There are other sources, like this: https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

It is a source run by expatriate Iranians of the diaspora.. the fact that so many people just discount their point of view it's pretty frustrating. If you speak to Iranians that you work with it's pretty illuminating

Actually, if anything, that makes it trustworthy because Saudi would like the regime to stay so that they can stay out of the oil markets and keep the prices high.

Mehdi Hasan on X:

> Interesting that the same western media outlets which spent two years nonstop questioning and disputing and refusing to accept Palestinian death tolls out of Gaza, even when they were backed by human rights groups and monitors like Airwars and studies in The Lancet, are totally fine uncritically accepting totally unsourced and huge, huge numbers out of Iran.

> This is what media propaganda and bias looks like (and, no, before the trolls descend, of course I’m not questioning that lots of innocent people have been brutally killed in Iran).

https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/2015563834329801071

If you want a more neutal organization https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

It looks a LOT like a CIA front.

EDIT: Sorry... that is too strong... "state aligned influence media". Note that the headline might be true, or it might not, but that source is quite glowy.

I can’t even imagine how this could be done. Nazi concentration camps would have had trouble killing that many in 2 days.

I've read a ton of philosophy and something I don't really understand is that one nation killing another is more immoral than when a nation does this to their own domestic population.

Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct.

But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.

What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?

But note that the Tianenmen Square massacre was only one part of a larger nationwide protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Chinese_protests_by_regio... . There's no telling how many were killed or disappeared outside of Beijing.

Seems the regime is OK shooting their way out of this problem. How big are these protests? 30K isn't exactly a small number of protestors.

> Whether it leads to a violent revolution or a static police state like North Korea remains to be seen.

The official name of Iran is "The Islamic Republic of Iran" and it is a country ruled by sharia law. Countries ruled by Sharia are already totalitarian states.

This is a little different, this is probably an issue anyone of any side politically can agree is bad. A government is killing their own people in the tens of thousands. It is foolish to even waste time pointing fingers outside of the country in question in my eyes because its irrelevant, their current government is killing citizens in the right here and right now.

> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." [0]

However, it also says:

> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When people, or communities, or companies, show you their true colors, believe them. Watch out for all those flocking in to explain how this is different…

The coordination is the thing here, that's many units being instructed to carry through in the same manner.

As for the numbers:

  Interior Ministry reports say security forces confronted demonstrators in more than 400 cities and towns, with more than 4,000 clash locations reported nationwide

As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.

It's grim stuff.

Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.

The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?

I don't think killing that many people requires much coordination when one side has guns (let alone machine guns) and a lot of soldiers

It's absolutely terrible but at the scale of a large country it's not logistically hard to get to that many deaths in a couple of days. Iran is a big country with population around 93 million.

The article says "36,500 killed in 400 cities". That's 91 people per city.

They executed every protestor that was arrested or in the hospital (estimated at ~28k.)

Is “the left” in the room with us right now?

The college students and the left support the Iranian regime.

the only way out is limited government and abolishing the IRS

Iran is the 17th most populous nation in the world, with 93 million people. These protests seem to be occurring across the entire nation. Another comment mentioned over 4,000 separate clashes. Other sources have already corroborated a lower bound in the mid-thousands. I think the burden is on you to refute these numbers by showing that the sources are deliberately misleading or finding a flaw in the methodology. Simply saying that you find them "not credible" and that some people might have a political motive behind sharing them is not an argument.

Note, I'm not saying that they have been confirmed, but I do not think that you have given sufficient cause for rejecting them out of hand.

How about plain civil disobedience? Like just stop working? It would need to get pretty extreme before the government had the audacity (and even capacity) to actually track you down to your home and arrest (or kill) you. Although this kind of coordination might be difficult with government control of communication media.

>the government can just hire mercenaries from outside the country.

Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy says you are inviting an overthrow of your government by doing this.

The mercenaries can flip sides if the opposite faction pays them and offers them better terms... or maybe the mercs just flip.

Hard to say how true this is.

Narrator's voice: "Unfortunatelly, they will be waiting forever, becase that help will never come."

"Help is on the way" from the US is often not a great propositon. Doubly so today.

https://reason.com/2026/01/23/the-trump-administration-plans...

The US shipped the carrier battle group in the region out to support the Venezuela operations, and is deporting asylum seekers back to their deaths this week.

Nobody in the US has any idea what is happening in Iran. Judging by the weird, not very HN like threads on this post, sounds like we are going to.

Funny you whine about irrationality while ignoring the very clear rational reason why Americans are outraged over government agents executing a random civilian in their own supposedly free country over what's happening in another country that is known for being violently oppressive.

1 person gets an abortion, the whole country is in outrage. Millions of young men get mutilated at birth - barely a peep.

The fact that he said that and then DID NOT topple the government in Iran is insane.. completely irresponsible, or rather responsible.. for those deaths.

The irony is that now those who are still alive in Iran might remember this and update their notion of US trustworthiness accordingly.

Do you think that the people encouraging ice protests share some culpability in the deaths of the other protesters?

The outrage over the ICE death is from leftists already opposed to ICE. Those same leftists support the Palestinian cause. Iran funds Hamas and Hezbollah directly. Iranian/Russian money has also been traced to some college protests and obviously supports leftist causes.

They're not going to be outraged over the people they support killing protestors who want to topple the thing they support.

Also, just to be fair, there's also some right-wing obvious Russian agents weirdly not condemning the Islamic Republic...

I can easily comprehend it, the history books are full of people killing large numbers of their own people. They just find some irrelevant differentiating factor that allows them to label the other as the outgroup and bring out the guns, the tanks, the ovens and the bombs.

This is a figure for the whole of Iran. So it includes not just the Persian-majority areas, but also the minority-majority areas (Azeris, Kurds, Balochs, Arabs, Armenians, etc). It would not surprise me if the death toll in the minority-majority areas were higher, and hence they contributed a disproportionate percentage of the total, since security forces would likely find it easier to do that to people of a different ethnicity and/or religion (some of these minorities are predominantly Sunni, Christian, etc) than to people more like themselves.

The Khmer Rouge executed between half a million and a million Cambodians between 1975 to 1979[0]. These were the intentional killings, estimates range to as many as 2 million Cambodians or 25% of the population died as a result of Khmer Rouge polices.

The end of the regime was brought about by an incursion into the Vietnamese border town of Ba Chúc, resulting in the massacre of more than 3000 civilians. Vietnam invaded, toppled the Khmer Rouge and brought an end to the executions although civil war would continue for much of the next decade.

For these actions Vietnam was extensively sanctioned[1]. The parallels with ongoing conflicts today are hard to ignore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...

> I can't comprehend how a population can kill that many of their own people.

The notion of some well-defined "people" is a fiction that ruling powers use to keep humanity's innate tribalistic tendencies pointed outward at their adversaries.

The truth is that the powers-that-be consider themselves to be above "the people", and will dispose of you as soon as you become inconvenient.

Bringing it home…

Renee Good. Alex Pretti.

It’s not just that they were killed but so much of the country including, most relevantly, the administration, believe they should have been killed.

It’s not hard to other any set of people.

A lot of it is being done by mercenaries brought in from Afghanistan and Iraq

It’s not necessarily the primary factor, but it’s worth noting that Iran is actually a relatively diverse country by the region’s standards. There are significant Kurdish, Azeri, Balochi, etc. minority groups, for whom the idea that they’re in the same “homeland” as the Persians is not necessarily given.

Iran is made of many different ethnicities, and there were reports of Arab militants that were brought in by the regime (it’s not hard to imagine given how reliant those organizations are on Iran for support).

It’s generally not very hard to incite violence across groups in the Middle East, especially when you consider how bad the outcome might be for the losing side. Case in point, the Alawites who lost control of Syria and are now persecuted by the new government.

From the previous uprisings, the regime usually sends Arab mercenaries like Hizbollah. They don't speak Farsi and have no connection to the people of Iran.

No. Shut up. This has been confirmed by countless Iranians