The Iranian People Remain Best Hope for Regime Change
Newsweek July 21, 2025 by Tom Ridge
Forty-six years after Iran’s 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime’s true Achilles’ heel remains not foreign pressure or external war, but the growing power of its own people and their organized resistance. The mullahs’ rulers—unelected and unaccountable—face a citizenry that is increasingly emboldened and defiant. With every new wave of protest, every strike, and every act of civil disobedience, the regime’s response is not reform, but repression.
In recent years, the world has witnessed a dramatic upsurge in state violence. The regime executed 975 people last year—making Iran the world’s top per capita executioner. Many of these victims are political prisoners, dissidents, or members of marginalized communities. In 2022, a new nationwide uprising erupted in response to the murder of Mahsa Amini. Since then, tens of thousands have been arrested and tortured, and hundreds have been murdered, executed, or disappeared.
Truck drivers, teachers, retirees, farmers, and students have all taken to the streets. The regime answers not with dialogue, but with bullets, gallows, and censorship. Its so-called “public executions” are a desperate attempt to project strength and instill fear. But, as history shows, such spectacles only reveal how tenuous the regime’s hold on power truly is.
Perhaps nothing exposes the regime’s panic more than its own chilling rhetoric. On July 7, the state-run Fars News Agency went so far as to openly call for a “repeat” of the 1988 mass executions of political prisoners—most of them members of the principal Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). It described that atrocity as one of the Islamic Republic’s most “brilliant records in the fight against terrorism” and declared, “today is the time to repeat this successful historical experience.” No fewer than 30,000 political prisoners were executed and buried in unmarked mass graves, in what the United Nations has condemned as a crime against humanity and a genocide. Such a brazen call for mass murder is not a show of strength, but a confession of fear. The regime’s leaders, haunted by the growing influence of the MEK-affiliated Resistance Units’ reach inside Iran, now see terror and bloodshed as their only means of holding back the tide of change. Their paranoia is no longer hidden; it is broadcast from the headlines of state media.
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