Nora Jones

It's a theocracy.

They beat people.

They throw gay people off a building.

But then I also see videos of people in a coffee shop that looks like it could be out of Brooklyn or something.

new york city obviously maybe both of those things can coexist we did see uh can we put e1 up here which is um this is some video of people in iran who were celebrating the ceasefire clearly the regime has some level of control even in some of the more secular or maybe even secular is the wrong word can you describe to us what

life is like in Iran and especially how the regime, how people feel about the regime now in the aftermath of this war.

Yeah.

Let me start from the last part of your question that when a war starts, I think one of the most significant events that happens is the collapse of the distinction between the state and the nation.

Yes.

And this is what we witness today for the most part in Iran.

All these people who are celebrating on the streets today are not necessarily supporters of the state, but they are part of a nation that finds itself under brutal attack by Israel and the United States.

But also, I think one of the reasons that this war became palatable to many people was that there is this kind of erasure of civil society in Iran, which has been quite vibrant in the past at least 30 years.

And one of the reasons that people say that, okay,

The only solution now is an external intervention in Iranian affairs because whatever we did, we could not change society, which is absolutely not true.

A lot of things have changed in Iranian society in the past 35 years, especially at the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

And there is a vibrant civil society, a very vibrant publishing business.

In Tehran alone, 28 daily newspapers come out, and many of them quite critical of the government.

And there has always been a very strong women's movement.

in Iran, student movement, labor associations.

And if you want to compare Iranian society in 2020, 21, 22 to Iranian society of 1990, you see a huge and significant difference between these two societies.