I want to speak in a plain voice, because plain voices are what survive when the noise clears. I want to speak without slogans or banners, without the heavy furniture of ideology piled between us and the truth.

Not because ideas don’t matter, but because they matter so much that they deserve honesty. Something is breaking in Iran, but not in the way television prefers.

Not with a clean soundtrack, not with heroes who glow in the dark, not with villains who conveniently explain everything. What is breaking is quieter and heavier.

It lives in bodies. It lives in exhausted mornings and sleepless nights.

It lives in the long walk home when the streets are empty. People like to ask whether this is a revolution.

Others ask whether it is foreign sabotage. These questions are comforting because they are familiar.

They give the mind something neat to hold. But familiarity is not the same as truth.

And comfort is often the enemy of understanding. What we are watching is not a story that begins with ideology.

It begins with survival. With wages that no longer cover food.

With prices that rise faster than you can breathe. With electricity that cuts out, water that tastes wrong, and air that burns the lungs.

With work that disappears and dignity that follows it out the door. Politics arrived later, as it often does, after the body had already made its decision.

A young person does not wake up wanting to overthrow a system. A young person wakes up wanting a future.

When that future is missing long enough, the absence becomes unbearable. And absence, like hunger, makes demands.

This is why the streets filled up so quickly. Not because everyone suddenly agreed on what should come next, but because everyone knew what could not continue.

Rural towns, border cities, neglected neighbourhoods, places that have lived through a quiet crisis for years, recognised the moment immediately. They had been living in it already.

The budget changes did not invent their suffering. They confirmed it.

It was not a shared dream that brought people together, but a shared refusal. This is important, and it makes many observers uncomfortable.

We like movements with programmes, with manifestos, with tidy futures attached. But history does not always wait for our preferences.

Sometimes people move together simply because it has become impossible to stay still. Iran, “il massacro dei manifestanti non bloccherà il cammino verso la libertà” The state responded the way it has learned to respond.

First, with small confessions. Economic mistakes.

Mismanagement. A promise to fix things later.

Then, when those words collapsed under their own weight, power shifted to where it always goes in such situations: to the men with guns, uniforms, and permission. What followed was not confusion.

It was clarity. Internet blackouts are not misunderstandings.

Shooting into crowds is not a policy error. Raiding hospitals is not a panic response.

These are decisions. They show, very clearly, how a state understands its relationship to the people beneath it.

At the same time, the outside world provided a convenient mirror. There were threats from the United States and statements from Israel.

The old language of war returned, eager and familiar. This did not create the uprising, but it wrapped repression in a flag.

It allowed killing to be renamed defence. And once killing has a name that sounds respectable, it becomes easier to repeat.

Per l’Iran i giorni più neri: migliaia di morti nelle proteste e incognite come macigni sul suo futuro This does not mean that the regime is about to fall. Power, especially armed power, does not evaporate because it is unjust.

The security apparatus is deep, wealthy, and practised. It knows how to wait.

It knows how to exhaust a society without breaking itself. The danger is not sudden collapse, but something slower and crueller.

A tightening from above. Or a long season of instability where people bleed without gaining freedom, where emergency becomes normal, and where hope is postponed again and again until it no longer knows how to speak.

When collective hope collapses, imagination does not disappear; it shrinks and becomes urgent. It looks for rescue instead of justice, grabbing whatever symbol promises strength, even if that symbol has nothing to do with liberation.

This is how names begin to circulate. Not as programmes, not as plans, but as cries.

When someone shouts a name like “the Shah” or “Trump,” they are not necessarily describing a political vision. Very often, they are describing exhaustion.

They are saying, in the only language left to them, “Make this end.” This is not nostalgia. It is suffocation.

And suffocated people do not write blueprints for the future. They look for air.

At the same time, another set of numbers keeps rising quietly, away from the cameras: suicide rates, depression, a sense of being trapped. These figures are often treated as a separate story, seen as medical or private matters.

That is a mistake. They belong in the same story as the protests.

The same young person who runs towards danger in the street goes home afterwards. The same body that resists baton blows collapses on a bed.

When the internet is cut off, when friends disappear, when tomorrow looks exactly like today, but worse, the fall can be steep. It can end in silence, in screams, or in death.

These are not personal failures. They are political facts written on human flesh.

This is why the obsession with leaders is so destructive. Iran is a chorus, often dissonant, sometimes contradictory, always vibrant.

Insisting that this society “needs a leader” misunderstands why people took to the streets in the first place. They came to insist that they exist.

Reducing this complexity to a fake duel between Khamenei and Pahlavi replaces real-life politics with a cartoon. And cartoons are useful, because they make violence easier to explain.

The same logic applies to the stories about Mossad and the CIA. These tales serve two masters at once.

They flatter the regime by portraying it at the centre of a global drama, and they flatter foreign powers by suggesting omnipotence. But above all, they erase Iranian agency.

If foreign intelligence controlled events, the mass killings across hundreds of cities would be impossible to explain. If such networks were real, a security state that tracks teachers and workers with such meticulous attention to detail would have arrested at least one of these supposed agents in advance.

The story collapses under the slightest pressure, but it survives because it is useful. Once protesters are renamed “foreign agents,” their deaths stop raising questions.

Violence becomes logical. Memory becomes dangerous.

This is nothing new. The Islamic Republic used the same language in the late 1980s to justify mass executions.

Words prepared the ground. Bodies followed.

What makes this moment especially bitter is the added layer of hypocrisy. The same regime and its supporters who spent years denouncing Israeli and American narratives about “human shields” now eagerly cite Israeli media and US politicians when it suits repression at home.

Truth, in this economy, is not something to be defended. It is something to be rented.

Against all of this stands a simple, fragile fact: people are still insisting on being human, even when they are afraid or confused. That insistence is not a programme, but it is a beginning.

It deserves protection, not simplification. It deserves criticism, not erasure.

It deserves a future that can finally name itself. Until then, the streets will continue to speak in many voices, some clear, some broken.

And the task, for anyone who claims to care about freedom, is to listen long enough to hear what they are really saying.