Nora Jones

And so one of the reasons that we don't hear about this, we always hear that Iran is a totalitarian state and people cannot breathe.

People are afraid of voicing their dissent, which is absolutely not true.

I'm not saying that, you know, it's not a rosy picture of Iran, but it's a picture that

that highlights all these efforts and struggles that people have been doing.

And sometimes they gain some grounds, sometimes they lose some grounds.

People are arrested, people are executed, people are exiled.

But nevertheless, it doesn't mean that we are facing a very stagnant and static society.

And I think that's...

quite an important thing that it's usually erased from the mass media in the West, in Europe and in the US.

And in my own scholarship, I always try to highlight that.

But whenever you highlight that, then it sounds like you're defending.

You just mentioned execution.

Yeah, I mean, how does the protest movement fit into that?

I'm sure that's going to be the most, you know, people will say, well, how can that be true if we just had this major protest movement?

No, I mean, the protests always happen in Iran.

It's not a new thing.

And every two or three years since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, we have a major protest movement in Iran.

Sometimes the government is flexible enough to accommodate some of those demands.

Sometimes if they feel an existential threat, they respond with brutality and violence and violence.

And this most recent protest in December and January, for example, it started as a protest of economic grievances.