Here's what to remember about Iran--and the Iranian people

There were two revolutions in Iran: the one to disconnect Iran from Western control--and the one to make the Iranian people captives. There will be two revolutions here, too, if we're not careful.

Tehran 1979. The veiling order has just come down. Four years later, it will be LAW. 100,000 women hit the streets in protest. Men jeering them dangled their penises out windows and screamed, “This is what you really want!” Image in the public domain.

As ICE beats people in the streets, drags 80-year-old men out of their houses in their underwear — in 10-degree weather — and shoots people through open car windows and then screams, “Fucking bitch!” at them as they die, it’s good to remember this has happened before.

In the run-up to the Iranian Revolution, the CIA and British Petroleum had overthrown the duly-elected Mohammad Mossadegh, opposition leader against the West’s golden boy, the Shah Pahlavi, whose spoiled wife bathed in milk while the Iranian people starved. The Shah ran a secret police force that rivaled what would become the Stasi in Germany and the KGB in the Soviet Union and used Gestapo tactics on their citizens that included torture, rape, “disappearance” and death.

The Twelver Shia religious potentates were sidelined in the great Westernization of the 1920s—which found Iranian Princess Soraya doing The Charleston in an underground bar in Cairo in a flapper skirt. Iranian women got the vote before American women got it—though New Zealand women go it first! Go Kiwis! In one incident, an Iranian government official so despied the mullahs that he ate pork in front of them, an insult they never, ever, ever, ever forgot.

The abuses of the Shah—the greed and cruelty of the Shah—so oppressed the Iranian people that it was clear something would go down. In Paris, Khomeini, aided by Abolhassan Beni-Sadr, were planning a popular uprising that would return Grand Ayatollah to Iran—a homecoming they hoped would make him a dictator. They got it, too. And part of the way they got it was this:

The American Embassy Takeover, Nov. 4, 1979

Unattributed image from the George Washington University National Security Archives.

By the time the siege of the American Embassy in Tehran began, an ugly affair that would last 444 days and cause Jimmy Carter to lose his re-election bid—that and some treason by former Texas governor John Connolly—Iranians were furious with the United States. Its oil was being siphoned off at great profit to the Americans and the Brits while Iranians slid into darker and darker poverty with oil rig and refinery workers calling Iranian citizens “sand Niggers.”

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The best movie on this subject is probably Argo, which won 2013 Oscars for Best Picture (Clooney, Heslov and Ben Affleck), Best Adapted Screenplay (Bill Terrio) and Film Editing (Bill Goldenberg). Watch it on Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00BR6SBWA/ref=atv_sr_fle_c_srec0828_9_1_9?sr=1-9&pageTypeIdSource=ASIN&pageTypeId=B00BHMEALA&qid=1768923191564

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The Iranian hostage crisis set U.S. - Iranian relations in a vicious place and they’ve been there ever since. When the Grand Ayatollah died, he left the country in the hands of Ali Khomenei, notably NOT an elevated Islamic scholar but bloodthirsty enough for the job. Next thing you know, they’re trying to get nuclear weapons and threatening to turn Tel-Aviv into a smoking, radiating ruin.

[Side note: little does Tehran apparently realize, the prevailing winds would roll the radiation eastward from Israel until it hit the mountains behind Iran, in which case the radiation would roll back down the slopes and settled into the BOWL that is Tehran and cause the greatest radiation disaster since WWII, including Chernobyl. How lucky so many of us are (she said, acidly) to be ruled by such imbeciles.]

But then, something really remarkable and unexpected happened.

9/11 and the Response of Ordinary Iranians

What has long been lost in this narrative on the American side—but not on the Iranian side—is that in the hell that attended the coming of the Islamic state was horrific. Married couples holding hands in a park killed by police, who did not ask for their ID, for unauthorized sexual conduct. The beating and killing of unveiled women. The imprisonment of film makers (including Oscar winners), women’s rights activists (including Nobel Prize Winners), and foreign women used as poker chips have driven Iranian public opinion of their government downhill from the beginning.

But that’s the educated class, the sophisticated urban populations, the older people who can remember what a moderately free society was like. In the agrarian countryside, with its education dominated by religion and its exposure to the outside world flattened to the ground, religious conservatism is high, memory is asleep, and rabid zealousness is high.

Yet even now, in the most remote places, people know that Khomenei and rule by the mullahs need to go. The Revolutionary Guard, which has arrogated immense power to itself by protecting bad guys, and the Basij, which spy on ordinary citizens, have been Public Enemies Nos. 1 and 2 since the late 1990s when anti-clerical protests broke out.

Then, on 9/11, something marvelous happened.

The attacks on the Twin Towers started with the first at 8:56 a.m. Eastern time. The second tower was hit at 9:03 a.m. The first hit looked like an accident; the second told us it definitely wasn’t.

In space, astronaut Frank Culbertson, Jr., aboard the space shuttle, watched smoke rise from Lower Manhattan until it reached the thermosphere. Shock gripped his team. As the earth spun beneath them, soon they were over central Asia, and the light coming from Iran amazed them. It was early evening in Iran, and in the growing darkness, the Iranians hoisted more than 100,000 candles and flashlights to show support for the Americans who’d just been attacked.

That’s where Iranians were 25 years ago. It’s where many of them are now, too. Not that they are passionately pro-American, but they do know that the freedom Americans (barely still) have is what they want. AND they are passionately human and deeply fair and don’t like injustice no matter who its victims may be.

Now for the Lesson to America

The lesson of Iran for America now is that fascism isn’t safe for anyone, and it is not going to give you it s plan ahead of time. WE HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE FULL PROJECT 2025 PLAN, HAVE WE??? NO! WE HAVEN’T. It’s still “classified” by the Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, who is actually running your life while Donald Trump makes an ass of himself and threatens the world, punishing half of Europe and threatening all of Greenland because the Norwegian Committee would not give him a Nobel Peace Prize he so richly did NOT deserve, the medal for which María Corina Machado—arguably the stupidest and most cravenly political covetous woman on this planet—gave him in exchange, she hopes, for the presidency of Venezuela, the election for which she did not win and which she absolute will not get from anyone.

What happened to Iran WILL happen to us unless we refuse to let it happen. And like the mullahs did, they have ALREADY started with women: the rollback of abortion rights is designed to get women out of the public sphere where they have competed all too well with men who want to have Trad-wifies at home and the money they lost when women started competing. They want control, freedom from responsibility, free house cleaning, and an obedience woman in the bedroom, and financial control. So did the mullahs, and they got it.

Then there is the demand for a religiosity that elevates one skin color and is beginning to elevate even the notion that slavery was a good thing (even for slaves) and now the notion that Americans really are exceptional and have a divine right to take Venezuela’s oil and Greenland’s rare earth metals and access that a fabulously rich Arctic sea floor to which they will MAKE SURE THEY HAVE ACCESS BY KEEPING US ON OIL SO THAT THE ICE CAPS MELT. It’s important to get that last part.

So, the image of 100,000 Iranian women protesting force-veiling FORTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO — ALMOST FIVE DECADES AGO — tells you everything you need to know: once they get in power, they will do anything to keep that power, and they will become more and more and more and more viciously conservative and intolerant to make sure they keep it.

Here endeth the lesson.