Blood-Soaked Maturity: Grief, Resistance, and Responsibility After the Mass Killings
After mass killings, this essay centers collective responsibility: rejecting reckless calls and war rhetoric by self-appointed leaders abroad, and turning grief into durable, life-protecting resistance.
The mass killing of unarmed protesters has opened a new wound in a society that has endured grief again and again. Lives were lost—each one a whole world of hope, relationships, futures, and possibility. Young people died who carried no weapons and had committed no “crime” other than demanding a normal, dignified life. No analysis, no theory, and no political horizon can make this loss lighter or give it meaning. The first and most necessary stance is deep solidarity with the families, the survivors, and a society forced—once again—to watch its children die in the streets.
This essay reads the massacre as a sign of the ruling power’s decay. As Hannah Arendt argues in On Violence, violence on this scale is not evidence of authority; it is a symptom of power’s erosion. A government that can no longer generate consent or legitimacy turns to physical elimination—at the cost of human lives whose only “offense” is to demand a livable life and the right to shape their own future.
The killings also follow a familiar pattern seen in November 2019 and again during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising and its aftermath: early repression, direct live fire, and an attempt to shatter the collective spirit before durable organization becomes possible. The purpose is not only to disperse crowds, but to break society’s confidence in its own ability to endure.
Yet if the violence exposes the regime’s naked truth, society’s response points toward something else: a painful, hard-won political maturity. A society that has grieved so often is gradually moving beyond pure rage toward harder questions: how can people stand their ground without each cycle of protest costing more lives? How can anger become a lasting force rather than a brief explosion that burns out? These questions are not a retreat from justice; they are born from responsibility toward those who have already been taken.
This is where critique of savior-style opposition politics becomes urgent. To mourn the dead is precisely to refuse to repeat the conditions that lead to slaughter. An opposition that speaks from afar—protected by geographic safety—while still invoking “the final moment,” “the decisive blow,” or “the fateful uprising,” risks turning real suffering into fuel for emotional storytelling. The warning is simple: reckless calls and miracle-promises do not honor the dead; they spend them.
War rhetoric deepens this danger. Speaking as if the street is a battlefield can function as a permission slip for the state to escalate and kill as if under “wartime” rules. If war is truly the chosen language, it also demands what war implies: planning, logistics, clear commitments, and responsibility for casualties—not slogans, guesses, and theatrical certainty. Romanticizing death is not courage. It is betrayal.
Against this, a different horizon of change is needed—one rooted in cumulative resistance and collective responsibility. Drawing on Asef Bayat’s work on politics under repression, the essay argues that lasting change often grows out of continuous, accumulated, and frequently nonviolent action embedded in everyday life. The street matters, but only when it forms part of a wider strategy: strikes, civil disobedience, symbolic actions, solidarity networks, and sustained social pressure. Saeed Madani’s emphasis on nonviolence reinforces the same point: a movement that drives the personal cost of action too high will inevitably hollow out from within.
For media outlets and political actors who claim to represent the movement, the responsibility is not to intensify the heat, but to help anger become strategic: to transmit experience, warn about the trap of violence, and strengthen forms of resistance that can endure. Every reckless call, every promise of miracle, and every romanticization of death deepens the gap between the street and politics—and risks reproducing the same cycle of blood.
And still, one bitter truth remains: despite devastating losses, Iranian society has not retreated. It is moving beyond a stage in which politics was reduced to waiting for a savior or betting everything on a final explosion. More than before, there is a collective conversation about tactics, cost, continuity, and shared responsibility. This conversation is itself a sign of political maturity—gained at a terrible price, but capable of preventing the endless repetition of massacre.
The lives that were lost will never return, and no victory can fill their absence. Loyalty to them is not expressed by repeating deadly paths. It is expressed by building the possibility of life—of politics, of change that is emancipatory and durable. A society that moves from grief to responsibility is a society that, slowly and at great cost, but in a real way, steps toward freedom—and does not step back.
