What Iran’s reopened internet will not show you
After 87 days of blackout, Iran has restored internet access. While the concealed crackdown killed thousands, Western student movements that filled campuses for Gaza went silent.
On Monday, Iran’s President Pezeshkian ordered the restoration of international internet access after 87 days of blackout.
The blackout had two phases. The first began on January 8, hours after anti-government protests spread across all Iranian provinces. The second tightened after the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28. Officials called both security measures. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mai Sato, told Reuters what the security measures were used for: hospitals raided, patients with gunshot wounds removed by security forces, families charged $5,000 to $7,000 ransoms to recover bodies.
During the crackdown, up to 20,000 civilians were killed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. It was the bloodiest crackdown in Iran’s post-revolutionary history, and it happened in roughly two weeks, with the internet off. Since the start of the war, over 4000 civilians have been arrested and dozens executed after show trials. The internet blockade did exactly what it was designed to do. Precise figures on the dead remain buried, and the voices of the Iranians who rose up against the Islamic Republic were silenced before they could reach the world.
In the West, the struggle of a people trapped for over forty years under an authoritarian theocracy has stirred almost no response from the activists and social movements that mobilize so readily for other causes.
In 2024, students built encampments in solidarity with Gaza in over 100 American universities. 35 went up in the United Kingdom, and more across the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and Belgium. Pro-Palestinian rallies drew hundreds of thousands to London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome week after week. Multiple flotillas were stopped trying to reach Gaza. Building occupations, divestment campaigns, walkouts, hunger strikes: every available tactic was deployed.
For Iran in 2026, there was nothing. No occupations. No flotilla. 20,000 civilians were shot in the streets and the same campuses that produced the largest student protest wave since Vietnam stayed quiet. The pattern is consistent. Sudan’s civil war has killed over 150,000 civilians in an ongoing genocide. No encampments went up for them either and no flotillas sailed. This is not a problem of awareness, as reports exist, in volume, from authoritative organizations with verified data. This is a problem of selection.
Western progressive movements mobilize when the perpetrator is the West or an ally of the West. When the perpetrator is a regime they consider anti-imperialist, the same movements go quiet. Iran kills its own protesters, and the campuses do not move. Assad gassed his own civilians, and the campuses did not move. China locks up a million Muslims, and the campuses do not move. The Sudanese militias rapes and burn their way through Darfur, and the campuses do not move.
In today’s media, the standard of outrage is not the scale of suffering, but whether the suffering can be made to fit a script in which the West is guilty. When it does, the machine activates: campus protests, celebrity statements, mass mobilization.
The internet coming back on in Tehran will let Iranians upload videos and families post the names and stories of the executed. The same activists who watched them die in silence will watch them document it in silence.
