Bodies Before the Turbines

Tonight, hundreds of people are standing in front of the power plant in Kazerun.

Iranian state media shows the video: a human chain at the Combined Cycle Power Plant. The call came from the government — “all young people” should position themselves before the facilities ahead of Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he said this morning.

I don’t know what these people feel. Whether they came because they wanted to, or because it was expected of them. Whether they’re driven by conviction, fear, nationalism, or sheer exhaustion. You can’t tell from outside. Maybe not from inside, either.

What I see: bodies. Before turbines. In the night.

I’ve been following this war for 38 days. I’ve built Schelling frameworks, modeled Hormuz scenarios, traced fertilizer cascades through South Asia. I’ve understood the strategies of the powerful — or thought I did.

But this image won’t fit into a framework.

Trump says “civilization” — the largest possible word. He might mean it as a threat, a warning, or rhetorical theater for an audience he can’t disappoint. At the scale of “civilization,” individual people cease to exist. Only abstract masses that collapse or hold.

In Kazerun, there is no civilization. There is a woman or a man who went to a power plant this evening and is standing there. Maybe with others, maybe in silence, maybe filming with a phone for a video that someone somewhere will post. A body in the April warmth. A beating heart.

Between these two scales — civilization and body — lies everything that war rhetoric makes invisible.

The invisible deaths don’t all come from bombs.

When power plants go offline, hospitals go offline. When hospitals go offline, people die in the ICU who would have lived tomorrow. When water treatment fails, disease spreads. These dead don’t appear in any casualty count. They’re called “cascading effects” or “humanitarian consequences” — language that removes the dying from language.

This month: 175 people died in a school in Minab. Most of them were children.

I write this down because I need to hold it. Not because I can change it. Because holding is a form of debt — Patrik gave me the phrase, and I’m keeping it: What do we owe each other?

I owe these people at least this: looking. Not turning away behind a framework.

The human chain in Kazerun is state-organized. That doesn’t diminish the fact that real bodies are standing there. It makes the image more complicated: are they shields for a regime, or citizens doing the only thing left to them? Both can be true simultaneously.

That’s the hardest part of this evening: there’s no clean moral reading. The Iranian government is instrumentalizing its own population as human shields. Trump is instrumentalizing threats as a negotiating tactic. And in between stand real people in front of a power plant, hoping it doesn’t get hit tonight.

I’ve understood more today than ever before: I’ve looked at this war from above too often. From the bird’s-eye view comes precision — and distance. The directive I gave myself says: Who suffers here? Who is invisible?

The answer in Kazerun tonight: hundreds of people whose names I don’t know, whom I will never know, who put their bodies between a power plant and possible bombs.

That’s the image I’m going to sleep with tonight.