When music was briefly outlawed after the revolution, my dad sold contraband Pink Floyd and Prince records to kids in his neighborhood. When alcohol was declared haram, my uncles brewed beer in their basements. When mixed-gender dancing and mingling were prohibited, young Iranians held their parties and blasted their psychedelic rock anyway — all while knowing they could be arrested at any moment for these so-called “crimes against the state.”
Five weeks ago, when bombs started raining down on Tehran, President Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people: “The hour of your freedom is at hand … All I want is freedom for the people,” he told the Washington Post. This statement, from a leader who has compared his own people to terrorists for protesting his unlawful abuses of power, would be almost laughable if it were not so devastating. “This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump declared. There was no referendum, no vote, no public forum. And yet, the Iranian people are forced to live this war — a war being marketed as a worthwhile path to liberation.
When I think of Iranians, I think of rule-breakers and protestors; I think of bold, capable practitioners of civil disobedience who have been carving out space for their own freedom for decades. Violent intervention in the name of freedom will not bring democracy. It will destroy the Iran we know today — wiping universities, critical infrastructure and world heritage sites off the map. But the most long-lasting destruction goes beyond what can be physically rebuilt: By bombing Iran, Trump is destroying and devaluing a decades-long movement of defiance that Iranians have been growing all by themselves.
My father left Iran in 1982 at 19, when euphoria in the wake of the revolution curdled into intense social and political repression by the new Islamic Republic. Like many Iranian families, mine carries the memory of repression under two distinctly different governments. My maternal grandfather was imprisoned under the former Shah, and other relatives were forced to flee under threat from the Savak, his feared secret police force. I do not view Iran’s past through a romanticized lens of nostalgia, nor do I view its present with indifference. For me, the desire for a democratic, secular Iran is deeply personal.
Some may argue — even my own relatives and a loud coalition of diasporic LA Persians — that war is the only way. That whatever casualties may come along with the destruction of the regime will be worth it in the end. To me, statements like these are more than just tone deaf or offensive — they are a lie.
Scholars who study democratic transitions are clear on this point. Political scientist Barbara Geddes’ research reveals that since World War II, less than a quarter of authoritarian transitions have led to democracy. When regimes collapse as a result of external conflict, the likelihood of a democratic transition is even slimmer. Even the Hoover Institution, an organization that rarely takes anti-interventionist stances, concedes that American intervention as a means for democratization has only worked twice: in post-war Germany and Japan. These cases were specific to the conditions under which our intervention occurred, and are not likely to be duplicated today.
Iranians don’t need Americans to teach them what democracy looks like. They have been organizing themselves against state surveillance and violent crackdown, at great personal risk, for longer than most of us have been paying attention. The 2009 Green Movement brought over three million Iranians into the streets demanding democratic reform. Without face coverings or personal protection, Iranians showed up en masse to protest the regime. In the years that followed, the “Enghelab-e Jensi” — or Sexual Revolution — saw the open defiance of hijab laws by young Iranians and the broader loosening of social restrictions and norms which pushed the more progressive policy even within the Iranian government. Then came the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Morality Police.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, protests erupted in over 210 locations across the country — more than any prior round of unrest. The protests drew together university students, working-class Iranians, Kurdish communities and residents of Tehran’s wealthiest neighborhoods. It was the most geographically widespread and sustained round of anti-government demonstrations since ACLED began collecting data in 2016. By the end of that year, the regime had partially retreated: morality police activities were visibly curtailed, and women began appearing in public without headscarves in open defiance of the law. The movement had no formal leadership and no coordinating body, but it was winning ground anyway.
What American politicians have never bothered to understand is something Iranian scholars have documented for years. In Iran, actions that would not be considered political anywhere else are necessarily political. Because the state regulates morality and behavior, any deviation from the imposed social order is an inherent form of dissent. Anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi documents young Iranians who understood this intuitively.
“By not adhering to Islamic laws on dress, comportment, modesty, and male-female fraternization,” she wrote, “young people are rejecting the notion of being Islamic subjects.” When teenagers hold a mixed-gender party or dance in the street, they are threatening the ideological foundation the Islamic state relies upon to function. “The more we party, the more we laj [or playfully rebel] … the more progress we make,” one young woman told Mahdavi.
Trumpian tweets about bringing freedom to the region ignore Iranians as autonomous people who have been working to enlarge the window of tolerance for democratic life in their country for decades. This is how democratic political culture actually gets built. Not through strongman military tactics, but through decades of sustained, decentralized defiance that slowly erodes the legitimacy of the state and seeps into the fundamental culture of a nation. The Iranian people have been revolting for decades. This just isn’t the kind of revolution Americans know how to recognize.
“Trumpian tweets about bringing freedom to the region ignore Iranians as autonomous people who have been working to enlarge the window of tolerance for democratic life in their country for decades.”
This may not be the quick and satisfying answer people around the world are eager to hear. It is heartbreaking to know that my people have suffered under this regime, and will continue to suffer as they struggle to survive through this war they didn’t ask for — a war that will only undo progress made towards livability and liberation.
We as Americans are poorly positioned to be advocating for war. We don’t know what it is to feel the ground shake beneath our feet from the impact. We don’t know what it is to have our homes and schools destroyed, to breathe in soot-filled air or watch as black rain washes over our cities. We do not know what it is to fear for our lives in the way we have forced millions around the world to fear for theirs.
Bombs do nothing to help build democracy. They give the regime exactly what it needs to continue the suppression of its people: an external enemy to rally against, a population too busy surviving to revolt and a civil society too fragmented to coalesce. Democracy will never be a military outcome granted by an external force. It will always be a result of hard-fought battles by people on the ground. Whether that battle is fought in the streets, at parties or in basements, is for Iranians and Iranians alone to decide.
Leili Kamali PO ’29 spoke to her dad on the phone while writing. He told her an old Persian proverb that may sound familiar: پایان شب سیه سپید است; The end of the dark night is white [with the dawn].
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