Never Again Was Meant For Everyone

“Never again” wasn’t supposed to be a Jewish slogan. It was meant to be a human one. Yet as Iran’s rulers beat, jail, and shoot their own citizens behind a manufactured cloak of digital darkness, much of the world shrugs, looks away, or, even worse, outsources its conscience to the news cycle. When visibility fades, so does outrage. And regimes know it.

Over the past weeks, Iran has imposed nationwide internet blackouts, throttling mobile networks and cutting off external connectivity to near absolute zero, precisely when protests and funerals grow and the sound of gunfire needs witnesses. Independent monitors like NetBlocks and Cloudflare documented the collapse in traffic; Amnesty warned that the blackout itself is a human rights violation designed to “hide the true extent” of unlawful killings and mass arrests. 

We have seen this movie before. During the 2019 protests, the regime shut the country off for days while hundreds were killed. In 2022–23, after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, authorities again strangled the internet, paired with live fire, birdshot and mass detentions. The tactic has matured while the moral response has atrophied.

And while the wires go dark, the gallows do not. Iran remains among the world’s top executioners – hundreds in the first half of 2024 alone by UN count. Rights groups tracked a surge to the highest levels in years, including executions of minors. But what has been occurring in Iran this past week is surreal. Numbers of dead so high no-one can even count them. Survivors fleeing Iran tell of wanton machine-gun fire. Bodies in the streets.  

So yes, this op-ed points a finger. At us. At governments, institutions, and movements that filled the streets for Gaza but rarely muster more than a press release when Iranians bleed in the dark. (And let’s be honest: regime-engineered invisibility helps them avoid the discomfort of consistency.)

Iran’s rulers understand the psychology of spectatorship: people mobilize around what they can see. That’s why the blackout is the first weapon out of the sheath. As one reporter wrote this week, “the shutdown is choking the protest movement and limiting what can be seen, verified and reported beyond Iran’s borders.” When connectivity plunges to less than one percent of normal levels, it is not a technical issue; it is a strategy of impunity.

There is a grim historical rhyme here. In World War II, there was no internet, only rumors, cables, censored photographs, and delayed reports. The world “knew” about the Final Solution, but in fragments, and too often decided it didn’t know enough to act. Today, we are handed the same excuse on a fiber-optic platter: we don’t have verified images; it’s hard to confirm; it’s complicated. The absence of images has become the alibi for the absence of moral action.

During the Holocaust, Jewish leaders and Allied officials wrestled with pleas to bomb the gas chambers or the rail lines and bridges feeding Auschwitz. We know the history: aerial photographs existed; the Allies bombed IG Farben nearby; yet the rails weren’t targeted, and the transports continued. Historians debate feasibility, but the phrase “bomb the bridges to Auschwitz” endures because it names what was missing – the will to take the killing machine head on, even symbolically.

No, Iran is not Nazi-occupied Poland, and analogies should be used with caution. But the lesson is specific: when a regime builds a process for killing and crushing dissent, even partial disruption matters. Today’s bridges are digital and diplomatic – the security services’ free access to money, gear, jammers, spyware, and reputation. If you will not bomb (or sanction, or sever) those bridges, then don’t say “never again.”

Some will protest: We issue statements. We support UN resolutions. We care. But care is not a policy. In the span of days:

• Cut-offs: When credible monitors show state-engineered blackouts to mask violence, treat them as red-flag events triggering automatic, time-bound consequences (sanctions on telecom officials, export controls on DPI gear, immediate safe-harbor for digital activists). 

• Mass executions: Tie economic and cultural engagement to measurable declines in executions and the release of protesters.

• Visibility: Fund independent Farsi-language platforms, satellite and resilient mesh communications, and legal defense networks; amplify verified testimonies from families of the disappeared. 

If this sounds too “political,” consider what is already political: permitting a state to disappear its citizens from the internet, knowing what that blackout is for, and calling it a “domestic matter.” That is not neutrality. That is collaboration by euphemism.

Some will ask whether this is about Jewish fear. It is about human responsibility. Jews learned, at terrible cost, what happens when the machinery of atrocity is allowed to run uninterrupted while bystanders debate the technicalities. We said “never again,” and we meant it. If the world will not stop the atrocities in Iran, if it lets the blackout stand and the hangman’s calendar proceed, then you haven’t learned a thing.

Let me be plain:

• The regime’s digital blackouts are intentional tools to conceal unlawful killings and mass arrests. Treat them as escalatory acts that trigger immediate international responses. 

• The execution surge is not “internal policy”; it is a human emergency measurable in bodies.

• The world knows enough right now to act. It knew enough, often enough, back then, too. 

Here is a modest proposal for moral consistency without using deadly force:

1. Codify an Internet-Blackout Doctrine: Any nationwide shutdown during protests triggers automatic targeted sanctions on officials and enablers, plus export bans on surveillance and filtering tech. 

2. Bridge-Bombing, 2026 Edition:

   • Financial bridges: freeze assets and block transactions of organs involved in repression.

   • Technical bridges: interdict DPI hardware, spyware updates, and satellite-jamming gear.

   • Reputation bridges: suspend cultural showcases and sports diplomacy for agencies implicated in killings until monitors verify de-escalation. 

3. Visibility as Policy: Elevate verified casualty and detention numbers weekly in parliaments and the UN; allocate emergency funds for Farsi-language legal aid and secure comms. (If we could track every truck into Gaza, we can track every blackout in Iran.) 

The question isn’t whether we can save everyone. It’s whether we will refuse to be fooled by darkness, the darkness of 1944’s rail lines, and 2026’s fiber lines.

The bridges to Auschwitz were never bombed. We live with that shame. The bridges to today’s atrocities are in plain sight. If we won’t cut them, sanction them, jam them, then “never again” has become “never now.”

Good things,

Ari Sacher