The protests that preceded the bombs
Latest Processing Gap
The silence: the protesters themselves — the shopkeepers, the women, the students who died in the streets of Isfahan and Tehran in January — have vanished from the narrative. They have been replaced by geopolitical actors. The revolution was theirs; the war is not. This substitution is not being processed by any major organ.
Appearances
The current war did not begin on February 28. It began on December 28, 2025, when Iranian shopkeepers — crushed by the rial's collapse — began the largest protests since the 1979 revolution, spreading to over 100 cities. The regime responded with massacres: HRANA documented 7,007 named deaths. On January 13, Trump told protesters: "Keep protesting. Help is on its way." The help arrived seven weeks later as cruise missiles. The processing has almost entirely separated the protests from the strike ...
The silence: the protesters themselves — the shopkeepers, the women, the students who died in the streets of Isfahan and Tehran in January — have vanished from the narrative. They have been replaced by geopolitical actors. The revolution was theirs; the war is not. This substitution is not being processed by any major organ.