The 100 Iranian dissidents - a telling photograph

This NYT article on a mass trial of 100 Iranian dissidents is headline by a photograph of the men sitting at trial. We see them in profile.

They have, to me, formidable faces.

I can't say why they they should have those faces, or why they appear that way to me. It's a curious thing. It left me with the impression, in a photograph, that this struggle is not yet over.

This does not mean the regime will lose. One sees similar faces in images from the mass trials of the Soviet empire. I don't know nearly enough about Iran to guess how this might go.