What the West can learn from the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran
It has been eight months since Hamas re-ignited war in Gaza by launching its latest terrorist attacks against Israel. Iranians around the world have been watching our nightmare unfold as Marxists & Islamists march together in massive pro-Palestine, anti-Israel demonstrations across the USA and Europe.
Note - I should have published this the week after it happened—I had about 80% of the post drafted then. Then I should have done it the month after. Then three months after. Now, eight months after, someone I care about finally gave the me personal motivation to finish this post. They say “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” I would prefer to spare my friends and loved ones this fate.
Iranians know how this story ends because we’ve seen it before. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, in 1979, the Communists and Islamists joined forces to overthrow the Shah and establish an Islamic Republic, which has lasted to this day and is the primary sponsor of Middle Eastern terrorism, including incubating Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen.
The Marxists & Queers marching with the Islamists probably aren’t aware of the history of the Islamic Revolution. They might not know, for example, that as soon as the Islamic Revolution was over, the Islamists turned on the Communists, executing and oppressing them—even the Communist leaders that were political prisoners under the newly deposed Shah. They also might not know that under Islamic rule, gays in Iran are executed to this day (as are gays by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis).
This “unholy” ideological alliance between the extreme left and extreme religious right would be comical if it wasn’t so dangerous. In the Islamic Revolution (like today), the Islamists aptly played victim to hijack the sympathy of the left, using leftists to do publicity on their behalf while they carried out acts of terror. The Islamists played along with the left while they accumulated enough power to realize their ultimate goal, the establishment of an Islamic Republic, and then predictably turned on their leftist compatriots. What followed were some of the darkest days of Iran’s history, with hundreds of thousands killed in the Iran-Iraq war.
In this post I will describe some of the events around the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and hopefully our generation can learn from the regrets of the last.
Unless otherwise specified, all the book excerpts are from The Fall of Heaven, written by Andrew Scott Cooper in 2016.
The Unholy Alliance
In 1979, nothing brought the extreme left and extreme religious right together more than their mutual hatred of the USA & UK. Global hatred of the USA was at all time highs due to the Vietnam War, and Iran was no exception. The UK MI6 lead coup against leftist Prime Minister Mossadeq that re-instated the Shah in 1953—colorfully documented in the book “All The Shah’s Men”—left a feeling of wounded nationalism that united many political factions in Iran in resenting the Shah, who they saw as a puppet of the USA & UK.
Left: Anti-Shah demonstration propaganda from 1976 (source)
Right: Prime Minister Mossadeq being apprehended in 1953
The Iranian left was angry about the Shah’s dealings with the US and the presence of Americans in Iran, especially due to the wealth inequalities resulting from the Iranian oil exports to the US and the deepening relationship with the US military, from whom the Shah was purchasing weapons & fighter jets. They also hated the policy of “diplomatic immunity” from prosecution for all American technical advisors and military personnel in Iran.
So when Ruhollah Khomeini—the insane Islamic clergyman who ignited the Islamic Revolution—said “no foreigners”, the message resonated with many, including leftist students and the Islamic right.
It didn’t matter that Ruhollah Khomeini’s stated, published, objective was the establishment of an “Islamic Republic”—a form of government completely incompatible with Communism (Islamic Law is fundamentally classist, where non-muslims are required to pay an extra tax simply for being non-muslim called the “Jizya”, whereas Communism is supposed to transcend hierarchical social classes). The Communists and Islamists saw themselves as allies in the struggle to overthrow the Shah and establish their respective—yet contradictory—utopias.
Some ways the Communists helped the Islamists included using the universities to indoctrinate the youth into Marxist ideology and using the media to sway public opinion against the Shah. For example, when Islamists burned down the Cinema Rex movie theater in August 1978, killing 430, the Communists were quick to join the Islamists in blaming the atrocity on the Shah. A description of the Cinema Rex tragedy is below:
People cried, jumped over each other. Groping in the dark, the panicked crowd rushed to the emergency exists only to find them locked. Those who were not crushed to death or asphyxiated by toxic fumes were engulfed by a raging inferno.
There was no movement among the doomed audience, only whining and whimpering, terribly muffled, as if from the bottom of a sepulcher.
For many, the greatest fear was that those unrecognizable heaps of flesh lying on the floor may have been their friends, their relatives, people they knew.
And this article from 2017 recounts how the Communists blamed it on the Shah:
The Communists amplified other Islamist lies about the Shah’s regime, such as his alleged imprisonment of 100,000+ political prisoners, as described in this 1980 Washington Post article:
Specifically, the shah has been accused of having had under lock and key either 350,000 or 100,000 foes of his regime (according to Khomeini and exile sources as far back as the mid-1970s) and of having killed 100,000 enemies (Khomeini).
Khomeini even accused the Shah of executing 100,000+ prisoners, although the real number was closer to ~300 over the first 30 some years of his reign, and ~3,000 in the final two years of the revolution (mostly arsonists & armed insurrectionists). For comparison, after Khomeini took power he once executed 3,000+ political prisoners in a single week, including Communists (source).
The students of Iran were not inherently aligned with the Islamists, but after their Marxist indoctrination in universities and exposure to Communist propaganda, saw the Islamists as allies in their opposition to the Shah. Despite (or as a result of) carrying around “The Communist Manifesto”, they became the “useful idiots” to serve the Islamist cause.
Together, the Communists & Islamist factions were able to, through mass strikes, terrorism, and public deception, get the Shah—who was unwilling to escalate violence against his own people just to remain in power—to abdicate his throne in January 1979 and voluntarily live in exile. Little did the Communists know the misery they had just unleashed on themselves, not to mention the rest of Iran.
The Communist Purge
According to some elder former Communist revolutionaries who participated in the ousting of the Shah, they knew they fucked up once the Islamists took over the Shah’s prisons and started executing the Communists leaders that the Shah had put in prison for supporting the revolution. In a classic Machiavellian move, the Islamists recognized that the greatest threat to their power came from the very faction that helped them achieve it—their Communist allies.
The Communists never saw them coming.
The Islamists were patient. They made lists. In the Universities, for example, they recruited from the religious students, had them attend various rallies, and then had them make lists of all their fellow students by political affiliation. They mapped out the organization charts of each of the student political & activist groups and identified their leaders. Then they rounded up the leaders on the same day, imprisoning them all and executing many.
This article from February 9th, 1979—republished on marxist.com—explains the Communist perspective shortly after the Shah was out:
Their hopes that “support for Khomeini will melt away after he forms a government” were completely delusional. Instead it was the Communists whose power melted away.
The Veiling of Women
The Communist women who supported the revolution were also shocked when in March of 1979, two months after the Shah left and Khomeini took power, they were forced to wear hijab by Islamic legal decree.
The day after, on International Women's Day on March 8, 1979, tens of thousands of women protested the new hijab laws in the streets, where they were met with opposition and in some cases violence by the Islamists.
The efforts of the women protestors was ultimately in vain. By 1981, it became compulsory for all women in Iran above the age of nine to wear the veil, and thus publicly demonstrate their subjugation to Islamic rule.
Finish What You Start
The Shah had three opportunities (at least) to crush the Islamic Revolution, but in each case he decided against it.
The first time was in 1963, when Khomeini instigated widespread riots by accusing the Shah of “embarking on the path toward destruction of Islam in Iran.” The following pages of “The Fall of Heaven” describe the situation (Note—Abolhassan Banisadr was the first President of the Islamic Republic after the revolution, though for only one year before he was impeached):
The son of Reza Khan has dug his own grave and disgraced himself...
Dear Mr. Shah, I advise you to desist this policy and acts like this. I don’t want the people to offer thanks if your masters should decide one day that you must leave. I don’t want you to become like your father.
— Ruhollah Khomeini
In response to Khomeini’s instigation, instead of having him executed for treason, the Shah went along with a plan formulated by the other Islamic leaders (marjas) to spare Khomeini’s life and send him into exile:
The Shah accepted the arrangement that spared Khomeini either execution or a length prison sentence.
Strike one.
Strikes two and three, oddly enough, were pitched by Saddam Hussein. In August 1978, the same month as the Cinema Rex tragedy and roughly five months before the Shah was ousted, Saddam called the Shah and offered to assassinate Khomeini. At the time, Khomeini was living in exile in Iraq, where he had been since the Shah spared his life the first time, some 15 years earlier. In addition to seeding chaos in Iran, Khomeini had riled up Shia Islamists in Iraq, turning them against Saddam, who himself was a Sunni Muslim and a secular ruler. Saddam saw an opportunity to solve both the Shah’s problem and his own, and proposed it to the Shah:
This mullah, Khomeini, is causing problems for you, and for me, and for all of us. It would be wise to get rid of him. But I need your agreement to take care of it.
— Saddam HussienIn my opinion, this is not the right action.
— The Shah
Strike two.
A few months later, in November 1978 as the Islamic Revolution was violently escalating, Saddam encouraged the Shah to roll tanks and start blasting the revolutionaries, in order to save Iran:
Tell Her Majesty to tell my brother the Shah to take out his tanks and guns and turn them against the revolutionaries. Tell him it is better that a thousand Iranians die now than a million people die later.
— Saddam HusseinI cannot sully my hands with the blood of my people.
— The Shah
Strike three, you’re out.
While Saddam was psychopathic enough to understand how psychopathic Khomeini was and how dangerous his Islamic Revolution was shaping up to be, the Shah was not. The Shah was unwilling to escalate violence against his own people—even those who wished him dead—and shortly thereafter lost his throne.
My grandmother is 85 years old, and lived in Iran through the revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq. She was a seamstress, so she helped the war effort by sowing patches in the uniforms of child soldiers where they had been damaged by bullets and landmines so they could be reused. She curses Khomeini to this day and says “if only the Shah had executed Khomeini when he had the chance.”
The USA and UK helped the Islamic Revolution
As a US citizen, I wish this weren’t true, but it is. Like most Middle Eastern meddling, it was about oil. The Shah had built up massive oil exports that made Iran wealthy and invested in a powerful military to protect Iran’s interests. And during a time that US Dollar inflation was rampant (~5-12%), the Shah was restricting oil sales, driving oil prices even higher.
Khomeini had been in contact with the CIA, offered to make a better deal, and assured them that there would be no disruption in the oil exports to the USA.
The CIA was supposed to be collaborating with Iranian intelligence. Instead, they deceived the Iranian intelligence by taking secret meetings with Khomeini. Khomeini tricked the CIA into believing that an “Islamic Belt” could help contain Soviet Communism. “Tricked” might be generous to the CIA—as they were already open to the idea of deposing the Shah.
The CIA also pressed the Shah not to respond to the revolutionaries with force (because they thought the optics were bad). And when the Shah had finally made up his mind to leave in January 1979, the CIA pressured the military leaders not to stage a coup and re-establish order, paving the way for Khomeini’s Islamic militants to violently take control of the country.
Later on, after the Shah lost power, President Carter chided him for being weak and allowing the revolutionaries to run rampant:
This time General Huyser had been sent to Tehran at the orders of President Carter to work with the Shah’s generals and make sure they did not launch a coup.
Friday, January 5th, President Jimmy Carter, Prime Minister James Callaghan of Great Britain, President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France, and West Germany’s chancellor Helmut Schmidt arrived on the French Caribbean island territory of Guadeloupe for a four-power summit.
In the course of a general discussion there was general agreement that the Shah would have to leave Iran within the next few days.
After repeatedly imploring the Shah not to crack down, Western leaders now blamed him for being too soft and losing control.
Not only did Khomeini not end up working with the US, but in November 1979, the Islamic Republic took 53 US diplomats and citizens inside Iran hostage for 444 days.
The Shah, in his memoir “Answer to History”, recalls how the West betrayed him:
If you’re interested, I trained an AI model on the Shah’s voice and had it read the above excerpt, which you can find here.
The Iran - Iraq War
In September 1980 after the Islamic Revolution, high on their own Islamic dreams of conquest, the Islamic Republic started a war in Iraq. The official story is that Iraq invaded, which is true, but it was Khomeini’s instigating the Shias in Iraq to revolt against their Sunni rulers (and the recent execution of the vast majority of the Shah’s military officers) that led Saddam to decide to attack Iran.
Approximately 500,000 Iranians and Iraqis died in the bloody and pointless conflict (with more casualties on the Iranian side). After two years, Iran had successfully reclaimed the territory that Iraq had taken in their initial invasion, but Khomeini prolonged the war by making it treason to even discuss peace, and was committed to total victory over the Iraqis and Saddam Hussein in particular.
Iraq made heavy use of landmines, so the Islamic Republic trained children to be “human minesweepers”.
Those are the uniforms my grandmother would patch up. This blog may be called “Molochpilled”, but the rampant child sacrifice that the Islamic Republic made into their official military strategy still makes me nauseous to put into writing.
The Iran-Iraq war also gave the Islamic Republic cover to crackdown on dissidents inside the country. Opposition members were accused of treason and summarily executed. According to estimations by the military historian Spencer C. Tucker, in the period of 1980 to 1985, between 25,000 to 40,000 Iranians were arrested, 15,000 Iranians were tried and 8,000 to 9,500 Iranians were executed.
The war went on for 8 years until July 1988, after Iran had completely exhausted its will to fight, and Khomeini finally agreed to end the war. No land was won or lost by either side.
Fast Forward To Today
The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded with the explicit goal of globally exporting radical Islam through Jihad. They are succeeding. Not only have they set up terror proxies in the Middle East—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen, and their Islamist militant allies Iraq & Syria—they have exported their Jihadist ideology into Western cities as well. This is a picture from a “pro-Palestine” protest in front of the White House from June 8th, 2024:
They are chanting: “Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now!”
There are similar scenes in nearly every major Western city. Here is an example from June 6th in Greece, where the Communists came out in support of the Palestinian resistance:
In Germany on June 1st, an Afghani Jihadist attempted to murder an anti-Islam politician, and stabbed 6 people total, including fatally stabbing this police officer who unfortunately apprehended someone else. In a bizarre twist of fate, the police officer who shot the Jihadist was Iranian. He will spend the rest of his life thinking about how he could have saved his buddy’s life if he only pulled the trigger 2 seconds earlier:
Here is another example from the Islamic Education Center (my childhood Saturday school) in Maryland only 15 minutes from Washington D.C., where on May 22nd someone who literally works for the Islamic Republic was making death threats to anti-Islamic Republic protestors:
In many universities across the US, Islamists and leftist students (indoctrinated in the Marxist “oppressor” ideology) march together and have set up several “encampments” on university grounds. On the surface, they protest in support of the Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza, but their chants of “Globalize the Intifada” and appearance of Hezbollah flags demonstrate their support for global Islamic Jihad. To top things off, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khamenei—Khomeini’s successor—published an open letter in support of the student protests, explaining that the students had “now formed a branch of the Resistance Front” and advising them to “become familiar with the Quran.”
The global Jihad also progresses through political means. In the small, 28,000 resident city of Hamtramck, Michigan for example, as soon as Islamists gained the majority of the city council seats they voted to ban gay pride flags. The former mayor said that there was “a sense of betrayal” by the gay community who had previously supported the Islamic community out of solidarity with a religious minority. This is an instructive microcosm of what to expect if Islamists take control over our democratic political systems.
Turning our attention back to Israel, it’s clear how the Islamic Republic is using its war against Hamas to turn the global left against Israel & the US. They are running the same playbook as in 1979, but instead of trying to topple the Shah, this time they want the destruction of Israel. Leaning on Marxist ideology, they frame Israel as the oppressor and Palestine as the oppressed, ignoring Hamas’s Oct. 7th atrocities and their support from Hezbollah & the Houthis, all three of which are backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As a result of international leftist support for the Palestinian cause—either knowingly or unknowingly in support of global Islamic Jihad—many Western institutions have been hampering Israel’s ability to defend itself. On March 25th, the UN Security Council voted to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, in opposition to Israel’s goals of eliminating Hamas, and without requiring the truce depend on Hamas freeing their remaining Israeli hostages. On May 9th, President Biden threatened to halt weapons shipments to Israel if Israel went ahead with its plan to invade Rafah—the southern part of Gaza—which Israel claims is Hamas’s final stronghold. On May 21st, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes.
All this at time when the Islamic Republic of Iran is much closer to acquiring functional nuclear weapons than ever before in history, and so is strategically using its proxies to tie up Israeli forces so they can’t be used against the Islamic Republic directly. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than Islamic Jihadis with nukes.
If I go, Iran will fall into ruins, and if Iran falls, the Middle East follows. And if the Middle East is in ruins, great terror will reign over the world...
— His Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 1979
Iran has already fallen into ruins. The strongest freedom-loving country left standing up to Islamic Jihad in the middle east is Israel, and should it fall, the “great terror” the Shah described will only continue its global expansion.
Islamists taking over your country might seem like a farfetched prospect to you all today, but it was just as farfetched for the Iranians leftists who supported the Islamic Revolution. As it turns out, hating America is not actually a real plan for running your country, and the contradictory alliance of Marxists and Islamists is only ever born of common hatred—not a desire to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. The outcome, as we saw in the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, is Islamists using and deceiving leftists to accomplish their objectives, and then brutally seizing power at the first opportunity.
Iranians have learned this lesson the hard way.
Hopefully the rest of the world doesn’t have to.
👹
If you liked this post, you should also watch this video by Elica Le Bon, where she breaks down the alliance between the Marxist left & religious radical right, and the devastating results.
Also, a much shorter summary of the content contained in the post can be found in this article, which I found while researching.