologist Michael Müller-Claudius interviewed 41 randomly selected Nazi Party members on their attitudes towards racial persecution. Of the interviewed party members, 63% expressed extreme indignation against it, 5% expressed approval, and the remaining 32% were noncommittal.
Also particurlarly eerie to me. Yet the regime went on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCsseldorfer_Abkommen_(19...
Most action from the West is likely to make things worse. Can you give a scenario where that's not the case?
WWII did not happen because of the Holocaust and nations around the world being outraged at that. In truth, the US and many other countries rejected Jewish refugees from Germany
I find it surprising that you're troubled. The West helped Israel with its genocide in Gaza; why did you expect that the West would intervene in what's happening the Iran, which by death count is significantly smaller?
In 48 hours, the islamic regime in Iran massacred more than 40,000 protestors (and left tens of thousands of people blinded/wounded, often "finishing them off" by raiding hospitals...). Some figures even show more than 40,000, but even assuming the low-park, that's 833 people per hour, or 13 people per minute who got killed.
Whatever Israel did (to defend itself) was by no means even near those numbers.
> Whatever Israel did (to defend itself) was by no means even near those numbers.
Israel killed about 300,000 people in the first month. Sure, it's a lower count per day, what a low bar.
From now on, every time anyone says anything about Iran, I'll be pushing the narrative that "whatever Iran did, it was to defend itself".
Edit to add: Also, Israel was actually attacked, and civilians were raped, kidnapped, and murdered. Did any of the protestors in Iran kill, rape, or murder any of members of the regime who subsequently slaughtered them?
Just to be clear. You're arguing that if a country is attacked, it's ok to kill civilians that are unrelated to the attack? Or are you arguing that those 300,000 were somehow involved in the killing of the 3,000 Israelis that died in the Hamas attack?
If a country is attacked, and defends itself, are you saying it should stop any form of defense because a civilian can die?
If this is the logic, then what would prevent armies from using human shields?
How on earth did you get that from my comment? Can you think of a more charitable way to interpret what I said?
So you're not saying that what Israel is doing is less bad due to the fact that it was attacked? So what are you saying then?
I guess that no, I can't find a more charitable way to interpret what you said.
> Israel was actually attacked
I was responding to your claim that Iran was defending itself... Whether or not Israel responded disproportionately to October 7 (it did), I don't think it's fair to say Iran's actions are "self-defense" in the same way that Israel's war was self-defense.
Disproportionate would be if they caught the October 7 terrorists and their collaborators, and instead of arresting them killed them. If that was what happened, I wouldn't be morally against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violen...
Hannibal directive: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-ma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive#Claimed_use...
That’s the fake UN number - in contradiction with Gaza Health Ministry.
Now that's a record fast jump between "it never happened" and "they deserved it".
Also funny the wording "whatever they did", as if it's a mystery.
> ‘If America attacks Iran,’ I said, ‘won’t people be killed?’
> ‘They don’t kill people. Our own government does. No enemy in our history has done to us what these clerics have done.’
‘They don’t kill people. Our own government does. No enemy in our history has done to us what these clerics have done.’
While children in Gaza starve, ICE roams the streets killing even non-immigrants, and Greenland is in the crosshairs, white, professional-managerial types put their focus on replacing Iranian sovereignty with being under the West's boot, for very liberal, humanitarian reasons of course.
The black and white "west is bad" narrative you're being fed isn't accurate.
Just trying to understand.
For three main reasons.
1. Culturally Iranians are way more aligned with west.
2. Western imperialism results in more democracy. Not 100%, but not this bad.
3. Economically countries under west's influence do much better. Iran is extremely poor right now.
Why do you think China and Russia are causing the economic instability? I thought it was because of US sanctions and currency manipulation.
Some "west bad" rhetoric is that the fall of communism was orchestrated by Americans and not of organic local origin.
In reality the communist regime protected by Russian/ soviet violence had no legitimacy or support from the population.
Perhaps Poles could not free themselves without the western , maybe Cia played active role in organizing solidarity movement.
If this is true then we Poles are forever grateful for orchestrating regime change in Poland in 1989.
Even the parent article reports first-hand that the Iranian regime is now labelling protesters as terrorists and calls for their arrests.
This, combined with the drought and economic collapse, has pushed the Iranian people towards revolt.
This is not the fault of Israel, America, Trump, Greenland, white people, or any other boogeyman. It's a feature of Iranian government, and the Iranian people want change.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i...
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/iran-horrifyi...
[2]: https://persecution.exmuslims.org/countries/iran/
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/14/iran-new-hijab-law-adds-...
[4]: https://www.equaldex.com/region/iran
[5]: https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
Bessent said so at Davos:
"President Trump ordered our Treasury and our OFAC division (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it's worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. [...] So this is why people took to the street. This is economic statecraft". https://youtu.be/VQQXLnXlWqY?t=1722
Is this how America helps dissidents? Make them so miserable they can't bear it anymore? Anyways, it never works. It just makes civilians more miserable and the government more repressive. Look at Cuba or North Korea.
Also, US allies (ie Israel) can kill hundreds of thousands of people without any consequences. In fact, we bankroll the weapons they use to do it to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
So why are the documented atrocities of one country not an issue at all but the transgressions of another country worthy of starving that country for decades? What's different between these two? And who is making that determination?
I don't get—never have, probably never will—painting the Islamic Republic of Iran as saviours, freedom fighters, or the last bulwark of an axis of resistance.
If the Boston strangler was anti-imperialist, would you claim he was a hero? It feels like you would.
Just because they have a shitty government doesn't mean we (USA) have the right to their oil.
USA indeed doesn’t have any right to their oil, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t help.
Westerners work to slaughter the secular left in a country, then use that as their entitlement to take over the country - "there is no secular force to take over".
This just happened in Syria - the West forced out a secular leader to replace him with a now celebrated al-Qaeda leader who the US had a $10 million bounty on fourteen months ago. Who is currently slaughtering every minority ethnicity in the country.
This is incorrect. For example, the deal with Iran did not allow for surprise inspections.
No, that's the regime's excuse. Most electricity in the country is used by the regime to mine crypto (!).