Read the full transcript of professor of political science Dr. Roy Casagranda’s lecture titled “A Political History of Contemporary Iran”, Nov 11, 2022.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Roy Casagranda: Is this my — this is the first applause I’ve ever got. So that’s weird. Alright. So what I’m gonna do tonight is I’m going to do an attempt to give you kind of a a good overview of what has happened to Iran over the course of the last hundred and twenty five years. My goal in starting that far back is to give you some background, but my my emphasis is gonna probably be in the last forty five years as opposed to focusing on the front end of it.
So let’s just jump into it because there’s no point in in delaying. I wanna start this story firmly nested in empire. And of course, in this case, the empire I’m talking about is the British Empire. Because the Brits are gonna play this really crucial role in shaping what Iran looks like today. And the reason is is because Iran I’m sorry.
Britain finds itself in a really awkward position. That awkward position is the following. In the late eighteen hundreds, so at the end of the nineteenth century, the British come to the conclusion that oil is the new coal and that the future is definitely gonna be oil. And the problem the British have is the Dutch have just bought their oil company. The British oil company was actually originally an antique dealership called Shell.
And the Brit, the Dutch company, Royal Dutch bought Shell and had 51% controlling interest. So at that moment then, there’s essentially two mega oil companies on the planet. The reason there’s only two is because The United States has been overrun by a single oil company. One oil company has taken out all the other ones and it’s Standard Oil. So by the end of the nineteenth century, Standard Oil owns 95% of The US oil industry, and Royal Dutch Shell dominates the rest of the world.
Although Standard Oil is going overseas too, so it’s it’s these two companies. Britain has had a long intertwined history with the Dutch, especially after William of Orange becomes king of England. And so it’s not that the Dutch are their enemy, and of course, they have a good relationship with us, so it’s not that we’re their enemy. This isn’t they’re they’re not worried about, oh, at some point, the Dutch in The United States will betray them. They’re they’re worried about what happens if something happens to The Netherlands.
What happens if The United States elects some nut job president and they derail themselves? They’re not we can’t rely on others. We have to rely on ourselves. And they’re thinking you can make a lot of money off of oil if we’re right that oil is the future. The British don’t know where to start, and then somebody comes up with a genius idea.
What if you just read a bunch of history? And as you’re reading the history books, you’ll find a reference to prior use of oil. And then once you find that reference, then you just go to that place and look for oil. Because in end of nineteenth century, the way you look for oil is you looked at the ground and then you just went for a walk. You’re you’re if you got really lucky, you stepped in it and it squished.
There was so much oil on the planet, you could just step in it. Isn’t that weird to think about? But odds are you’re not gonna get that lucky. What you’re then looking for is black shale or black limestone. Those are really porous rocks.
They’ll pull the oil that’s underneath into them and they’ll go black. And that means there’s probably oil there. And the way you’ve got to the oil was a shovel and a pick and you literally dug a well like you would dig a water well. And hopefully, there’s a little bit of pressure and the oil is just coming to the surface on its own. So that’s what the Brits need to do.
The problem is, where do they even start? The planet’s big. They own a huge chunk of it, but it’s still big. And so the history books give them the answer. A thousand years ago, the Middle East lit its streets up at night using oil lamps, which meant that medieval Arabs had oil, which meant there was probably oil somewhere in the Middle East.
So that’s where they decided to start looking. In anticipation of this, the Brits decide to expand their presence in the Arabian Gulf. Now, they already had a it’s also called the Persian Gulf. I’m using the Arabian Gulf in this particular case because at the time the Brits were using it that way. I’m not gonna take sides in the argument about whether it’s the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.
Perso Arabian Gulf? No, it won’t work. That’s terrible. So the reason Brits have an have a presence already in the Arabian Gulf is the following. The Arab states that are today The UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman had pirate fleets, and those pirate fleets were operating in the Arabian Sea capturing British ships going back and forth between India and the British Empire.
And it was driving the Brits Brits absolutely bonkers. So in the early nineteenth century, the Brits either militarily engaged them or diplomatically engaged them, and they make a deal to get them to stop attacking British shipping. And they one one of the deals ends up then the British end up naming that space the Trucial Coast because of the truce they made with those Arab pirates. And then that state, it got its independence from the British, renamed itself the United Arab Emirates. So the Brits are already on the ground there, but they decide to expand.
And the place they’re thinking about ends up being Kuwait.
The Qajars like to to spend their days in opium opium dens. They were really into opium. Like that was their thing. Opium in the morning, opium the afternoon, opium in the evening. They just they really liked.
So the Brit Darcy approaches the British the Iranian government and the the ruler at the time was a Qajar named Musafaradin Shah, and he strikes a deal with him. Here’s the deal. In the event that they do find oil, the Shah, the Qajar ruler of Iran, will get the equivalent in today dollars of about 2 and a half million, just cash. In return, he’ll also and he’ll also get 16% concession. So for every $100 that the British pull out of oil, the the Shah will get 16 of those dollars and the Brits get 84 of those dollars.
That’s an incredible deal. Like, you want Darcy negotiating every deal. We need to dig this guy up, find his DNA, and clone him. Usually, it’s a fifty fifty split. It’s Iranian oil, British effort.
You split it fifty fifty. This is an eighty four sixteen split. Or here’s another possibility, always negotiate with people who are high on opium. One of the two, not sure which. Darcy actually runs into a lot of trouble.
He doesn’t quite get what he wants in the beginning. His company is basically on the verge of going bankrupt. Long story short, they end up creating the Anglo Persian oil company out of this thing, and it does find oil. The Nazi was right. He was in the right place.
They find oil and they don’t find a little bit. They find a lot. The Brits are filthy rich just off of this one event. They’re so thrilled. It’s great.
It’s the best thing ever. As World War one is approaching, the British realize or they find out that the Ottomans have just found oil. And the Ottomans have found oil in what is today Northern Iraq. And so the Brits approach the Ottomans and say, look, we want that oil too. We want it all.
And the Ottoman Empire goes, sorry, we already made a deal with the Germans. And so the British go, okay, we got your number. We got your number. We’re gonna take you down if there’s ever a World War one. So the British and the French start planning for World War one.
The reason they’re planning for World War one is because they’re gonna make it happen. The British especially are interested in this. In part because the British have a problem, another one. Oil was the first one. They’ve crossed that hurdle, but they have another problem.
It’s called the German Empire. This brand new state, because Germany is brand new. It was made in 1871. It’s ninety five years younger than The United States Of America. You’re young when you’re a century younger than The United States Of America.
This brand new empire that came out of nowhere basically is a super industrial state making a massive navy. And the German ships are, of course, quality ships that are probably totally over engineered. And the British ships are good, they’re just not German quality. And so the British every time the Germans build a ship, the British build two ships to make sure. Because the British know if the German Navy ever matches the British Navy, then so the British are stuck in this arms race with Germany.
And both states are charging, they’re careening towards bankruptcy. They can’t keep building ships like this. They’re just turning them out one at a time well, two at a time for the Brits. It’s too expensive. So the Brits know something has happen to knock Germany down a notch.
And so they’re sort of gearing their minds towards eventually doing that. World War one, of course, will break out. Just for the record, as it’s as it’s unfolding, it it unfolds for the dumbest reason on earth. Somebody gets assassinated, like who cares? I mean, I think, you know, at the end of the day really that you’re gonna start a whole global war for four years that’s gonna kill thirteen million people.
For one dude, who cares? Anyway, he wasn’t even he was Archduke, like, forget about it. He wasn’t even like an emperor or something. As it as the declarations of war are going back and forth leading towards this inevitable end, Is it just me or is there a feedback thing going on? No?
Only I hear it? What? Oh, it’s the air conditioning. Okay. Cool.
The Kaiser realizes this is a terrible disaster mistake and he starts trying to figure out a way to back out of it. And he’s like approaching the Brits going, wait, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? And the Brits are like, no. No.
It’s too late. We’re doing this. We wanted this. This is gonna happen. The British sit down with the French and they work out a deal called Sykes Picot.
Sykes is the Brit. Picot is the French guy. They consult no one else. This is just an Anglo French deal made in a vacuum. Vacuum.
And even though it’s going to involve a bunch of other actors. They basically whip out a crayon. They take a map of the Middle East and they just start drawing off chunks of stuff. The Ottoman Empire is the prize. They’re gonna disassemble the Ottoman Empire.
You got to remember, the Ottoman Empire was a global superpower at one point that was the rival of every European state and was had higher tech than any European state. But the Ottoman Empire ran into a problem and that problem really tore the Ottoman Empire up. And that problem originates in philosophical argument that actually starts in the eleventh century AD. And the argument is, how much philosophy and science and math really is enough? Is there a way to have too much of those things?
Does it distract from the greater truths that religion affords? And the result is is that the Muslim world now has a conservative movement that starts in the 11 at the end of the eleventh century. And by the time we get to the Ottoman Empire, that conservative movement is actually actively trying to stop the Ottoman Empire from innovating too quickly. So Ottoman rulers will take over, they’ll try to put through a bunch of reforms because they’re trying to change technology or behavior or economics or the military, and then they’ll get pushed back mostly from the military and their reforms will go nowhere. And so the Ottoman Empire gets bogged down in this this argument about whether religion should be at the center of this or politics should be at the center of this.
And as a result, the Ottoman Empire starts to fall behind Europe instead of staying ahead of Europe. By the time we get to World War one, the Ottoman Empire is the old man. Right? It’s it’s done. It’s finished itself.
It’s shrunk dramatically. It doesn’t have the tech to keep up. Here, let me give you a taste of what I mean by this. Not only did the Ottomans put Vienna under siege twice, the second time Vienna was done. The Ottomans almost took over Austria like it’s insane.
What was to stop them from just plowing through the Holy Roman Empire after that? Taking out Italy. Austria was the linchpin. If they could grab Italy, the rest of Europe was wide open. It was a Polish knight who actually wore wings as part of their uniform, who charged into battle at the last minute and saved the day.
Like it it the it’s just it needs to be a movie. I’m sure it is, but it needs to be a movie of quality. Let’s do that. In the set in the year 1700, as Prussia is redesigning itself because it’s merging with the Kingdom of Brandenburg, it actually had it. They’re trying to figure out what what Germany is gonna look like in the year 1700, and they decide they’re gonna move the capital to Konigsberg, which is outside of the Holy Roman Empire so that the Kingdom of Prussia, which will include territory inside the Holy Roman Empire, namely Berlin and Brandenburg in that territory, that that new state will be independent of the Holy Roman Emperor because it’ll be outside.
It needs a military and it needs a really nice one. And they know that this Prussian military has to be really high quality because they’re so severely outnumbered. So they send their officer corps to the Ottoman Empire to train with the Janissaries because the Ottomans, they were the they were the best soldier man for man. What you think of as Prussian military tradition largely comes out of this experience of these German officers training in the Ottoman Empire and taking those techniques back to Prussia and then Germanizing them. And before you know it, have Bewegungskrieg and the next thing you know there’s a Germany in 1871.
So, it’s way past that now. It’s World War one. The Ottoman Empire has ruined itself with with this anti intellectual, anti innovation sentiment. This conservative, let’s just focus on religion, let’s not advance ourselves technologically, culturally, and economically. Sounds familiar.
So I didn’t mean to bring that to too contemporary. But there is a lesson here, I think. The British are gonna carve off that when they got their crayon out and they got the map, they’re gonna carve off the Western end of Turkey, so Izmir, and they’re gonna give that to Greece. They didn’t tell the Greeks they were doing this, they’re just doing it. So that’s gonna happen.
They then take Palestine and what is today Jordan and they they draw that off and that’s gonna go to the British. Syria and what is today Lebanon is gonna go to the French. They actually originally drew Iraq for the French because that way the French could have the Northern Iraqi oil fields. That was the compromise with the French. And then came Iran.
Now Iran was not part of the Ottoman Empire, it was a separate independent state, but the British wanted to do Iran also. So they drew a line through the middle of Iran and split it into North Iran and South Iran, and the British were gonna take South Iran and the Russians were gonna take North Iran. And the British know that the Russians are willing to do this because it’s something that’s already happened where the British got the Russians to help them. So I need to roll the clock back just a bit. So in nineteen o six, Iran got this fabulous idea.
Really, the the movement I guess started in nineteen o five, but by nineteen o six, this movement has taken off. And here’s here’s what Iran has in mind. It wants to become a democracy. The Iranians decide to make a a play for democracy. In nineteen o six, Muzafer Al Din Shah, the high as a kite opium godjour ruler of Iran that did the 84% concession to the British, where he got 16%.
That guy ends up signing basically a compromise with the pro democracy movement to create the Majlis. The Majlis is Iran’s parliament. So now Iran has a parliament with a prime minister, and then he dies the next year. But the British don’t want Iran to have a democracy. The British are horrified at the prospect of Iran having a democracy.
Because what happens if the Iranian people at some point down the road figure out that this oil concession in Khuzestan, in the Southwest part of Iran, is a catastrophe for the Iranian people. They’re they’re literally giving their oil away. It’s not even a $50.50 concession. If they figure this out, what’s to prevent the Iranian democracy from voting to change this? So the British decide they need to do what every good empire does and destroy democracies in third world countries.
Right? That’s what you do. Oh, no. Brown and black people are getting a democracy. No.
That’s wrong. We gotta stop that. Stop that now. So the British figure, the weak peace in Iran in the Iranian state is the clergy. Because the clergy are also not sure they want a democracy, so the British start funding the clergy and paying the clergy off with the hope that the clerics will help derail Iran’s democracy.
But that’s not all. The British also then go to the Russians and go, how do you feel about invading from the North? We’ll come in from the South. Let’s just tear the place up a little bit, cause some harm, some pain, some suffering. We’ve got the clerics on our side and maybe we can topple the democracy.
It’s a long story and we don’t probably should do it, but we’re not gonna I just give you the sort of the the nutshell end to this. By by 1911, so three years before World War one breaks out, the dust settles on the pro democracy movement. It took five years of struggle and suffering, and it mostly ends in failure. Iran does not come out of this as a democracy. But the seeds were planted.
And one of the things that came out of this first of all, the the guy who replaces Musafa ibn Shah actually ends up getting toppled in nineteen o nine, Muhammad Ali Shah, and he’s replaced by Ahmad Shah, who will be, just spoiler alert, the last Qajar ruler of Iran. He’s he’s the beginning of the end. Nineteen o nine is when he takes over. The the the revolutionary movement to democratize Iran finishes in ‘2 ’19 sorry, 1911 with a constitutional monarchy. They they end up with a constitution.
They’ve codified the fact that there’s a parliament. It’s just not a very democratic system. So but they’ve got the pieces to make one down the road. In other words, this is maybe a good first step even if it wasn’t a perfect first step. So now, back to World War one.
So the British think, yeah, we’ve got the Russians. They’ll just come on in on our side. They’ll take the northern half of Iran. They’re interested in it. We’ll take the southern half.
That’s where the oil is. The Russians probably don’t know, and it’ll be perfect. Only it isn’t. Because the British weren’t counting on something. And that was that Germany would defeat You know, there’s always this thing you should never attack Russia because they always somehow prevail.
I mean, usually, somehow prevail might be better because they did it in World War one. They surrender. Now they they they’re getting real coy about it and they keep like pretending they’re not gonna surrender even after they’ve stopped fighting the war and they quit, but they eventually do surrender. And by the way, it’s not the Russian Empire anymore because they’ve had these two revolutions. It’s now, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
And so when the war ends, when it’s 1918 and the Germans have finally surrendered, the British are like, even if the Russians were willing to do it, we can’t work with them because they’re communist. So we can’t do Iran because the British didn’t have the military ability to take the whole thing and there and there’s no way to invade half of it because the other half will fight you. You’ve got to do the whole thing. They needed to divide and conquer Iran. So the Brits go, oh, oops, sorry France.
I guess you’re not getting Iraq. That’s ours. We need that oil. And they switch the Sykes Picot deal. The French go whatever and they go along with it.
And so the Ottoman Empire gets carved up. The Greeks are, of course, thrilled to find out that they’re getting the Western peace. They send soldiers into Izmir. They begin committing acts of genocide against the Turks because they’re trying to ethnically cleanse it. It’s a nightmare disaster.
And you think, why are you doing this? The Italians moved into the coastal region on the southern part of Turkey. They’re thrilled. They’re like, wow. Look at all this free real estate.
We did poorly in World War one, but we should pick the right side. You know, it’s okay to kinda lose militarily as long as you’re on the right side. And of course, the Ottoman Empire recovers, it drives the Greeks and the Italians out. It even gets a concession from the French so that Antioch won’t be in Syria and they pull it into Turkey. So it doesn’t end up quite with the exact crayon drawn border that the British and the French had come up with.
There’s a little modification. For Iran, right, it’s a sigh of relief they didn’t get conquered. Iran has the glory of being one of the only states on the planet to not get colonized by Europe. There aren’t many. Right?
Liberia is one of them. Now, Liberia did get colonized but ironically enough it got colonized by African Americans returning to Africa. And The United States sort of put a protectorate over it so that nobody would mess with it. Thailand did not get conquered by a European state. Japan did not get conquered.
The Ottoman Empire definitely got carved up like a Thanksgiving Day Turkey, pun intended, but Turkey effectively avoided the European conquest. And then and then Persia. That’s it because even right at the end, right before World War two, Ethiopia gets conquered briefly by the Italians. It’s the second time the Italians attack Ethiopia. The first time they were destroyed by the Ethiopians.
Second time the Italians attacked Ethiopia. Did I say it right? I don’t know. It came through in my head, came out backwards. So, okay.
So Iran survives World War one without being Sykes Picot. I’m pretty sure that needs to become a verb. They’re they’re unstable though. So ever since the nineteen o six attempt at becoming a democracy, even though it effectively all stops in 1911, it doesn’t. There’s this percolating instability that keeps rolling through Iran.
And in fact, in 1920, there is a guy, Mirza Kuchuk Shah, who is who is who is a communist, who decides he’s going to break a piece of Iran out of Iran and make the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic. The PSSR. And he does. He takes the Gilan province out of Iran and it’s sometimes called the the Gilan Socialist Soviet Republic. And they rule it from June 1920 to September 1921.
It doesn’t go on particularly long period of time. And one of the reasons that it fails is the Russians had definitely been involved with this. Right? The Soviet Union was eager to see if it couldn’t maybe expand outward a little bit. The Russians decide that this isn’t worth their resources.
Russians are kind of hoping that the civil war will end because the Russians are in the middle of a civil war, and so they stop they stop backing it. And the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic ends after a year and a half. But it’s in that span of time, in that year and a half span of time, that a major political shift takes place. Earlier in 1921, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was a Cossack so when you think of Cossacks, you probably think of Russians and cavalry units charging in and slaughtering peasants. I need you to have that image, but put him in Iran because it’s the same thing.
He’s a Qasrq and he’s in command of a Qasrq unit in Qasvin. And he is sick and tired of the complete chaos that Iran is in. So he takes his unit. He takes command of his unit and he actually marches to Tehran and they capture it. They capture the capital of Iran.
He topples the existing government. He replaces the prime minister with his guy, Tabataba’i, and he becomes the commander in chief of the Iranian army, the army Iranian military. And then two years later, he replaces the prime minister because he starts arguing with him and he becomes the prime minister. And then, in 1925, so two years after that, he’s in a position now where he can make a serious move and take more control over Iran. Reza Shah has in mind that he’s going to become the Ataturk of Iran.
So Ataturk at the after the Ottoman Empire was disassembled, he decided he okay. There’s no more Ottoman Empire. We’re now Turkey. And then he decided I’m gonna modernize it in my own image. And I’m gonna take Turkey and make it into this new thing.
I’m gonna change the letters it uses to write its language. I’m going to change the language. The Ataturk ordered that Turkish be purged of its Arabic and Persian words. And it had a lot of Arabic and Persian, and then they switched the alphabet from Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. So Turks today can’t read any of their literature that’s more than a 100 years old because first of all, the letters are unrecognizable to them.
But even if they get past that and learn the Arabic letters, they have to now learn these Arabic and Persian words that have been deleted from their language. Reza Shah maybe isn’t planning to go that far, but what he does wanna do is dramatically change Persia so that it’s no longer this this third world country that’s backwards that isn’t modernized. He wants to advance it. His original position, his original goal, his original objective was to do like Turkey and create a republic. But he ran head on into the clergy.
The clerics did not want this democracy thing. They were just against it every step of the way. They were like, what will the people decide? We don’t want this. And he had a problem with the British.
The British made it also very clear that they simply did not want Iran to become a democracy. Republic whatever kind of republic you end up with, that was off the table. And so, in the end, he yields to pressure from the clerics and from the British and he goes to the Majlis, he goes to Parliament and says, we got to do something, we’ve got to have a stable state. It seems to me the only way forward is monarchy. Make me shah.
And they do. And they replace out Ahmad Shah and that’s the end of the Qajars. Ahmad Shah is the last Qajar ruler. Reza Shah Pahlavi becomes the first Pahlavi Shah of Iran. And he begins the modernization progress.
As as a monarch, he has a lot more control over exactly how this unfolds, but it also means the people have little control over how this unfolds. It’s really just him making the decisions, him and then the rubber stamp parliament. And then things go wrong. There’s this catastrophic event that has global repercussions that we’re still dealing with called World War two. And he probably would have been okay except the Germans got this crazy idea that 70,000,000 people could attack a 170,000,000 people and somehow defeat the 170,000,000 people with inferior tanks and an inferior air force.
And just to give you an idea how insane this is, when the German army was lined up against the Russians actually, let’s just do Operation Barbarossa because I don’t wanna make it too complicated. There were 5,000 German tanks in Operation Barbarossa. 3,500 when they lined up and then they got 1,500 reinforcements throughout 1941. So it ends up 5,000. The Russians had 22,000 tanks.
2,000 of the Russian 22,000 tanks were superior to everything the Germans had. I know. I know. The Germans make everything better. Not them, not tanks.
The Russians had k v ones and t 30 fours and they were better than anything the Germans had to field. In other words, the Russians should have destroyed the Germans in Operation Barbarossa. It should have been an annihilation. It was just it was the Russians who got the annihilation, not the Germans. It it makes no sense when you look at the numbers and you look at the technology involved.
But anyway, that’s what happens. Well, when it happens, when the Germans attack the Soviet Union, the British and the Russians decide when that because now Britain isn’t alone anymore. Right now, they finally have somebody because the Germans take out France and now all of a sudden Britain’s alone and then the Germans attack Greece and the British are like, oh my god, Greece, you can be our oh, no. Not not gonna alright. Anyway, we’re alone again.
You know, it was one of those tragic almost had a friend moment. So when the Soviet Union gets attacked, Churchill’s like, Stalin, we’re best friends forever. And so they start trying to work out how the Brits can help because the Russians are getting torn to shreds even though they they should have been totally destroying Germany. And it’s getting desperate. It’s it’s bad.
Of the 22,000 tanks, there are none left by 41. But the Germans still have like 3,000. It was just disaster. Russians are surrendering millions of men at a time. It’s just like the Germans are like, what do we do?
What do we do with them? Why did we attack this place? Germany ends up conquering us an area like five times larger than Germany. They’re like, well, this country doesn’t end. We’ve conquered literally 10% of it.
Why did we attack this thing? Anyway, so the British and the French British and the Russians decide, you know what? Isn’t it a shame we didn’t split Iran in half at the end of World War one? Is it really ever too late? And Stalin goes, no, of course not.
And the British invade Iran from the South and the Russians invade Iran from the North. And by September, the Iranian military just throws its guns down and runs. The modernized Reza Shah military that was supposed to defend Iran just disintegrates in front of the British and the Russian forces. They don’t even put up a fight. He’s freaking out.
He can’t believe it. Before he knows it, the British and the Russians are in Tehran. They capture him and his family and they make a deal with him. They say, look, if you step down, you go under house arrest, we’ll send you to some nice part of the empire, maybe Egypt, maybe Uganda, who knows. The Mauritius Islands looks good.
Who doesn’t want to go to the Mauritius? And then I’ll let we’ll let your family live. In fact, we’ll let your son become the Shah of Iran. And Reza Shah goes, what choice do I have? My army didn’t fight.
And he abdicates in I think it was well, maybe it’s later. Yeah, sometime late nineteen forty one since I’m not dry in the right month. Now his son is in charge. His son ends up just being called the Shah. So he’s in.
The British and the Russians occupy Iran until the end of the war. And the the reason they did this officially was because this was a way now the British could ensure that supplies could be delivered to Russia through Iran. Because you couldn’t you’re like, the obvious way to go would be to go to Murmansk or Arkangelsk in the very far north of Russia, past Finland. The problem is the Russians had Norway. So so the Russians sorry.
The Germans had Norway. So the Germans could fly air craft from Norway and try to sink British shipping going across that way. So it was dangerous. The British were doing it, it’s just they were gonna take losses doing it. So the way to go without taking losses was to go all the way well, they wanted to go through the Mediterranean, but there were those obnoxious Italians trying to mess with them.
So they’d have to go all the way around Africa and then through Iran and into Russia that way. That that’s why they did it. And then, of course, once The United States enters the war, we also send some supplies that way as well. So the war ends, the British withdraw, the Russians mostly withdraw, but they stop in Azerbaijan. The reason they stopped in Azerbaijan was so before the Qajars, there was a there was a Safavids.
The Safavids, the rulers of Iran, conquered the Caucasus Mountains. They didn’t quite finish the job. They missed the western most 10% of it. The Ottoman Empire grabbed that, but they had about 90% of the Caucasus Mountains. Well, at during the Napoleonic Wars and then again a little bit afterwards in the eighteen twenties, the Russian Empire attacked the the Gajars because the Gajars took over by this point.
The Safavids were no longer in charge. And they carved off the Persian Empire’s Caucasus region. Well, when they did that, there was a territory inside Iran called Azerbaijan and the Russians split it in half. And so they the Russians took the northern half of Azerbaijan and left the southern half of Azerbaijan in Iran. The Azeris are Turks.
So the Russians at the end of the war are like, you know what? Let’s just put Azerbaijan together. And then that way, the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic will be whole because it’ll be both the North and the South. For the record, Turks are about 18% of Iran’s population. Iran about 60% Persian.
It’s about two percent Arab, about two 10% Kurdish, about 2% Belushi, and then 2% if you take the Armenians, the Georgians, the Circassians, Assyrians and put them together, they’re another two or so percent. So Iran’s actually quite diverse. Ethno linguistically, the Baluchis, the Iranians, and the Kurds are related to each other. They speak Persian languages from the Persian Indian language group. The Indus River is effectively the boundary between the Persian languages and the Indian languages, from from the Aryan language groups.
This drives Indians nuts, but I I gotta do it. So the Aryans conquered most of India and brought Aryan languages with them. There’s this Indian nationalist movement that says, no, the Aryans were always there. That doesn’t make sense. But go ahead.
I I have a lot of Indian viewers. They’re they’re raging right now, but we turned off the we turned off the ability to to to comment, so that’s perfect. I I love my Indian viewers, so this is just mean. It’s okay. The Aryans also conquered Europe.
Like, there’s no shame in this. They’re the guys who domesticated the horse. They get to conquer a huge chunk of land because they domesticated the horse, the greatest weapon in human history. You gotta love the horse. Like, there was such a good weapon, we were still using it in World War two.
Not not The US and Great Britain. They were the first countries to jettison the horse. We did it with Gatling guns. We just took the army’s horse out into the middle of nowhere Montana and shot them to death. But we got we did it and we switched over to trucks.
So but Germans, the Russians, the Italians, the French, everybody else is still using the horse. In World War two, aren’t that crazy? It’s hard to comprehend. Wait a minute. So there was nukes?
Yeah. And the horse. Feels like it doesn’t when you had tanks, but we also had horses. Hey. It’s cool though when you think about it.
It’s like this clash between this ancient world and this high-tech world. We should bring the horse back. Why didn’t we shoot the horses, you asked? That’s a great question. Nobody actually asked that.
I just decided to answer it, because it’s capitalism. If we had sold the horses, it would have crashed their value and it would have pissed off all the horse breeders. So if we had sold it for meat, it would have crashed the value of meat. So the only thing to do is shoot them. Right?
No. That’s capitalism. Don’t know why you’re looking at me like that. It’s weird. It’s how this works.
What we don’t sell, we shoot. It’s the it’s the economic system. Alright. So alright. So it’s the Russians are holding on to Azerbaijan.
They’re planning to put it back together. In 1946, The United States goes, give it back. Give it back to Iran. And Russians go, but why? They’re it’s not fair to the Azerbaijanis, they should be reunited.
We go, we’ll nuke you. They go, okay, here we go. And that was it. That was because that was the time period where we threatened to nuke everybody at drop of a hat. The United States kept doing that right up until like 1960 something.
63, I I feel like is a good number. I’m just a random number. We just drop of a hat, we’re like, you know what? We’ll nuke you. And everybody walked away.
1958, we threatened to nuke Iraq. So Iran is back intact. The war is over. It’s ’46 and the Iranians get that idea again. What if we did democracy?
Talk about stubborn, like, when are you gonna get through your head that you’re not gonna do democracy because the British or the Americans are gonna stop you. In 1951, Iran has as its new prime minister a guy named Mossadegh. Mossadegh is gonna do it. He’s the architect of this. He wants to modernize Iran, so he’s gonna pick up Reza Shah’s banner.
He’s also gonna try to fulfill its its its deep desire to be this democracy. So he’s gonna try and do both of those things. He knows there’s no doing it without that oil. He needs the oil because he needs the money. Because how are you gonna build the infrastructure to create a modern society without money?
Right? Look at Texas, it’s literally crumbling. Why? Because the rich don’t pay taxes. Taxes.
There’s no money for infrastructure. There’s no money for development. We are billions of dollars behind in Texas on infrastructure. Billions. Like if we started right now, it would take us years to catch up.
Don’t worry. Crumbled bridges are fantastic. You can totally still cross them. I have a picture in my office of Russian soldiers and American soldiers reaching across the Elba River because they’re on a bridge. The bridge is smashed to pieces, but there they are like, because they wanna shake hands because, right, they’ve met, the two armies have met, it’s like May 1945.
But see, it’s a smash bridge, it works? Well, you gotta be so picky. So Mossadegh decides the number one threat that he has is the Brits. So before he can do any move, he shuts down the British embassy. Why the British embassy?
Well, because embassies are sovereign territory of the of the country that’s hosted. So the British embassy is actually The United Kingdom. It’s not Iran. And diplomats get diplomatic immunity. So your spies are your diplomats and they freely operate out of your sovereign territory, territory, the embassy.
So if you’re worried that spies are gonna topple your government, shut down that embassy. So that’s what he does. He shuts it down. And then he goes to the Anglo Iranian oil company and changed its name from Anglo Persian to Anglo Iranian because part of the modernization Reza Shah does is he switches the name from Persia to Iran. For for the record, for etymology purposes, just because these things matter.
The original name of Iran was Iran. Iran is the original name. Iran was the Persian word for Aryan. They were they were the Aryans. By the way, there’s another country on earth named Aryan.
It’s not just Iran. Eiren, E I R E N. Ireland. Ireland is literally Arian. So there’s two Arians on earth.
It’s Iran and Ireland. Ain’t that cool? And so what happened was the Greeks of course, this is gonna gonna go to the Greeks, it has to. Something hap we had to bring the Greeks in somehow. The Greeks believed that Perseus, the son of Zeus, married Cassiopeia, the daughter of Andromeda.
Isn’t that cool? They’re marrying constellations. And their children are the Persians. And that’s why they’re called the Persians. They’re named after Perseus, the son of Zeus.
And I go Andromeda was the queen of Ethiopia. So so Zeus’ son and the print Ethiopian princess, they together produced the Persians according to the Greeks. Hence the name Persia after Perseus. So Persia became the name but it was the foreigner name and so Reza Shah wanted to go back to the original actually Iranian name and that’s why he picks Iran. It’s an attempt to sort of get out of that.
So there’s this now, there’s this dialogue in in when we talk about Iran, should I say Persia or or Iran? Should I say Iranian? Like, what are so generally, when we say Persian, we mean the people who speak Persian, which is the language. It used to be Farsi, but Farsi was the Arabic attempt to pronounce Persian because there’s no p in Arabic. They they just made it a f.
So the so the so the Persians now have said, no no, we have pa, and so they brought the pa back. And so now it’s Persia again, and it’s the Persian language. So stop saying Farsi. That’s that’s past that makes you look old. Unless you’re young and then say it so that you sound sophisticated.
So so usually when we talk about Iran, we mean the the country and then the Persians are the Persian language speakers. So then you will hear Kurds from Iran or Baluchis from Iran say very loudly, we are Iranian. But they’re not saying very loudly, we are Persian. And so that’s sort of how this has evolved, but there’s nothing solid about any of this. This is this is just sort of a superimposition.
For the record, if you’re Baluchi, Dari, Tajik, if you’re from Western Pakistan, and then all Kurdish, Iranian, that’s that’s the Iranian language group. So there is actually real connectivity there. In any case, Mossadegh shuts down the British embassy, kicks the Brits out, and then grabs hold of the Anglo Iranian oil company and renames it the National Iranian Oil Company and terminates the concession. It’s not fifty fifty, it’s 100 now. And so it’s not eighty four sixteen.
It’s 100. And and his justification is, it’s Iranian oil. Iranians know how to extract it. We don’t need the Brits. Why are the Brits here?
Why are they doing this? What benefit does Iran get from this? None. Out. Now we’re gonna use this money to modernize.
The Brits can’t overthrow them because the embassy is closed. So the Brits actually go to president Truman and they go, the American embassy is still open. What do you say? And Truman goes, no. The United States doesn’t overthrow democracies.
So that’s a bold faced lie. And Harry s Truman knew it was because we had literally just overthrown the the brand new Syrian democracy. It was three years old in 1949. It’s one of the CIA’s first ever operations. A guy named Miles Copeland, the musician, his son became the drummer for the police.
So just to connect some weird dots. Miles Copeland, the jazz musician, the white jazz musician, I didn’t want you thinking that suddenly the CIA had like black operatives working in Syria. Overthrows the Syrian government of Al Qwatli three years in, and it it plunges Syria into nightmare chaos. Over the next nine years, they’ll have 11 governments. The only thing that stops it from being even worse is Al Qawatli somehow gets back into power, stabilizes Syria, and then goes to the the president of Egypt and goes, if you don’t annex us right now, the communists are gonna take over and Egypt annexes Syria.
Like, that’s how bad the overthrow event destroyed the Syrian state. It couldn’t function anymore. So Truman did overthrow democracies, just for clarity’s sake, but he turns to the Brits and goes, we don’t do that. Eisenhower is running for office the next year. It’s 1952.
It’s Eisenhower is gonna win. Eisenhower is a supreme allied commander in World War two. Eisenhower is gonna win. Everybody loved Ike. I mean, that was his slogan.
I like Ike. Right? It was everybody loved Ike. They didn’t like him. They loved him.
So he was gonna win. The Democrats approached him at the same time as the Republicans and said, would you run for president as our our candidate? And he went, I don’t know what party I belong to. I have an idea. I’m gonna go out into the mountains and hang out in the cabin for a while.
I’ll get back to you. He came back from the mountains. He goes, I’m a Republican. Many Democrats are still weeping to this day. Eisenhower is approached by the Brits before he’s even become president.
And the Brits go, so we have a problem in Iran. We just lost our oil. We don’t know how God put it underneath Khuzestan like that. That just seems unfair. But we are we’ve been pumping it out of Khuzestan as fast as we can but we didn’t get all of it.
And Eisenhower goes, I got you. We got through World War two together. Don’t worry about it. He becomes president in 1953. He orders the CIA to take out Iran’s second attempt at democracy.
Ain’t that cool? That CIA operative is Kermit Roosevelt, as in the grandson of Theodore, as in the grandson of the former president. Now, Kermit Roosevelt comes up with a brilliant idea. All he has to do is take bags of CIA money and he can just walk up by the way, they tried to do this in Egypt already. Egypt already.
I know it was it later that it was right around ’53 they tried to do this in Egypt. I don’t remember. A year a year before or a year after, they literally walked up to the president, Mohammed Najib. They Egypt had just had a revolution of fifty two and got rid of its monarchy And the CIA went with bags of money into Muhammad Najib’s office. Gamal Abdul Nasr, who was a colonel, who wasn’t the president of Egypt, followed the CIA operatives in, pulled the bags of money out of the brand new president’s office and built a tower in the shape of a lotus with a revolving restaurant on the top on an island in the middle of the Nile with that CIA money.
Ain’t that cool? And as a result, prevented the CIA from effectively bribing the president of Egypt. Anyway, so that’s Kermit Roosevelt’s idea. He’s not gonna bribe Mosaddegh. There’s no bribing him.
Mosaddegh is clearly a believer. He clearly he’s dedicated to his cause. What Kermit’s gonna do is he’s gonna bribe members of the military. He gets them on board to do a coup d’etat. It’s like 3AM.
There’s a knock at Mosaddegh’s door. The prime minister opens the door and there’s an officer standing there. He goes, prime minister Mosaddegh, you are under arrest. And Mosaddegh goes, no, you are. And all of a sudden, a bunch of soldiers come out of the bushes that were hidden in Mosaddegh’s front lawn and they mass arrest the coup conspirators.
Kermit Roosevelt was just a like a block away watching the operation. He sees what’s happening. He’s running down the streets of Tehran like the bionic man trying to get away and he escapes into the shadows. Eisenhower finds out what’s happened. He orders Kermit Roosevelt to back down.
Roosevelt knows, uh-uh, you sent me here to overthrow this democracy. By God, I’m going to overthrow it. And so, he meets with Norman Schwarzkopf senior. Not not the guy the general, his dad. Isn’t this cool?
All you have to do in The United States is just memorize a few names and then they just repeat over the generations. Like in a hereditary nobility system. Like here, it’s everything. It’s not just generals and politicians, you know, like the USS McCain. It’s not named after senator John McCain.
It’s his dad. You know what I mean? Like, you don’t have to do that. Do Hollywood. Find your favorite Hollywood actoractress.
I bet their dad or mom was a Hollywood actoractress. Do it. Do this little thing. You’ll see. It’s all hereditary.
Anyway, so he goes to Norman Schwarzkopf senior, who was a merchant who traded with Middle Eastern countries. And he goes, you know the Iranian people. What should I do? I don’t know what to do. I’m hosed.
I’m actually rogue right now because I’ve been ordered to stand down. How do I pull this off? And Schwarzkopf says, dudes, you’ve got bags of money. Right? He’s like, yeah.
What do I do with it? Schwarzkopf goes, go and hire the day laborers from the corner. And Roosevelt goes, to do what? And then Schwarzkopf says, pro Mosaddegh rallies. Roosevelt’s like, you’re insane.
Why would I have him do pro Mosaddegh rallies? I’m trying to overthrow Mosaddegh. Yeah. After the rally, have them go on a rampage and loot stuff, smash out windows, steal things from stores, flip over cars, set things on fire. And Roosevelt goes, you’re a genius.
And so that’s what they do. The CIA starts hiring day laborers to do these pro Mosaddeq rallies and then trash Tehran. And they do it day after day. And Mosaddeq keeps getting up in front of the country and going, what are you doing? You’re my if you’re my people, why trashing our country?
I’m trying to modernize our country. Stop stop ending your rallies with rally in favor of me. I love it. Who doesn’t love that? Don’t break anything.
Why are you breaking things? And they do this until the military’s had enough. The military does a quretan. And Iran’s second democracy goes down in a ball of flames. At that point then, the shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, is in position as the monarch to basically take over.
So that thing where the Majlis and the prime minister were gonna be in charge evaporates. And for the next twenty five and a half years then, the shah becomes the tyrant ruling Iran. He is not kind. You do not want to defy him. He does not accept opposition forces.
You will go to prison, you will be tortured. He is cruel. He’s a tyrant. He does try to modernize Iran and he does do some interesting attempts, like it’s not all bad. Like there’s the white revolution.
Oh, wait. Was that all bad? Anyway, the the white revolution definitely had problems. There but there were definitely parts of what the Shah does that that were good. They did they did help modernize Iran.
He modernizes the military. But in the process, Iran pays a really interesting price. And the price is complicated because Turkey paid the same price. I just told you they lose their literature, for example. There’s a cultural erosion that’s taking place because as as the modernization takes place and they do things like the white revolution, why’d you pick white as the color?
And there becomes this thing that Iranians get wrapped up into of aspiring to whiteness. So to the point where Iranians go, I’m I’m Aryan. I’m not Arab. I’m Aryan. I’m Persian.
And there is this separation because they’re not Arab. They speak a different language. They were never conquered like Egypt was by the Arabs. Egypt wasn’t Arab either, but the Arabs totally conquered Egypt. So it is like what?
3% of the population speaks Nubian and maybe 2% of the population speaks Coptic. The rest of Egypt speaks Arabic. They’re Arab. It’s over. Right?
But in the case of Persia, they never lost their language and their cultural identity marker was never destroyed. So that’s there. But the problem is now that they’re in this aspiring to whiteness thing, which drives this new nationalist thing, and it results in a really weird mix of cultural adaptation. So for example, the Shah keeps looking to the past. His hero is Cyrus the Great, Kurosh.
By the way, my hero is Cyrus the Great too. Kurosh was simply one of the greatest human beings to ever walk the planet Earth. He issued the world’s first ever bill of rights. Right? I mean, that’s really cool.
In the sixth century BC. So almost twenty six year centuries ago, almost two thousand six hundred years ago, he issued the world’s first Bill of Rights. He translated it in every language of the empire. We actually have the text. So I don’t think we have a complete version, but we have a mostly complete version.
If you ever go to the UN Building, there’s a text. I think it’s in four languages over the front door. That’s it. That’s Cyrus the Great’s Bill of Rights. It’s on the UN Building.
The the Persians are right to look to Cyrus the Great, the the guy who created the Persian Empire, and go, wow, that that guy. By the way, his empire was expressly one of diversity. Expressly one of diversity. He intentionally told all the conquered nations that were part of the empire, you’re not only full members and partners of the empire, we want you to speak your own language and have your own religion and be different. He he actually said diversity makes us stronger.
Can you imagine? So weird. Crush them like the Romans did. Or the Brits tried to do. Anyway, so there’s this reminiscing of the past that goes on.
And that past is largely pre Islamic, but not exclusively pre Islamic because there are these features of Iranian culture like Rumi that you don’t ever mess with that are that’ll always be a core piece of Iranian culture. But part of this going to the past thing also included having, like, these really amazing spectacles at places like Takht De Jamshid. So the the Alexander the Great didn’t know it existed. It was one of the capitals of Iran, but it was a secret capital capital of Iran. And so when he found it, he destroyed it, of course.
That’s that’s what you should do when you discover there’s a city you didn’t know about, just wipe it out. Anyway, he destroyed it but he also called it Persepolis as in the city of Perseus. Because, right, the Persians are the descendants of Perseus. So of course, it’s Percipolis. So if you if you look it up in English, you probably know it as Percipolis or Persepolis, if you wanna pronounce it that way.
But the Persians call it Takht De Jamshid. By the way, just for the record, I’ve been there. It is definitely worth the trip. It is a fantastic ruin. The Shah does this gigantic thing spending millions of dollars to basically have a big pageant fest there because he’s trying to bring back the glory that was.
And some of that doesn’t click with the public. They’re trying to figure out, I’m in poverty and you’re spending all this money in pageantry. Why aren’t you spending this money developing this the economy, developing our infrastructure, educating our kids? And so there’s a little bit of disconnect going on. But also, there’s a cultural problem because Iran becomes known as Little America.
Because so we do the coup for the Brits, only we don’t really do the coup for the Brits. Because Eisenhower had as one of his goals, the destruction of the French and British empires. Eisenhower intended to destroy the British and French Empires and then replace them both. It’s why we do the Vietnam War. That’s our attempt to replace the French Empire in Southeast Asia.
Isn’t that cool? So after we do the coup in Iran, the Brits are like, oh, thank you. And Eisenhower was like, no, dude. That’s ours now. That’s how that works.
We did the coup. The Brits still have a role to play but they’re gonna be second fiddle. Right? It’s this is our thing now. And so before you know it, Iran is known as Little America.
It also gets the nickname the shopping mall of The Middle East. Right? Because if you think of the quintessential thing that makes America America, it’s shopping malls. And so boom, there it is, the shopping mall in Middle East. The most common surgery done in Iran is nose surgery.
I don’t think that’s changed, think that’s still the case. When I was there in 02/2002, I swear one out of every ten woman women walking down the street had a splint over her nose. Nose. And then of course, bleach was the most common sold chemical in Iran because everybody now wanted to be blonde. And my favorite album cover ever is Gagoosh with cowboy hat and pistols.
Gaguch, of course, being one of my favorite Iranian pop singers because she is truly amazing. This isn’t an attack on Gaguch at all, I swear. It’s just there is this strange thing happening. And some of it is flattering. For example, we sell Iran F 14s.
Only two countries on the planet ever had the best airplane ever made. It’s no longer in commission, which breaks my heart, but the movie, the recent Top Gun movie solved that problem for me, which is the only reason I could enjoy it. The f 14 is truly a splendid piece of machinery in Iran and The United States are the two states that had it. Isn’t that crazy? Remember Iran Contra?
You probably don’t, you’re too young. The spare parts that Oliver North was selling Iran, some of those were f 14 spare parts. I’m gonna talk about her on country. But just it’s just too fun to think about. So the Shah starts to run into trouble.
His state is his status in the state is unpopular. He is a tyrant. He’s been too rough with the Iranian people. He’s been too hard on opposition forces. And the reason that he has to be is you’re not gonna believe this.
The Iranians still wanna do democracy. And they’ve got this monarch who’s saying no. And they’re not okay with no, they’re not taking no as an answer and this is causing this constant struggle. Struggle. And so Carter becomes president.
James Earl Carter, known as Jimmy, that guy. And Carter looks at the Shah and goes, it’s time to liberalize. It’s time. You need to start making steps in that direction. So the Shah goes, okay, what choice do I have?
I have to do what the president of The United States says. So he starts opening up press and while the press is going nuts, anti shah everything. It’s a it’s crazy. It’s full on. It’s like 1978 and every newspaper is trashing the Shah.
The Shah gets sick because he gets cancer. He needs treatment. He leaves Iran to go get treatment and a revolution breaks out. And by the first by in spring of nineteen seventy nine, the Shah is toppled. He ends up in Panama at one point.
He finally gets to Egypt where he dies, where he’s buried, where his dad’s buried. Because after the British shuffle his dad around, they buried him in Egypt. Although, now there seems to be some evidence that maybe he was actually buried in Iran. Anyway, who knows where he is? But the other his son is in Egypt for sure.
That’s that’s clear. By the way, in the beginning part of the Shah’s reign, there was actually conversations about like how to how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna make this work? And there was a lot of pressure put on him to do like a traditional style, let’s get let’s get alliances going. And so he actually married an Egyptian princess, Fawzia, with the goal of then kind of cementing this Egyptian alliance with Iran because Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan had formed an formal alliance and they were trying to figure out how to get Egypt into it.
And the goal behind the alliance was to create an Islamic block so that if European states went into colonialism mode again in the future, they that at least the Muslim states would have a means to to push back and and and have resistance. And so he marries Fawzia, but it’s a disaster marriage and they end up divorced, so it didn’t work. Anyway, so so the shah has this interesting connection to Egypt. In any case, the Shah goes down and there is this really interesting moment where Iran could go one of two ways. It could go communist or socialist because the communist and socialist were working together at that point.
Or it could go Islamist. It could create the Islamic Republic. Those were the two directions it could go. And we knew what would if it went communist to become a Soviet ally. So we didn’t want that.
We knew no matter what happened, we were losing Iran because we had played too heavy of a role in the Shah’s heavy handedness. We were too involved. There was no way our friendship was gonna survive this. And then of course, there’s this pendulum swing thing that people do. So all of a sudden everybody wants to look like they have a a European nose with blonde hair, and now all of a sudden everybody’s rejecting that.
And in that moment, there is a lot of anti US sentiment because we played such a nasty role, including overthrowing their democracy in 1953 and sticking them with the tyrant to begin with. And so a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the revolution is fiercely anti American. So we know we’ve lost Iran, but we don’t want Iran to become a Soviet ally. So the best thing to do then is to push Iran into the Islamist direction. And we we weaponize the Ayatollah Khomeini, who, of course, had a tour of duty in Iraq and a tour of duty in France, and the next thing you know, he’s now in Iran.
And he was a truly charismatic character. He was a believer. He probably meant to make the world heaven on earth. But he’s so charismatic, he’ll make the decision between the left and the right and Iran will go Islamist. In the chaos of Iran going Islamist, the the left, the socialists, and the communists had been working with the Islamists thinking, an enemy of an enemy is a friend and on the other end of the revolution will figure it out.
Well, got figured out and the left got massacred. It was a slaughter. Leftists are fleeing in every direction they can to get out of the country because it’s they’re hosed. The Islamists also massacre the military. The the officer corps, not the not the enlisted.
The generals, the admirals are wiped out. Some of the air force generals escaped by by plane. The army guys are hosed because they’re just sitting there on the ground. The admirals are decapitated. Some of the air force generals get killed as well.
It’s a disaster because the they’re now creating a new state and this new state is gonna be the Islamic Republic. They are going to impose Shia style Islam through a theocracy on the Iranian people. But in that moment of the revolution, the Iranian people actually experienced this incredible moment of freedom. Because in that moment of the revolution, there really isn’t a state apparatus. So it’s sort of like this anarchist dream where the state hasn’t established itself, the new state.
It’s thinking about what rules to impose but it even if it imposed them, it wouldn’t have the force to do it because it doesn’t have anything to do it with. It still has to create its police force and its laws. Right? It’s got new constitution. There’s all and in that moment, there’s this incredible freedom that will abruptly end as soon as the state has established itself.
In that same year, ’79, a group of college students get a crazy idea. What if they we broke into, this is what they’re saying, this is their dialogue, the US embassy. And we could get a hold of the CIA documents that show that The US overthrew the the democracy in ’53. Then we could show the world and maybe The United States would apologize for it. And then we could start healing from this wound.
And so a group of college students start heading to the US embassy. Well, most of the US embassy staff had already been evacuated. There are like four civilians left at that point and they get word that the students are coming and they escaped to the Canadian embassy. But there’s 66 CIA operatives still there because Iran wasn’t just the headquarters for the Iranian the CIA operation operations in Iran. Iran was the headquarters for CIA operations in Asia.
So basically, everything from Turkey to China operated out of Tehran to the point where we had the minting plates for $20 bills there. So San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, and Tehran. That’s what we minted, US money. Those are the official mints. Isn’t that cool?
Because the CIA needed the cash. Right? When it’s overthrowing democracies, that’s not cheap. You gotta you gotta pay for that stuff. $20 bills are a fantastic way to pay for everything it turns out.
And so that’s what they did. That’s when we were doing the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, we literally had boxes of $20 bills and we just drive around with forklifts delivering these crates of $20 bills. I don’t know what it is about $20 bills, but that’s the thing. I think it’s easier to buy AK 40 sevens with them for some reason. Not sure.
So the the the brand new Islamic Republic that doesn’t want anything to do with what the students are about to do calls the US Embassy because the US Embassy is officially United States Of America. So as soon as those kids climb over the wall, they’re in The United States Of America trespassing. This is an international incident. And so they call the embassy, like, dude, get the rest of your staff out. What are you doing there?
And the CIA guys are like, nothing as they’re shredding the documents. That they gotta stay there. They gotta get everything shredded. And so they’re just sitting there at the shredders going, we’re we’re just gonna stay here a little longer. The Iranian government’s like, no, you gotta go.
What are you doing? They’re obeying orders. The students climb over the wall and they capture the 66 CIA operatives in the act of shredding the documents. They had already gotten a bunch of the documents shredded. Those college students shove those shredded documents in garbage bags.
They walk over to the nearby middle schools and high schools, they go, you guys like making puzzles, right? And they put the documents back together. In our words, piece by piece, we document how Kermit Roosevelt overthrew the democracy in 1953. The students go, here it is, they cop make copies, give it for free to the whole world. Too bad there wasn’t an Internet back then, they’d have loved that.
They give it away to the whole world, free documents, and then and then they go, okay, president Carter, go ahead and apologize. No way. We’re in The United States Of America. Even though we’ve lost wars, we’ll never admit it and we’re definitely never gonna apologize. And so we refused.
Carter wasn’t gonna do it. So the students said, we won’t release the hostages until you do. Carter’s like, I don’t care. Don’t keep them there, just CIA operators, no one cares. And then the students go, but you know what else we have?
We have the names of all your operatives in China and in Southeast Asia and in India and in Pakistan. You sure you don’t want to apologize? Carter didn’t do it. And so they published all of it. In an instant, the CIA massacred.
Not literally, they just had to pull all their operatives out of the field because now the Chinese knew their name and where they were. Yeah. Now everybody knew their names and where they were. And so the CIA had to start over just just like we had to do in Russia. Right?
October 2021, the CIA admitted that their assets in Russia were wiped out. That’s amazing. I wonder where those documents came from that detailed out the location and names of all those assets. Let me think. Where could those documents have come from?
Anyway, wonder. So there’s no denying what we did, but we’re not gonna apologize for it and we’re not gonna get the hostages released. And so, time’s passing. Ted Koppel creates a new TV show, Nightline. It’s gonna be at night.
He’s gonna have like fun music to start the show and then every every show is gonna start with how many days the innocent victim hostages have been held in captivity in Iran. And it became like this clock measuring time. And Carter’s popularity rating just kept going down down down. So Carter in desperation decides to do a military operation. He’s gonna send helicopters in to do a rescue.
And the helicopters are flying across Iran and then they gotta do mid air refueling. That sounds like an awful idea. I know we were good at doing it now. But it it turned out it was an awful idea. Two of the helicopters collide, they go down and and there’s not enough helicopters now to complete the mission, so they have to abort and come back.
And so now the Iranians are like dancing on these burnt out helicopters. And it Carter’s popularity plunges even faster now. And then came rumors of the October surprise. And at this point, hostages are like in hell for a year. And there was talk that Carter had done it.
He had successfully negotiated the release of the hostages. Negotiated the release of the hostages. And now, they were gonna get released October 1980. November 1980 is the Reagan Carter election. And so Reagan is panicking because if the hostages get released before the election, Carter’s popularity will bounce right back and he’ll probably win the election.
So they’ve got to stop this from happening. So they figure out who Carter’s been negotiating with. His name is Rafsan Jani. In the early days, he had so he had his hands in so many different things that I nicknamed him the prince, as in Machiavelli’s the prince. He was prime minister at one point.
He was never president. There is no prime minister of Iran, they dissolve that position. So but he he did get into a powerful position. He never got to the the top, but he’s didn’t matter. He was very powerful.
And so the Reagan campaign now, so for the record, this is not a 100% proven, it’s just mostly proven. There’s like 15 witnesses and multiple court documents because a lot of this a lot of the material that that is evidence for this actually ended up in courtrooms and judges actually even said, yes, some of this definitely did happen. And by the time you’re done with the evidence, it’s probably true. I I I’m confident this is true. Happened was the Reagan campaign sent a group of men, they met with Rafsanjani, they came with briefcases.
They put the briefcases on a desk and they said, we’d like for you to hold the hostages at least until after the election. Rafsan Jani went, I thought you said you were from The United States? They go, we are. And Rafsan Jani goes, what’s in the suitcases? And they go, you’ll like it.
It wasn’t $20 bills. It was more. And so he opens it up and he goes, you know what? I’m gonna see what I can do. He had successfully negotiated with the students to release the hostages.
He goes back and he renegotiates with them to keep the hostages. The election happened. Reagan wins. Carter doesn’t know this has happened. So he’s still got his sleeves rolled up negotiating, trying to get the hostages released.
He’s negotiating while Reagan’s being inaugurated. Like, was so determined to make it happen. And of course, moments after Reagan is inaugurated president, they they release the hostages as planned so that Reagan can get credit for it. Isn’t that cool? By the way, it is the second time that I’m aware of of a US president throwing an election by working with a foreign power.
The first time was when Nixon got president Tuoh to leave the Paris Peace Accords in 1968. And that that’s a 100%. There’s no leftover slight doubt in that one. In part because we have recorded conversation of LBJ freaking out when he finds out what’s happened and saying that man has committed treason, that man being Nixon. And it’s one of the reasons why Nixon was so paranoid that he cheated in ’72.
He was worried that if a Democrat beat him in ’72, they’d find out he had rigged the election in ’68. So he don’t cheat in a race you’re gonna win anyway. That if you’re gonna cheat, only do it in the races you’re gonna lose. I just think that should be a rule. Always.
Also, do the math. Like, figure out how much you should cheat. Like, don’t over cheat because sometimes that backfires on you. Get it right. Like, you know, work it out first.
So the hostages get released and then Reagan decides that it would be really fun to do a proxy war with Iran. And what The United States does is it goes to Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, and says, you have a grievance with Iran. Isn’t that correct? And Saddam Hussein said, yeah. Our border on the Shattel Arab isn’t quite resolved, and we’d like that straightened out.
And he goes and and the Reagan guys are like, yeah, but couldn’t your grievance go beyond that? And they go, what do you mean? And go, isn’t Khuzestan Arab? That’s the Arab part of Iran. Wouldn’t it be better if an Arab country ruled the Arab part of Iran?
And Saddam Hussein, wait, you know that, you mentioned it. That does sound like a good idea. And so the Reagan guys say, well, they just decapitated their military. It’s gonna they it’s like Stalin’s purges. It’s gonna take them forever to get to recover from this.
Attack them now. We’ll supply you. We’ll run you the weapons, whatever you need. And so I was saying, obliges. And in 1981, Iraq attacks Iran.
It’s a not eight year long war. It’s a complete disaster for both Iran and Iraq. The low number is three three quarters of a million Iranians die, one quarter of a million Iraqis die. The high number is just double that. Nothing is gained.
The border doesn’t really change in any meaningful way, and the world is not better off for having done it. The war ends, and Iran that whole time then is in emergency mode. So whether you like the theocracy or not, didn’t matter. This is life and death, this is survival. There’s this catastrophic war where Iranians are losing a huge number of lives.
Three people die for every Iraqi. So even though the war is a stall a stalemate, there’s no real winner in this thing, the cost to Iran was catastrophic and through the roof. And so Iranians were willing to fight for the Islamic Republic whether they liked it or not because this was a matter of nationalism and national identity. And then the war ends. Pretty much for no reason other than that the Ayatollah Khomeini goes, you know what?
Why not? Let’s stop. Saddam Hussein kept saying, please let’s stop. This isn’t going anywhere. He’s like, no, no, he turned it into a holy war.
So he’s like, I’m an idiot from starting the war. I should have never trusted the Americans. The war ends, Iran’s trying to get back on its feet, Iraq’s trying to get back on its feet. The next thing you know, The United States is smashing Iraq into the stone ages in 1991 and Iran’s looking at it going, wow, weren’t they friends just now? And if obviously, in the meantime, there was the whole Iran Contra thing.
What The United States did was it told the world, look, to get the Iran Iraq war to stop, please nobody sell weapons to either side. In the meantime, we’re selling Iraq just crazy amounts of weapons. And the French too, just for the record. I think even the Swedes sold them Viggins. So I think even they were like, everybody’s like, yes.
Nothing to either Iran or Iraq as they’re sending the weapons to Iraq, including we sent them sarin gas and v x gas and mustard gas and anthrax just for the record. So those weapons of mass destruction we blow up your rock for later, we knew they had them because we had the receipts. So we did. We actually had the serial numbers of every rocket we sent them. That’s how the UN weapons inspectors knew what to look for.
They were we literally they literally had the serial that’s what Scott Ritter’s whole job while he was a UN inspector in Iraq was he was just looking for the serial numbers. That’s all. Ain’t that cool? That’s keep keep serial numbers on the weapons you send to other countries that you think are probably violating international law. I think that’s just always a good idea.
The reason we did Iran Contra, I’ll do the nutshell version, was Iran desperately needed spare parts. Its entire military was US. They even had a f 14 Tomcat, like, know, they’re like, what are we supposed to do? We don’t have any spare parts. And so Reagan wanted to fight a terrorist war in Nicaragua.
He wanted to fund the Contradoras to attack the Sandinista government. So he needed funding for it because when he went to Congress, Congress said, no. That’s terrible. Let’s not do that. So Reagan decided, the constitution doesn’t say I have to listen to Congress.
Oh, yeah. It probably does, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know. And so he he decides to fund them anyway. Where are you gonna get the money from? Well, Oliver North comes up with the plan.
Sell the Iranians the spare parts at four times the market value, take that money, and then launder the money. And I mean, it’s a loop de loop launder. Like, it goes to Brunei and I think it went through like, I don’t remember how many countries. It’s really complicated. It gets to Israel.
Israel had a cache of a k 40 sevens they kept capturing after Arab Israeli wars that they they were selling to the highest bidder. And in this case, it turns out it’s the CIA. The CIA buys the a k 40 sevens using that Iranian money and then sends them to the Contradoras so that the Contradoras can shoot Nicaragua up. That’s that’s what that was. Isn’t that neat?
Anyway, he does Reagan does get busted for it, but but Americans don’t have memory so he got away with it. Oliver North was basically called in by the house and grilled and it was on TV. Before you knew it, somehow Oliver North had become a hero and It’s like, no. He just broke the constitution. The procedure is blindfolding in firing squad.
Anyway, I I must have missed the memo where traitors become heroes. How? I don’t know. When was the memo issued? It’s like what we’ve done with the word hero.
You’re a hero. What did I do? Grocery shopping. Were they throwing hand grenades at me while I was doing it? How am I a hero for grocery shopping?
How did did did hero get redefined and I missed something? Doing ordinary things. Doesn’t make you a hero. It probably just means you’re not suffering from a depression bout. Depression sucks.
So, we got past the Iran ContraScan. Okay. So fast forward. In ’19 in the late nineteen nineties, Iran elects a guy named Khatami. So Iran is in this weird situation because strangely enough, it is kinda democratic.
This is the irony of the Islamic Republic in the nineties. That Majdalis that got created in nineteen o six is still there, and they’re holding relatively free and fair elections. The the reason I’m not saying they’re fully free is the following. To run for our office, you had to be approved by a council. The council was a theocratic council.
So they purged a bunch of potential people, but they let some people through, including this guy, Hathamy. Hathamy thought he could get into the presidency, a position that doesn’t have a lot of power because the Islamic Republic is a monarchy. It’s an absolute monarchy. Monarchy just means one person is in charge. That’s all it means.
It doesn’t have to be hereditary. Although Ayatollah Khamenei has designated his son as his successor, successor, so he’s switching the Islamic Republic from a theocratic monarchy into a theocratic hereditary monarchy. So he’s the guy really in charge, not the president. But the president, because the president is president, has a lot of symbolic power, and as a result, can kind of move people and can can affect policy because the president’s the guy who’s supposed to execute policy. So Khatami gets in there and he tells the morality police, stop going after women for not covering their hair if they have some hair covering.
And let’s see if we can start easing back. The reason was the following. The hijab had become the symbol of women’s oppression. Whether or not wearing hijab is oppressive doesn’t matter. Having somebody stick a gun to your head and say, you’re gonna wear this, you’re gonna cover your hair, makes it oppressive.
Right? If you give the person the option and they decide they want to do it, that’s their choice. But if you’re forcing them to do it, they’ve taken choice out of the equation. We’re not in anything other than oppression land. There’s no there’s no two ways about it.
I figure out the secrets of the universe. Let’s say, the supreme being comes to me and tells me everything I need to know about the secrets of the universe. I walk up to one of you and I say, I figured it out. Here it is. And you go, I don’t know.
I don’t know. And then I take a gun and I stick it to your head and go, you will convert to my religion now. Did I just save your soul? Probably not. I’m gonna go with that.
I suspect you I didn’t. Like, the thought that somehow violence is going to save somebody’s soul is really remarkable to me. Like, talk about logic fail. In any case, that’s the position the Islamic Republic suddenly found itself in because they had had a debate. Should we do the head cover or not?
And they decided, yeah, we’re gonna make it mandatory. This is something we’re going to do. By the way, they tried to do the Azan from the mosques really loudly and they tried to make that mandatory. But one of the interesting twists on that was the Iranian people were like, we’re not sure we want that. It’s too noisy and so they basically deleted that.
So they were trying to do some things that just didn’t work. The hijab worked. They got women to wear the hijab, but under duress. And so Khatami is like, let’s let’s ease this up. Just so happens when I went to Iran in 02/2002, Khatami was president.
And what I kept seeing was women who had head covering on the back, but the whole front of their hair was completely out. Also, women have to wear a tunic and women in 2002 in Iran were wearing the tightest garment the world has ever seen. And they would usually wear black, which just for the record is is the most amazing color for clothing ever. It is just like, oh my god. So I was walking around Iran the whole time going, wow, this is actually really hot.
So there was a rebellion. It was a fashion rebellion. It seems like a dumb thing when you think about it like, oh my god, you’re taking your rebellion through fashions. But that was exactly the the focal point for women’s oppression. The reform movement doesn’t work.
It fails. In 1999, the the supreme leader orders an attack on a university. They kill a bunch of students. It’s a disaster. Khotami sort of sputters after that.
He’s still holding on. He gets replaced by Ahmadinejad, the the bush of the Middle East, you know, 60 IQ, can’t string together an intelligent sentence, says one dumb thing after the other, you’re like, oh my god, did you say that? And my favorite was when he said Iran doesn’t have gays. Anyway, there’s a fun story about Khamenei related to that. There there is, actually.
I I anyway, let’s just say Khamenei might not be straight. Just leave it at that. So the Islamic Republic reform movement fails. Ahmadinejad is this right wing lunatic takes Iran the exact opposite direction. We played a role in this.
When nine eleven happened, Hatami issued an official statement from the Islamic Republic. It said, the people of Iran condemn all forms of terrorism and the people of Iran stand with the people of The United States. We are here to offer anything you need in assistance. In an instant, Khatami had ended decades of hatred and anger with one statement. He’d even apologized for the Iran hostage crisis in the last few years of the Clinton administration.
I think it was ’99. He said, we’re we regret that. That’s something. We didn’t apologize for overthrowing the government yet. We did we did it.
Obama did it. He he was like, alright. We’re sorry. Our bad. But George Bush junior, he’s gonna do his first State of the Union.
It’s 02/2002. The whole world’s gonna watch because nine eleven just happened. And what does he say? There is an axis of evil that runs from North Korea through Iran to Iraq. And the Iranians go, what are you talking about?
Because not only did they offer us assistance, they gave us assistance. We told them we’re gonna blow up the the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the Iranians go, dude, we’ve been fighting a a proxy war with we have a whole group of soldiers on the battlefield who are Afghans and fight that we supply. We’ll give you their contact and you can use them as your ground forces. And Bush is like, sure.
And the next thing you know, he’s calling Iran evil. That was it. That was the end of the reform movement because all the hardliners went, oh, you work with the great Satan, they backstab you. This is what you get. You should have never helped them.
And of course, the average Iranian is like, yeah, it looks like that to me from here. So in 02/2009, there’s the green movement. The Iranian people rise up. They’re attempting democracy again. Their goal is to overthrow not sorry, to to reform the Islamic Republic, not to overthrow it.
Their goal is to force the Islamic Republic to make dramatic changes, especially around women’s rights, but everything. And the Green Movement doesn’t last very long. It fizzles out and it goes down. It taught the world a big lesson though. So what the Green Movement would do is they would they would they would protest in the most important spot in every city.
So in the most important location in Tehran. And then they’d go home for dinner, and then in the morning when they’d show up at that spot to protest again, the police would have it cordoned off. So the only way to get into that spot would have been to battle the police. So then the protesters would go to the second most important spot in the city and protest there, and then they go home for dinner, and when they come back in the morning, that’s cordoned off. So then they’d go to the third and the fourth.
And by the time they were at the sixteenth, it was like an alley on that nobody even saw and the the revolution was over. The Arab Spring learned that lesson so when they took to the streets, they permanently occupied that location twenty four seven. And then when we decided to do the Arab Spring, we took that lesson and we called it Occupy Wall Street. Isn’t that cool? So 2019 rolls along, Iran has another attempt.
It doesn’t last. It burns out pretty quickly. Earlier this year, Khuzestan, the Southwest corner, the Arab part, it has a it’s Arab minority now as far as I know. It’s majority Persian, but it’s traditionally the Arab part. It went into rebellion.
It has not actually stopped being in rebellion. It has it has maintained that rebellion. But then, a little bit over seven weeks ago, I think we’re we’re closing in on the eight week mark, an Iranian woman, actually she’s a Kurd to be precise. Right? So she’s not a Persian Iranian, she’s a Kurdish Iranian.
She was in Tehran visiting. The Kurds are not allowed to have their first names. So she she went by Mahsa. Mahsa Amini is her is her Persian name. And she shows up.
She her head covering wasn’t on correctly. She gets arrested. She’s put into the Morality Police van and all the witnesses say, one of the Morality Police, she was mouthing off, she was telling him to go to hell, she was calling him all sorts of ugly names. One of the Morality Police guys got mad and he raised his leg and he kicked her in the head and smashed her head against the metal side of the the the truck. And then when she gets to the police station, they the TV the cameras are there, it’s rolling, so you can see her.
She walks over, she looks like she’s gonna sit down, she gets up, she walks over to a person, looks like she’s gonna have a conversation with the person, she falls down, she dies. It turns out she had brain she had a brain injury and it was swelling and it finally swelled to the point where it caused her to lose consciousness, that’s why she passes out in that moment. And then she dies of her injuries. That’s it. That was the spark.
Iran has now been in a revolution now for going it’ll be eight weeks here shortly and there’s no signs it’s letting up. In in Iranian culture, on the fortieth day after a person dies, you have to have a ceremony to to talk about that person, to mourn that person. So these fortieths keep popping up. Like just two weeks ago, Mahsa Aminese fortieth came up and people took to the streets and the violence level increased because now people are reminded and they’re angry and they’re in large crowds. And so the people who were killed in the early days of this revolution now, their fortieth keep popping up.
So this so about about ten days ago no, was it more? Two weeks ago, let’s say, the revolutionary guard leader said, we’re gonna start using live bullets. We’re gonna we’re gonna intentionally start killing you. You need to stop. You need to get out of the streets.
And he said it on a Friday. That Saturday and Sunday, there was definitely a drop in the protest. People definitely got scared. By Monday, they were protesting again. Before you knew it, the protests were even larger than they were before, so it didn’t work.
They weren’t intimidated off the streets. And and then what happened was the government actually came and said, you gotta stop killing people because these fortieths are causing so much more revolutionary force afterwards. How do so so you have one guy saying, we’re gonna kill, and then you have the supreme leader saying, please stop. We don’t we can’t manage this. Iran’s economy is on the verge of collapse.
The petrol petrochemical industry went on strike. The oil industry went on strike. The gas industry went on strike. A bunch of the truckers, not all of them, but a bunch of them went on strike. There are whole whole bazaars that have gone on strike.
There are whole segments now of the Iranian economy that’s in free fall. And of course, this is on top of all the sanctions that have been put imposed on Iran, and so the Iranian state can’t do this forever. There is a there is an endpoint to this. One of the hopes was that oil prices would continue to plunge because that takes out the ability of the Islamic Republic to fund itself. And then OPEC raised oil prices to stabilize Venezuela, Russia, and Iran.
And so that that’s not happening. But nonetheless, Iran is the Iranian state is is collapsing. The the the question is, what happens next? So this revolution is an unusual revolution. It’s unlike probably anything ever before, and one of the reasons is it’s a woman’s uprising.
The slogan for this revolution is, which means life, women, liberty. Like that’s the slogan for the revolution. There the songs that they’re singing are about this. The chants, the marches. A whole cadre of the revolutionary force are basically middle school and high school and college student women.
In Iran, the women are actually running the revolution. So when I talked about petrochemical and gas and petroleum, those guys are all men. It’s a 90% male dominated economic field who are siding with the women in the revolution. Like, they’re clear about this. It’s not only about women’s rights.
There’s economic problems. There’s economic problems, there’s this need for democracy that Iranians have never let go of, but women’s rights are at the core because it’s become the symbol of oppression for everybody, even the men. And and that’s what’s really interesting about this. Because if you look at some of the protests, the hijab is gone. Like, all these women have torn off their hijab.
But there are also this cadre of totally covered women, that not just hijab, but even, Chador, which is more. It covers they they tie it off under your chin, who are standing with the women who don’t have hijab, who are saying, we want women to have the right to choose. We want to choose to wear hijab, but we want them to choose not to if they don’t want to, so we’re standing with them. There there’s an amazing video. A woman has just been captured by the morality police.
What a disgusting group of people. Morality police? Anyway, get a job. Like, I don’t know, construction or something. Build something.
Worthless. Anyway, this woman gets captured for her not wearing a hijab. All of a sudden, these covered women, they’re wearing hijab and chador, come charging at the cops. They’re beating the cops. The the woman, the uncovered woman escapes.
By the way, she looked like a gazelle. She’s like leaping through the air running. And the in the meantime, the current women, after the woman has escaped, they just sort of walk away. And the morality police are like, what just happened? And it it so in other words, this isn’t about in Iran, this isn’t about they want to topple the regime and then do something weird like ban Islam.
What they wanna do is they wanna topple the regime, create a democracy, and then have the freedom for people to choose the kind of life they wanna have going forward. They want to terminate the theocracy and replace it with a secular republic. They don’t want to terminate their culture. They don’t wanna demuslimize. And I think sometimes people are seeing it in that framework, which is wrong and bizarre.
But in the meantime, you’ve got places in Europe saying, should we ban hijab to show solidarity with Iran? And they were getting this really loud group of women from Iran going, no, that’s that’s not any better. Oppression. You’re still telling women what to do. We have an idea.
Let women decide what they wanna do, which would be neat to do in Texas. Wouldn’t that be neat if women had rights in Texas too? I I think we should do that here. I think you should be inspired by the women of Iran. There was a woman’s uprising in 1975 in Iceland.
Those are the only two now that I know of, the one that’s taking place in Iran and the one in Iceland. The one in Iceland not only succeeded, they drafted a new constitution. They the women successfully toppled the state. The Iceland is probably the most democratic country on the planet right now. So it it worked, it transformed.
From what I can tell, Iran totally has that potential in this moment. It it’s not certain it will happen, but that that’s actually what this moment is. Their their Iranian people are sophisticated, they’re intelligent, they have the potential to have a massive economy. They’re the twenty first largest economy on Earth right now with their economy being flushed down the toilet. So if they could if they could get out of that and rebound, they’d probably be like the twelfth or fourteenth largest economy.
This is this is a superpower state with enormous resources. They’re one of two countries on the planet that has an advanced drone research program. The United States is the other one. That’s why you keep hearing in the news that there are Iranian drones in the Ukraine because the Iranian drones are so much more sophisticated than the Russian drones. Right?
That that’s that’s what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with an incredible state with incredible potential that’s been crushed by this conservative regime that wants to superimpose its idea of morality and it’s not working. It’s killing the Iranian people and they’re they’re done. I I but who knows what the future looks like, you know what mean? It’s like predicting an election.
It’s like rolling dice. Alright. I think we’re out of time. I’ll field one question because we don’t have a lot of time. So you mentioned America’s role in the history of Iran over and over again.
What what do you think the role will be now and what what do they kinda wanna Yeah. That’s a fantastic question. So the question was, because he’s not mic’d up, what’s the role of The United States basically going forward? So the the pessimist part of me says that what The United States is going to do is use the CIA to try to undermine the revolution and install a new monarchy. So the Shah’s son is still alive.
He has said himself that he doesn’t necessarily himself that he doesn’t necessarily wanna be the monarch, but then he came back and he said, well, but maybe I could do a temporary thing until the state gets stabilized. He I don’t trust anybody. I I assume every politician is always trying to figure out how to maximize their power. So but for all we know, he’s a wonderful guy and he really will do that. My thinking, however, is that the Iranian people aren’t gonna go from it from what I can tell from what’s happening inside Iran.
If it’s up to the diaspora, so the people living especially in The United States, maybe not even the Iranians in in Europe, but the Iranians in The United States, they I think they would love to have the monarchy restored. It but I don’t see it from what I’m seeing in Iran. I think they want a secular republic. My hope is that The United States will stop being the bad guy in foreign policy. It’s time to stop interfering in that way and and turn this around and use this as an opportunity to mend this bridge.
Obama apologized for overthrowing the government in ’53. You know, like, we the first steps in the 12 step program is you got to apologize to the people you hurt. Well, we’re there. Iran’s apologized. We’ve apologized.
We’re in great shape. So all we got to do is stop interfering in a negative way. They could be a great trade partner and maybe we could be friends again. I mean, why not? That could be on the table.
But I think the first step would be to keep the CIA out. The there’s another part of your question though that I think is really important, that’s what can the what can the American people do to stand in solidarity with the Iranian people? One of the things that Iran has been asking for is for there to be protests overseas, They say it it it it gives them hope because they see the support. So like that protest that just happened in Berlin, I I wanna say it was like ten days ago. Oh my god.
It was insane. Now, it was largely Iranian. They were from the diaspora coming from all over Europe going to Berlin, but there were a bunch of Germans there too, hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve been at multiple protests here in are they protests or rallies? I’ve been at multiple rallies here in Austin.
In fact, I I spoke at one in front of the capital. Lloyd Doggett was there. He also spoke. And one of the things I’m seeing is it’s just it’s mostly Iranians. It’s not a 100% Iranians, but it’s probably like 85% Iranians.
When you find out that there’s one of these protests, show up and and show your your non Iranianness. And I think it matters. I think it matters a lot. I’ve been protesting for thirty something years now and one of the things that I notice is you go to an event and it’s overwhelmingly that group. So, right, you you show up at a a Palestinian rights event like during the Gaza massacre in 02/2008, 2009 and, you know, there’s a lot of Arabs there and there are some non Arabs there but there’s there’s no Iranians there.
Well, there were there were two. I knew both of them. And then you, you know, then you go to the Green Movement event that same year, thousand nine, and there weren’t any Arabs there. It was just Iranians. And and, you know, there there weren’t any white people there.
It was really just Iranians. And I and every time I kept thinking, man, you know, if everybody care about the other guy just a little bit more and we could make these events cross over, maybe we’d have some power and we wouldn’t be so fragmented. By the way, there is great value in showing up to these events even if it’s not your group because you get experience doing them. For example, my role in the Green Movement in 2009 was to get in front of the Iranian protesters and slow them down. They just wanted to race.
And it’s like, no. Our goal is to mess up traffic. Slow down. Slow down. And so I was this guy walking backwards doing that.
And then afterwards, they would ask me, how do you know all this stuff? Well, because I was at this protest and that protest and this In other words, don’t wait until your group’s on the line. Get out there and do it now. Care about other people. In this case, it’s the audience and it’s an amazing event because it like, if you’re a feminist, it’s there.
If you believe in religious freedom, it’s there. If you believe in democracy, this is that revolution. There are all these things on the line that most people I think can get behind. Anyway, so my hope is that we as Americans will start to support that way without getting heavy handed and interfering, which is our our ugly past. They already know what they need.
We don’t need to tell them what they need. Trust me. When I was there in 02/2002, I just walk up to random Iranians and just start political conversations and it was amazing how informed just walking down the street, like you walk down the street here and start a political conversation, you’re just gonna get gibberish. It’s nonsense. Oh, by the way, Jon Stewart did that.
He went to Iran and did a show. And I I wanna say it was 02/2007, so was like five years after my experience. And he had the same experience. He just walked up to random Iranians. And then you know how they always have those comedy things where you walk up to a random American and you go, did you know?
And then you tell them some wrong fact and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know. Australia is three times larger than Russia. For real? And the capital of Australia is Singapore and oh, yeah. And and you mock us.
Don’t – don’t be that person. Alright. So we’re definitely out of time right now. We’re over, And so I’m gonna have to call it here. Thanks so much for coming.
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