Welcome to the latest installment of ‘Humanity: The Species That Shouldn’t Have Discovered Fire.’ Today’s leak from Iran isn’t some boring cache of emails regarding bureaucratic luncheon preferences; it is a high-definition gallery of what happens when a theocracy decides that your face is a redundant feature. Pictures of hundreds of people killed in a violent crackdown have surfaced, and the consensus is that the victims are so thoroughly disfigured that they have achieved the ultimate goal of any surveillance state: total, unidentifiable anonymity. It’s a masterclass in kinetic editing, performed with the kind of zeal only possible when you believe God is your primary editor.

The Iranian regime, a collection of geriatric men in robes who fear the sight of a woman’s hair more than they fear the heat of a thousand suns, has finally found a way to resolve the problem of individual identity. They didn’t just kill these people; they erased the very concept of them. By ensuring the victims could not be identified, they’ve turned a massacre into a generic dataset. This is the logical conclusion of ideological purity. If you aren’t with the program, you aren’t just wrong—you are a smear on the pavement. The efficiency is almost admirable, in a deeply nihilistic, soul-crushing way. They’ve managed to turn the human form into a Rorschach test for international diplomats to squint at while they decide which toothless resolution to draft next.

Naturally, the Western ‘Intelligentsia’ is reacting with its usual blend of frantic signaling and utter impotence. On the Left, we see the usual performance: a struggle to condemn a non-Western regime without feeling like they’re accidentally supporting a neo-colonialist narrative. They’ll post a black square, perhaps a hashtag in Farsi that they can’t actually read, and then return to complaining about the lack of oat milk in the faculty lounge. They want to ‘stand with’ the victims, but only if the standing is done in a way that doesn’t require them to put down their soy lattes or acknowledge that some cultures are, in fact, objectively worse than others when it comes to the whole ‘not-bludgeoning-protesters’ thing. Their outrage is a fashion accessory, updated seasonally to match the latest global tragedy.

Meanwhile, the Right is drooling at the opportunity to use these images as a recruitment poster for the next unnecessary war. They don’t care about the victims—half of these people couldn’t find Iran on a map if their offshore accounts depended on it. To them, these disfigured bodies are just more fuel for the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ fire, a convenient excuse to pivot away from their own domestic failures and fantasize about regime change that inevitably leads to even larger piles of unidentifiable meat. They’ll talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ with a straight face, while simultaneously supporting every domestic policy that ensures their own citizenry remains as compliant and brain-dead as possible. It’s a wonderful synergy of hypocrisy.

And let’s not forget the ‘International Community,’ that euphemism for a group of people who get paid six-figure salaries to express ‘grave concern.’ The United Nations will hold a meeting, there will be some very serious frowning, and perhaps a strongly worded letter will be sent into the void. This is the theater of the absurd. We live in a world where you can leak photos of a slaughterhouse masquerading as a nation-state, and the response is a series of meetings about how to properly frame the tragedy without hurting anyone’s trade deals. The victims are unidentifiable, which is perfect for the diplomats. It’s much easier to ignore a pile of bodies when you don't have to worry about correctly pronouncing their names at a press conference.

Ultimately, this leak tells us nothing we didn’t already know about the human condition. We are a species that excels at two things: killing each other over invisible sky-monsters and watching it happen through a four-inch screen while we wait for our Uber Eats. These victims, stripped of their faces and their futures, are the ultimate mirror for our own vacuity. They are unidentifiable because, in the grand scheme of global politics and digital voyeurism, they never really existed as people to begin with. They were just content—and now that the content has been ‘leaked,’ we’ll consume it, feel a momentary pang of something resembling guilt, and then scroll down to see a video of a cat playing a piano. The erasure is complete. The Mullahs won, the West watched, and the rest of us are just waiting for our own turn in the grinder.