Defend Expression

Jinoos Taghizadeh is a multidisciplinary Iranian artist, storyteller, activist, and writer. A graduate of the University of Tehran in Sculpture and Literature Drama from Niavaran College of Art, she has built a reputation as an incisive art critic and essayist and exhibited her works at renowned venues, including the Chelsea Museum, Maxi Museum, White Chapel Gallery, and Wiesbaden Kunsthalle. Her published books include Non_Dubliners (Ireland), Letters I Never Wrote (Norway), and Memories I Never Had (Iran).

I learned numbers before I learned the way home, or how to spell my own name.

At seven, I counted images in newspapers of those executed in the weeks after Iran’s 1979 revolution. At ten, I heard the whispered statistics of more than 7,500 executed for opposing the regime in the 1980s; buried in unmarked mass graves. My adolescence unfolded during an imposed eight-year war that killed nearly 200,000 people, one third of them child soldiers; my own age. My university years were not spent in art museums or libraries, but amid tear gas, batons, and uncounted disappearances and the chain murders of intellectuals. In 2009, I watched Neda Agha-Soltan die, her eyes open, and with her the final illusion that this regime could be reformed was buried.

Each time we said “it cannot get worse”, it rose exponentially. 

In December 2017, uncounted people demanding bread, water, and dignity were killed. In November 2019, 1,500 people were murdered in a single week during a complete internet shutdown. One month later, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down its own civilian passenger plane, PS752, with two missiles; in 19 seconds, 176 lives were reduced to fragments. These deaths joined a daily accumulation of executions, proxy wars, explosions, environmental destruction, and an ever-growing list of deaths.

When Mahsa–Jina Amini was killed by the hijab police, Iran rose again under the cry “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Once more, the dead, the blinded, the raped, and the executed multiplied; an unbelievable barbarism.

And now in 2026, again, the numbers explode beyond comprehension. In just three days, under total internet and telephone shutdown and complete severance from the world, at least 12,000 protesters seeking bread and freedom were slaughtered, and the death toll continues to rise toward 30,000. Eyewitness reports describe unarmed protesters gunned down in dead end alleys and at bazaar entrances; women, men, and children targeted indiscriminately; wounded people executed in hospitals with bullets to the forehead. Military equipment is deployed inside cities. Leaked videos show rows of bodies sealed in black bags, stored in warehouses, on streets, and on bare ground. For more than ten days, the country has been cut off from the world during a full-scale massacre. The state confiscates bodies and sells them back to families, just as it has always stolen identity, agency, and narrative.

What frightens me now more than the violence is the silence.

During the 2022 uprising, the world listened. Images of women cutting their hair and young men dying for basic dignity became media “trends”; visually striking, emotionally consumable versions of the Middle East. This time, the world looks away.

Global powers reduce human lives to statistics and prioritize diplomatic and economic agreements over accountability. They avoid confronting one of the region’s most entrenched sponsors of terrorism, choosing stability, markets, and denial instead. For decades, a regime eager for economic relations with these same powers has labeled every protester, worker, student, activist, artist, intellectual, and seeker of justice a “foreign spy,” while reducing mass poverty and popular uprising to sanctions and Western provocation. This alignment is visible when the president of the United States remains silent about the killing of thousands and publicly thanks Iran’s Supreme Leader for merely not executing detainees.

Something even darker has unfolded among intellectuals, academics, activists, and journalists who fluently use ethical language in their ideological approaches. Those who rightly stood against genocide elsewhere now fall silent or repeat the narrative of a dictatorship. Instead of naming massacre, they label protesters “foreign agents,” reproducing the regime’s propaganda.

This is not a war. It is not the destruction of cities by a foreign power or ethnic civil wars. This is a fundamentalist dictatorship killing its own unarmed people. Ignoring this massacre is not neutral. It is a deliberate approach to reduce human lives to geopolitical object by those whose anti-imperialism bias affected their human-rights pretense and decided to repeat the narrative of a regime that feels closer to their ideology.

The painful truth is this: in the face of this crime against humanity, the Western far right and the radical “Axis of Resistance” left converge at one point. They appear to be enemies, but they agree on one thing: innocent lives are negotiable. Dehumanization is their meeting ground.

Under total internet shutdown and informational darkness, we still do not know how the killing machine is operating, as it has for decades. Meanwhile journalists and human rights advocates, to justify their sealed mouths, point to the Iranian diaspora demonstrations; people who, after decades of terror, appeal to foreign powers for rescue. Is there anything more tragic than frightened and hopeless people asking for a military attack on their own country to stop this bloodbath? 

What can be expected from people whose identity, agency, and dignity have been stolen for 47 years? From a nation exhausted by poverty, violence, and ideological slogans it never chose, while its resources were consumed by authoritarian ambition. What looks like contradiction or desperation is survival under extreme conditions. This is not an endorsement, but an attempt to name a reality so complex that the simplifying ideologically obsessed intellectuals refuse to face.

I am an artist and writer in exile, living with survivors guilt. Art once felt like home, but I have lost faith in my profession. When I see images of bloodied bodies, Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas comes to mind. Thomas places his finger into Christ’s wound to believe. I place my finger into the wounds of bullets, twisted into the thousands of wounds opened inside me to understand how the world is being emptied of belief in humanity.

This silence is not disbelief. It is a moral collapse.

A world whose intellectuals, artists, and human-rights advocates have lost their moral compass is not a livable world. I no longer believe in their ethical claims, just as I no longer believe in number