From Gdańsk to Tehran: People Uniting for Freedom Can Break the Grip of Tyranny

Note: In remarks at Freedom House’s Annual Awards and 85th Anniversary celebration last night, actor, producer, and human rights advocate Nazanin Boniadi reaffirmed that courage and unity can overcome tyranny in Iran and around the world. 

Freedom House stands with the people of Iran and calls on democratic governments, civil society, and freedom’s defenders everywhere to support the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom and the right to define their own future.

Read Boniadi’s full remarks below. 

In 1981, a shipyard electrician in Gdańsk, Poland, was arrested under martial law. His crime was helping workers organize. His movement—Solidarity—was crushed and banned by name. The Soviet bloc appeared immovable.

Nine years later, Lech Wałęsa was sworn in as president of a free Poland.

I begin there because Freedom House stood with the Polish people in 1981. It documented abuses. And it understood something the world repeatedly forgets: A regime’s ability to crush a movement is not the same thing as its ability to erase its cause.

Tonight, the people of Iran are living through their own dark chapter. For nearly half a century, Iranians have endured repression, censorship, corruption, and state violence under the Islamic Republic. This year, that repression reached terrifying new heights, with the mass slaughter of protesters credibly estimated in the tens of thousands. But instead of multilateral humanitarian intervention, Iranians are now trapped between foreign firepower and intensified domestic repression. Promises to end tyranny have faded.

An entrenched regime is accelerating executions under the cover of the longest state-imposed internet blackout in history. More than 630 people have been executed in Iran so far this year. Despite economic collapse and immense public suffering, the regime has sharply increased spending on state media, ideological institutions, and its security apparatus—as always, prioritizing its own survival over the well-being of its people.

That reality reveals something crucial: The Islamic Republic fears the Iranian people more than any foreign power. And like all dictatorships, it does not survive on repression alone. It survives by engineering distrust. Disinformation, smear campaigns, and digital harassment are all designed to fracture opposition movements before they can unify around shared democratic principles. Low-trust societies become easier to govern through fear.

According to the World Values Survey Iran is among the lowest-trust societies in the world. Distrust is both a product of authoritarianism and one of its most powerful tools. And yet, as the world once again fixates on geopolitics, the rights and aspirations of the Iranian people once again risk falling by the wayside.

That’s why Freedom House’s Iran initiative is so urgent. Support for freedom in Iran cannot begin and end with military strategy or nuclear negotiations. It requires restoring internet access, freeing political prisoners, supporting civil society, countering propaganda and transnational repression, and investing in long-term accountability and justice. 

So what do we do?

We go back to the shipyard in Gdańsk. Solidarity succeeded because it chose principles over factions. It built trust where the state had seeded fear. Workers, intellectuals, clergy, and students chose cooperation and shared purpose over ideological purity. That lesson matters profoundly right now—not only for Iran, but for all of us living in democracies increasingly vulnerable to polarization.

When dictators divide us with propaganda, we must unite around facts. When they tether us to factions, we must anchor ourselves in principles. When they weaponize distrust, let our answer be dignity. Because if division through fear is their superpower, then trust through shared humanity must become ours.

Lech Wałęsa spent years being told history was against him. The military was too powerful. The Soviets were too entrenched. The West was too distracted. But authoritarian systems often appear permanent—until suddenly they are not.

The courage of the Iranian people is undeniable. Whether we will answer it with equal moral courage remains a defining question of our time.