This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

When protests ignited across Iran in December, and reports emerged that the regime was killing thousands of protesters. Donald Trump

threatened to intervene then and there. He did not. But the Pentagon began building up a huge

military presence around the Gulf region. And meanwhile, the regime, it turns out, may have killed as

many as 30,000 of its own people, according

to some estimates.

Iran has seen huge protests in the country before, and the regime has responded with violence

before.

But this time seems something of a different order of magnitude.

Some Iranians who oppose the regime have been in the crazy position of hoping for the

U.S. to strike, to bomb their own country, even if it leads to full-scale war.

Reporter Kora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with people in Iran about what

that could all mean. Now, we've altered or overdub their voices to protect these people from reprisal.

It is the topic of the past 40 days.

It is the topic that every two Iranian would speak about when they would ever meet.

One of the people who spoke with me as a young man who works in a hospital about four hours north of Tehran.

I mean, I'm having a very difficult time processing all these different thoughts because on theory,

like on paper, I would be against a foreign invention. I would

believe that democracy would only come from within. But looking back at what happens,

where are these criminals going to go? Like, we're not going to vote their way, not a million years.

This hospital worker was stationed in two different emergency wards

...