| “Since I left Iran in 2011,” Amir Ahmadi Arian writes today on the NYR Online, life in exile has been marked by “a permanent anxiety, a compulsive worry about the safety of loved ones who are hard to reach.” Never, he continues, “is this feeling sharper than when the Iranian government shuts down the Internet and imposes a communication blackout,” as it has done three times in the last seven years—most recently this past week, in response to antigovernment protests that erupted in cities and towns across the country. Only “scraps of information” have escaped the current blackout, Arian writes, but they “suggest a horror show: hospitals overwhelmed with the dead and injured, morgues overflowing,” and “hundreds of bodies laid out in black bags with families wandering among them, trying to identify their loved ones.” Recent reports, he notes, suggest that in the past five days “many hundreds or even thousands of protesters have already been killed.” The Trump administration, for its part, has promised to “help” the protesters “make Iran great again”—including by threats of further military strikes. Below, alongside Arian’s essay about the causes and implications of the current protests, we have gathered five pieces about the history of uprisings and state violence in Iran since 1953, when the United States helped engineer a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and insure absolute power for the Western-friendly Iranian monarchy. Since leaving Iran fifteen years ago I have felt a permanent anxiety for loved ones there. Never is it sharper than when the regime shuts the Internet down. New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. In the first hours of Israel’s war on Iran, my friends and family in the country gave voice to a deep exhaustion and despair. —June 19, 2025 As protests in Iran continue, the regime’s attempts to crack down on them may create an unstoppable spiral of state violence and popular fury. —November 24, 2022 During the Truman administration the CIA desk on Iran was run by Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Richard Helms, and Donald Wilber—the men who implemented the coup during the Eisenhower administration. Their assessment of Iran was more closely aligned with MI6’s than with that of the National Security Council’s. They systematically—and, one could say, cynically—exaggerated the “Communist danger” in the country. In doing so, they contradicted their own field reports and National Intelligence Estimates…. The documents also show that the CIA was active in elections to the Majles—the Iranian parliament—for both the Seventeenth Majles (1952–1953), which did its best to undermine Mossadegh, and the Eighteenth Majles (1954–1956), which ratified the new oil concession with the consortium of Western companies. Reporting on parliamentary elections, an embassy official wrote without any apparent irony that the British had become unpopular in Iran because of their deep involvement in national politics. The terms “electoral collusion,” “alternative facts,” and “deep state” may have not existed then. But they were an essential part of the CIA toolkit.
—June 7, 2018 We are witnessing today the intensification of the post-election crackdown, perhaps the severest the country has experienced since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. This campaign is aimed not only at the usual dissidents among the intelligentsia, political activists, students, and journalists, but also at men once considered regime insiders. Iran’s leaders have turned against their former comrades-in-arms, fearing that the reformists will take the country in a more liberal direction. In doing so, hard-liners in the regime have joined hands with the Revolutionary Guards, the Intelligence Ministry, and their collaborators in the judiciary, whose chief is appointed by the Supreme Leader, and whose Revolutionary Court is used to try those accused of crimes against the government. The repression has included widespread arrests of reformist politicians, student and women activists, trade union leaders, journalists, lawyers, and public intellectuals; show trials and trials behind closed doors; coerced televised “confessions”; lengthy detentions without trial and long prison sentences after trial; and, perhaps most disturbingly, widespread executions.
—April 7, 2011 “Liberal and left-wing groups who joined with Ayatollah Khomeini to overthrow the Shah believed, as did much of the European press, that the revolution would give birth to a liberal democracy. Instead, they have watched Khomeini’s followers create an Islamic theocracy. The most glaring misperception of all has been the failure to grasp the part that Islam would play in mobilizing the revolutionary opposition to the Shah and in shaping post-revolution Iranian society.” —June 26, 1980 You are receiving this message because you signed up
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