The BBC, that venerable bastion of state-funded tut-tutting, has recently graced us with a leak from the bowels of a Tehran mortuary. It’s a digital scrapbook of the damned: hundreds of faces, frozen in the permanent surprise of a state-sponsored exit from the mortal coil. These are the casualties of Iran’s ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests, a movement that sought to trade a headscarf for a bit of dignity and ended up trading a heartbeat for a slot on a cold metal tray. It is, quite frankly, the most honest piece of journalism to emerge from the region in years, if only because dead bodies are the only things in the Middle East that don’t lie to you for political gain.

Let’s start with the perpetrators: the geriatric theocracy of Iran. There is a certain pathetic desperation in a regime that feels so threatened by a few stray locks of hair and a demand for basic autonomy that it resorts to mass-producing corpses. The 'Morality Police'—a title that deserves its own wing in the Hall of Orfwellian Irony—have proven once again that their brand of morality is strictly measured in the amount of lead required to silence a teenager. These bearded fossils, clutching their prayer beads with hands stained by the very blood they claim to be purifying, represent the ultimate evolution of the fragile ego. If your god is so powerful, one wonders why he requires a battalion of thugs to beat women to death for the crime of existing in public. It’s not theology; it’s a protection racket with better hats.

But don’t let the West off the hook for their role in this performative tragedy. The international community’s response to these leaked photos has been as predictable as it is useless. We’ve seen the usual suspects in Washington and London dust off their 'Strongest Possible Terms' templates. They condemn, they sanction, they tweet. Oh, how they tweet. There is nothing quite as nauseating as watching a well-fed Western politician use a photograph of a murdered twenty-year-old as a backdrop for a stump speech about 'democratic values'—values they’re more than happy to trade for oil or strategic silence when the murderer is an ally. The hypocrisy is so thick you could choke on it, yet we are expected to applaud their 'solidarity.' Solidarity, in this context, is a hashtag that expires in forty-eight hours.

On the Left, we have the 'anti-imperialist' crowd, those intellectual lightweights who find themselves in the awkward position of having to ignore a massacre because criticizing the Iranian regime might accidentally align them with the 'Great Satan' of the United States. They’ll talk about 'contextual nuances' and 'regional stability' while ignoring the fact that four hundred families had to identify their children by looking at digital files provided by a brave leaker. To these people, the victims aren’t human beings; they’re inconvenient data points that muck up their tidy narrative of Western-centric evil. If the victim isn't being oppressed by someone in a suit and a tie, the Left doesn't quite know which folder to put the outrage in.

And then there’s the Right, the chest-thumping 'freedom fighters' who see these photos as nothing more than a convenient excuse to lobby for another forever-war. They don’t care about the women of Iran; they care about the optics of regime change and the delicious prospect of testing out new drone technology. They’ll cry crocodile tears for the 'brave protesters' while simultaneously drafting policies that would see those same protesters banned from seeking asylum in their own countries. It’s a cynical game of chess where the pawns are real people, and the grandmasters are all safely tucked away in bunkers thousands of miles from the smell of formaldehyde.

The mortuary photos themselves are a masterclass in bureaucratic brutality. The sheer volume of the dead suggests a factory-like efficiency in the state's crackdown. This wasn't a series of unfortunate accidents; it was an administrative directive. The families, forced to scroll through images of the slaughtered to find their kin, are participants in a ritual of humiliation designed to remind them that the state owns their grief just as much as it owned their children's lives. It is the banality of evil in high-definition.

In the end, we are left with the crushing reality that nothing will change. The regime will continue to pray and kill, the West will continue to posture and trade, and the public will continue to scroll past these horrors in search of something more palatable. These faces in the Tehran mortuary are not a wake-up call; they are a snooze button. They represent the high cost of human stupidity and the absolute certainty that, given the choice between progress and power, the men in charge will choose power every single time—even if they have to stack the bodies to the ceiling to reach it. We are a species that deserves its own extinction, and these photos are just the latest evidence for the prosecution.