Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal

Summary

For more than two weeks and counting, the country has existed inside a manufactured silence. The public internet, the basic infrastructure of modern life, has been reduced to rumor and fragments. What remains functional are the regime’s approved channels, whitelisted networks that keep the state connected to itself while cutting the country off from civic circulation.From outside Iran, this condition is often described as another episode of unrest. From inside, it feels closer to a new revolution that has already cost the country thousands of lives.Iran has experienced a massacre and entered a post-massacre moment, a phase in which the state no longer performs restraint. It kills, buries, rewrites the narrative, and disconnects.The blackout is not a byproduct of disorder. It is part of the machinery. Violence is easier to carry out when it is harder to document, and easier to deny when proof is delayed, partial, or erased.From the studio of The Program with Kambiz Hosseini, where Iranians have been calling into a live call-in program broadcast to Iran, the question no longer sounds abstract. It sounds prosecutorial.What, exactly, does the world believe it is watching?The calls do not arrive as speeches. They arrive as exertion, as voices pushing through dead air and dropped connections.'No more fear'Ali, calling from Mazandaran in northern Iran, addresses the security forces directly. “You do not need to put your weapon down. No one is afraid of you.” He repeats it, not as bravado, but as fact. Fear, he suggests, is no longer the organizing principle.Pouria, calling from Shiraz in southern Iran, offers a different register. “We did not abandon a single wounded person, and we did not allow anyone to be left behind or written off.” The language is practical, almost logistical. It describes a moral line that held even as institutions collapsed. Do not leave anyone behind.Bahram, from a working-class neighborhood in southern Tehran, explains why he went into the streets...