Iran's brutal crackdown on January protests killed between 10,000 and 20,000 people - and rather than crushing the resistance, it fueled a deeper rage. Ali M. Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, told The Wall Street Journal that the regime's mass slaughter "actually proved counterproductive."
According to "Hvylya", referencing the WSJ's weekend interview with the historian, the scale of violence crossed a threshold that repression cannot easily undo. "If they had suppressed it with, say, 'only' the 3,117 dead that they claim, it might have succeeded," Ansari said. But killing "10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of your own in the random manner that they did - and shooting people in hospital beds - it creates an anger that is difficult to suppress."
The aftermath defied the conventional wisdom that predicted a chilling effect. Students resumed protesting before U.S. and Israeli airstrikes even began on Feb. 28. Ansari pointed to a broader historical pattern: after the brutal repression of protests in 2019 and 2022, analysts declared the protest movement had decided "going out on the streets isn't worth it, because 'all we do is get shot.'" Yet each time, protests returned larger and more defiant.
The historian described what he sees as an unmistakable trajectory - an "accelerated means of protests - mounting, mounting, mounting" - driven by a deeply rooted Iranian tradition of fighting for liberty that traces back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The regime, in his assessment, is caught in a vicious cycle: each crackdown generates more resistance, and each round of resistance requires greater brutality to contain.
With only 10% to 20% of the population supporting the regime and every major crisis converging at once, Ansari argued the standard comparisons to stable authoritarian states fail. The question is not whether Iranians will keep resisting, but how long the regime can sustain the cost of repression.
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