Video is not uploading. This is the transcript. Sorry. Will send video tomorrow?Okay, here we go.
I live in Iran. I'm an Iranian.
I'm sending this to you—my friends—not as a news anchor, not as an activist. Just as a person. Someone you know. And I need to tell you what is happening where I live, because the world is not watching, and the silence is what this regime feeds on. For two weeks in January, the internet in Iran was completely shut down. No messages in, no messages out. No way to check on family. No way to tell the world what was happening.You may have heard something about protests here. You may have scrolled past a headline. Let me give you the number that keeps me awake at night:
The government's attempt at a crackdown on them have been nothing short of horrific. In the course of two days, when the protests (which were PEACEFUL and filled with nothing/nobody but innocent, unarmed civilians, mostly lower/middle class ones) regarding the economy reached their peak, the government's special forces/police gunned down these people, with the death toll reaching a confirmed ~40,000 people, and specialists guessing at the real number being 52,000 or higher. Since then, more protests have happened, and more people have been killed. Now, the reasons as to why the real numbers of the dead are unknown is the worst part of it-- most of these corpses are snatched by the armed forces, who pile them into trucks or fridges (with some ice-cream companies literally being bribed to keep corpses there) and taken to different provinces across the country as to make it more difficult for parents and/or family members to locate them.
The protests were *peaceful* and they killed ***FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE*** over the course of two days. In a THREE-year war with Gaza, Israel reportedly killed around 30,000 Palestinian civilians. In Iran's own EIGHT-year war with Iraq, the Iran-Iraq War, 500,000 Iranians were killed, of which only 450,000 were soldiers-- meaning 50,000 were innocent civilians.
This government killed that same amount in TWO. DAYS.
Sometimes, when a person's body IS located/found, an intolerably high sum is demanded of their family as payment to receive their child's body. Not to mention, there are occasional raids done on hospitals by the police to question doctors/nurses regarding injured folk or the injuries they've treated, in order to find the patients who had been injured in the protests and went to hospitals seeking treatment, so they can arrest and/or execute them. Due to this, many people, even when injured from bullets or shots, are afraid to go to hospitals or report their injuries, out of fear of being caught. However, thankfully, many doctors of hospitals delete their records of these people in order to keep them safe. Unfortunately, this means many doctors are also being taken in for questioning and/or being detained, for no reason other than the government's claim that they are "shielding terrorists".
The current situation over here is so widespread that it's nigh impossible to meet anyone here whose life HASN'T been touched by these atrocities. My physics teacher reported one of the (unnamed) students had taken time off due to her father being shot. My driver said his brother's son's wife was begging him to return to their native city because his brother's son (the woman's husband) had disappeared for months and there was no word of him, something that has happened to many people, including some older friends of my friend from college.
I know what some of you might be thinking. You might be thinking about politics back home. You might be thinking about who is in power in your country, or in mine. You might be thinking, "I don't want to support that politician," or "I don't trust that government."I need to ask you, if not as a friend, as a human being: **PLEASE, put that aside for a moment.**
We are not asking you to endorse a personality. We are not asking you to pick a clown to support from your own country's political circus.
We are asking you to look at a number: **50,000 dead in two days.**
And we are asking you to ask yourself: What action, right now, has the best chance of stopping that?If you don't like the messenger, fine. But the message is that people are being murdered and hidden in freezers. If we wait for a politician we *like* to come along and fix it, there will be no one left to save.My mother was remarking to her parents that if people don't support Reza Pahlavi (the strongest current contender for a change in the regime), they're walking on the blood of the murdered children.
That is a hard thing to hear. It's a hard thing to say. But I am saying it to you now because I don't know how else to make this real.I am not asking you to send money to some random link. I am not asking you to risk your own physical or financial safety the way WE have to, night after night.
I am asking you to do one thing: **Talk about this.**Share this info if you can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Call your representatives—not because you love them, but because they have a phone, and they have a vote, and they need to know that their constituents are watching what happens here.
The regime is counting on the world being distracted. They are counting on you scrolling past. They are counting on the fact that the dead people don't have voices anymore.
But I do. And you do. And if enough of us use them, maybe the world will have to listen to them.
