Organically, Iranians have formed a collective resistance that surpasses the state’s capacity to crack down on it.By Shay Khatiri, Middle East ForumMuslims commemorate the dead forty days after they die, but with growing secularization, few Iranians have observed the tradition in recent years. That has now changed.February 19, 2026, marked the fortieth-day anniversary of the security forces’ slaughter of protesters. Some slain protesters came from religious families, who would have honored the fortieth-day mourning anyway, but even the secular are doing it as an excuse to continue the protest movement.A touching event at a high school reveals a larger truth about Iranian society.On the fortieth day after his son’s death, a teacher entered the classroom. Students, wearing black, stood silently, a revolutionary anthem playing in the background.The teacher’s son’s photos were projected on a whiteboard, and a candle burned on the teacher’s desk.This would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Then, most people’s biggest fear was regime retaliation, with suspicion that every public setting included either an informant or the child of a security official.This began to change over the past decade. In 2019, a friend bought a sculpture of Reza Shah at a store. He had seen pictures of such artifacts online and asked the shop owner if he had any.After considering him for a few moments, the vendor took him to the back and showed him his collection of illegal items.Previously, few customers would have had the gumption to ask, and no seller would have kept such items at his shop, let alone offer to sell them to a stranger.There must have been demand for the sculptor to keep them for sale. The incident was perhaps a sign that society’s members had begun to trust each other as fellow revolutionaries.Yet, fearing the regime persisted. On the third anniversary of the 2019 protests, during which the security forces killed 1,500 people, a few university students honored the uprising by reproducing a Green Movement protest anthem.The new production stood out in two ways. First, the lyrics were modified to transform the song from an election grievance to a revolutionary one. Second, the video showed only the participants’ feet to shield them from retaliation.In the recent high school class video, the students performed the second, revolutionary version of the anthem. A student then gave a speech to honor the dead, with his face visible.The teacher and his colleague in the classroom made no effort to hide their faces, either. This exposed the rest of the class who participated, but nobody seemed to mind.This signifies a monumental change among Iranians that predates the recent protests. Last year, the regime murdered someone for burning Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s picture on camera.In response, Iranians started a viral campaign doing the same with his picture, and many did not bother to hide their identities. Instead, they publicized this by sending their videos to opposition broadcasters.The balance of fear has changed. As a Persian poem goes, “If there is a law to arrest the drunkard, they will have to jail the whole city.”Organically, Iranians have formed a collective resistance that surpasses the state’s capacity to crack down on it. There are not enough prison cells to make a dent in the movement, let alone crack down on it.People still fear the Islamic Republic, but social ostracism is a much bigger concern. Few people are still scared of showing their faces when they condemn the regime.People are increasingly at ease to participate in collective resistance, such as classroom protests, attending funerals, leading anti-regime chants, and going on strike.The cowards in society always lean toward the strongest force. A decade ago, the cowards feared participating in anti-regime activities. Today, they fear skipping them.The regime still has the guns, but social forces suggest that they are becoming a match for bullets.Especially with two U.S. aircraft carriers now positioned to threaten the Islamic Republic, nobody wants to be remembered as the person who did not participate in protests, in case the regime falls.The post Iranians fear social ostracism more than the regime – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.