In 1953 the CIA and MI6 participated in a coup d’etat in Iran. That true sentence (and what usually follows) can create an oversimplified distortion of history—and present. But Iran is in the news again with the biggest protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution bringing millions to the streets. The regime unsurprisingly cracked down hard: at least 2,700 protesters have been killed and 18,000 arrested.
Though the initial impetus was economic, these are the latest in a wave of growing uprisings in Iran against the far-right theocratic authoritarian government—especially its treatment of women. How did we get here? What happened in 1953? Isn’t this all just about oil anyway? Was the 1979 revolution really about religion? Weren’t there Communists involved? Does all the turmoil in this region trace back to Western colonial imperialism?
Julian explores the tangled threads of oil, empire, and religion.
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In 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 participated in a coup in Iran.
That true sentence and what usually follows in most accounts of those events can create an oversimplified and distorted picture of the history, though, and how it leads us to the present situation.
We'll unpack why soon, but Iran is in the news again, with the biggest protests since the 1979 revolution bringing millions to the streets over the last two to three weeks.
There have been large protests several times in the last decade or so, centered most recently on the woman life freedom movement in the wake of the killing of Masajina Amini in the custody of morality police after having been arrested for having hair showing from under her headscarf in 2022.
The current wave started as unrest over economic hardship and currency devaluation and then grew into a mass uprising calling for an end to the regime, death to the dictator, and it seems even the return of the overthrown monarchy with growing popular support for the son of former autocratic Shah Reza Pathlavi, which seems odd.
As the protests have grown, the regime has cracked down even harder.
An internet blackout, mass arrests, and increasingly a shoot-to-kill directive.
Over 18,000 have been arrested across 31 towns and cities.
Some have apparently been tortured into giving blindfolded televised confessions of being foreign agents who've committed crimes in the name of America and Israel.
Conservative estimates put the death toll close to 2.7,000, but some sources say it may be much higher, and the regime is willing to admit to 2,000.
Chilling footage has shown that in addition to their more militarized presence, at the peak of the unrest, groups of the IRGC, that's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, in plain clothes, rode motorcycles into protest areas to shoot Iranians.
Protesters have held up their cell phone flashlights to show how many of them were gathered on blacked out streets.
Others have been shown dancing and singing around fires, destroying government buildings, tearing down billboards showing the supreme leader.
And there have been those iconic photographs which went viral of defiant women, long hair uncovered with a cigarette between their lips that they're lighting with a burning photograph of the Ayatollah.
At least 50 mosques, but according to the foreign minister, as many as 350 have been set on fire.
Here's Faranak Ahmedi, an Iranian journalist for the BBC, explaining why.
And mosques are not just a place of worship in Iran.
Many, if not most of them, are headquarters of basij militias who are used on the streets to shoot people.
And in everyday life, they are used to control every facet of your life.
Back in Iran, we were at a mixed-gendered house party, like maybe 10 people that birthday.
There was music and we were dancing.
These basij militias patrolled that area all the time, like they did every area too.
So they raided that party.
And when they come and take you, quite forcefully, they take you to the mosque first.
And from there, they file a report.
And then from there, they take you to the police station.
Many times I've been arrested for either being with a man that was unrelated to me or because of my hijab.
One of the first places I've been taken to was a mosque.
This is what theocracy looks like.
And it's been a reality in Iran for almost 47 years.
Theocracy is a religious cult enshrined into law, wielding the full power of the police, military, prison system, and nowadays, surveillance technology to impose its will.
It is forced religion and forced compliance with archaic laws based on religion.
Make no mistake, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, like Khamenei before him, is an authoritarian dictator.
He differs from most other dictators in the world today because he's also the highest religious authority in the land, and his political and legal edicts carry the additional gravitas of divine authority.
Loyalty to him is framed as akin to loyalty to God.
Now, some will make the case that this is not really about religion.
It's just the distorted manipulation of religion so as to have power over people.
Or they may say this is just a long-tail manifestation of Western colonialism, forcing oppressed people to double down in resistance on their cultural and religious roots so as to claw back some human dignity.
To whatever extent that may be true, it appears to be a failed strategy in this case for the population risking life and limb in the name of freedom.
But these types of consequential paradoxes seem to be ubiquitous in the geopolitics of this region and perhaps in geopolitics as a whole.
I'm Julian Walker.
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