End of the Year Issue
Amena Elkayal
Images emerge from Iran with unsettling regularity: mothers mourning their children, bodies of Iranian martyrs killed by the IRGC during the crackdown in black bags, and quasi-apocalyptic scenes of explosions in Tehran. And then, just as quickly, they disappear from collective attention. Not because the suffering ends, but because the audience moves on.
We watch, we feel briefly, and then we move on...
Published in 2003, Regarding the Pain of Others is a critical reflection on how images of war and suffering shape public perception, especially for those who experience violence only from a distance. Its author, Susan Sontag, was an American writer, philosopher and cultural critic known for her incisive analyses of media, politics and representation. In this work, she questions whether witnessing suffering through photographs truly fosters empathy, or instead risks turning pain into something consumed, distant and ultimately ineffective in prompting action.
More than two decades ago, Susan Sontag described a dynamic that has since become central to contemporary media culture. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she argued that for those who have not experienced war, understanding it is “chiefly a product of the impact of images,” an understanding mediated not by direct encounter but by curated visual representations that shape perception in subtle yet powerful ways. In this sense, images do not merely document reality; they construct it, selecting, framing, and aestheticizing moments of suffering in ways that can both reveal and obscure. What appears immediate and authentic is often already interpreted, distanced from the conditions that produced it. Thus, images, she cautioned, do not necessarily bring viewers closer to reality. They can instead create a moral distance, where suffering is observed, even felt, but rarely acted upon.
"Compassion," she wrote, "is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers." In Iran, it is not only withering. It is being redirected.
Since late 2025, Iranians have faced one of the most severe waves of internal repression in the country’s history. Protests quickly escalated from a response to mounting economic pressures and social restrictions to challenging the Islamic Republic’s oppressive regime. The state's response turned into a massacre of its own people. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired on civilians, internet access was repeatedly restricted and hospitals struggled under the weight of casualties.
Since the protests started, at least 36,500 Iranians have been killed by their own government in a strikingly short span of time. This is alongside the 330,000 injured and tens of thousands detained and tortured by the IRGC. It has become one of the deadliest crackdowns in recent memory.
Yet despite the scale of the violence, global attention has remained fleeting. For a brief moment, the world looks. Then it looks away.
Sontag understood that images do not simply document suffering, they shape how it is valued. Some forms of violence are amplified, others minimized or rationalized. Iran presents a particularly uncomfortable case. Because the Iranian government positions itself in opposition to Israel and in support of Palestine, some observers adopt a very reductive logic: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Within this framework, the regime's repression is treated as secondary, or even justifiable. It reduces a complex national struggle to a crude binary as if the Iranian people were merely pieces on a board rather than a society with its own grievances, hopes and agency. This serves geopolitical convenience, not their lived reality.
This is not solidarity. It is selective morality. Opposing Israeli policies does not require silence about Iran. Supporting Palestinian rights does not necessitate overlooking state violence against Iranians. These positions are not mutually exclusive, yet public discourse often treats them as though they were. The result is a hierarchy of suffering in which Iranian lives are weighed against geopolitical narratives and too often found inconvenient.
Repeated exposure to violence, Sontag warned, risks dulling moral response. "As one can become habituated to horror in real life," she wrote, "one can become habituated to the horror of certain images."
We saw this in Palestine, where after October 7, the world watched in horror, only to later look away as 75,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. We saw it in South Lebanon, where Israeli forces have been continuously carrying out extensive military attacks, just for this to turn into a week-long trend. We saw it in Ukraine, once front-page news, now pushed to the margins despite ongoing civilian killings. And yet, international attention has faded, even as the suffering continues.
Now we are seeing the exact same scenario in Iran. What begins as outrage slowly curdles into numbness. The images keep coming—so many that the mind, in self-defense, stops feeling each one. Sontag understood this not as callousness, but as a kind of moral exhaustion. And that, perhaps, is the deeper violence: not just the bombs, but the ease with which we learn to live with them.
Today, that habituation is reinforced by the architecture of digital media. Disturbing images compete with entertainment, commentary and distraction. The easiest response is not engagement but avoidance –users scroll past before a video even finishes. They skip images that feel overwhelming, or promise to return later, but rarely do. The result is a fragmented attention span, in which suffering is encountered in brief, intense bursts, never long enough to demand sustained reflection or action, fulfilling what Sontag once anticipated.
When Iranians themselves respond to events, the pattern shifts. Indifference gives way to judgment. Following the death of dictator Ali Khamenei, which marked the death of the regime’s central figure, reactions within Iran were ones of open celebration. They reflected a very new hope towards a better future.
Yet many outside observers —most of whom had previously remained silent on Iran— were quick to dismissively criticize, describing Iranians as naive, misinformed, or manipulated.
This reductive framing arrives from multiple directions, but one of its most striking iterations comes from within the region itself. There is an irony in hearing, from certain quarters of the Arab world, lectures on the dangers of misplaced hope. This is, after all, a region that has known the weight of foreign intervention intimately—the devastation of Iraq after the American invasion, the carve-up of sovereignties, the long catastrophes of occupation. One might expect that such experience would yield a certain humility, a reluctance to presume that a distant observer knows a people's political reality better than they know it themselves. And yet, in the case of Iran, the script flips. Those who have endured the wreckage of foreign intervention now presume to tell Iranians that their celebration of a dictator's death is a mark of naivety.
This condescension reveals a failure of imagination. It cannot fathom that an Iranian political consciousness might exist that is neither pro-regime nor a puppet of foreign interests. It reduces a population of nearly 90 million people, shaped by decades of revolution, war, and the lived experience of theocratic rule, to a simple binary: either they are with the Islamic Republic, or they are doing the bidding of its enemies.
To dismiss their reactions is not analysis; it is paternalism. It suggests that Iranians can be seen, but not heard.
The truth is more complex and more human. The Iranian people do not want war. They have watched their country teeter on the edge of regional conflagration. They have seen their resources funneled toward foreign militias while their own economy crumbled. The prospect of a war imposed from outside—whether by the United States, Israel, or any other power—is not something they desire. They know that the first casualties would be themselves. But neither do they want the regime they live under. This is the duality that the world refuses to hold. To be anti-regime in Iran is not to be a warmonger. To celebrate the death of Khamenei is not to invite foreign intervention. It is to express a yearning for the end of a system that has, for nearly half a century, treated its own citizens as enemies. The Iranian position is not a logical contradiction. It is a political stance forged in lived experience: a rejection of both the tyranny of the mullahs and the tyranny of outside powers. It is the desire for a path that belongs to Iranians alone.
Sontag is very skeptical about a certain universal “we”—that unspoken assumption that the viewer, the reader, the distant observer belongs to a single moral community with the one being observed— often invoked in discussions of suffering.
She questions who exactly is included in this collective? The "we" that watches Iran from afar does so from a position of distance and safety. It can choose when to look and when to look away. Those inside Iran do not have that luxury. And yet, from this distance, external audiences often claim authority over interpretation, over morality, over what Iranian suffering signifies. Sontag challenges this assumption directly, arguing that the perceived bond created by viewing suffering is often illusory. Rather than fostering responsibility, it can reinforce a sense of innocence: we have seen, therefore we have done enough.
But witnessing without responsibility is not solidarity. It is spectatorship.
The challenge is not simply to look, but to look without reducing. Iran demands this kind of attention. It requires acknowledging multiple truths at once: that the Islamic Republic is deeply repressive, that geopolitical conflicts shape how its actions are perceived, and that Iranian voices cannot be reduced to external narratives. Above all, it requires resisting the impulse to use human suffering as evidence in unrelated political arguments. Because when attention is conditional and when suffering is recognized only if it aligns with existing beliefs, it ceases to be empathy. It becomes selective engagement.
And in that moment, Sontag's warning becomes unavoidable. If looking changes nothing, if it merely reinforces what viewers already believe, then the image is not an appeal. It becomes a mirror, and we learn to admire our own reflection while the world continues to burn beyond the frame. That is the moment witnessing fails. That is when we cease to be participants in a shared moral world and become something lesser—eyes open, hearts absent, watching devastation unfold without ever stepping inside it, and calling it awareness.
Photo Source: flickr by Ted Eytan