Dec. 31, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:30
3946 The Road to Revolution: Iranian Uprising | True News
The incredibly brave men and women of Iran are standing strong against the theocratic dictatorship that oppresses them. Join Stefan Molyneux for a rapid tour through the events that led up to this critical event in modern history.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I really, really want to talk about this topic, but I feel so strongly about it, and I know the camera's not going to lie, and you're not going to be able to miss it.
So I've been trying to find a way to talk about this without being so passionate about it.
I haven't had any luck, so I'm just going to tell you up front why I feel so strongly about what's happening in Iran at the moment, and then you can put it in context, and hopefully I can get through to the facts in a relatively objective manner.
So I grew up without a father and I was incredibly fortunate, like life-changingly fortunate, to meet in my early teens a man who was, without even a close second, the greatest man that I knew at the time and certainly one of the greatest men I've ever known in my life.
And he was the father of a friend of mine.
He was very wise, smart, funny, engaging, good-humoured, good-natured, a great father, a great husband, great provider, and engaged with children in a respectful manner, engaged in debates that the family was wonderfully intellectual.
And because I was basically three inches above this trashy, subterranean, dantean, hellscape layer of trailer park single motherhood, seeing that path to a middle class household, seeing that path of possibility for intelligence, for wisdom, for curiosity, for debate, for arguments, for language, for virtue.
That was the skyhook that I grabbed onto to get me out of where my origin story was destined to lead me, which was to a terrible path.
This man, this great man, this hero of my youth and of my middle age Was a Persian man.
He was Iranian.
Oh, he referred to himself, of course, as Persian.
And my admiration for him and for what I learned about the Persian culture literally knows no bounds.
And when these stories come up, I feel very strongly about it.
This man, who in my view was killed by the incompetencies of the Canadian healthcare system, was a truly great man, a true inspiration, and had a massive amount to do with who I became.
Only for the better. The worst is all mine.
What's going on now in Iran is very powerful.
You've seen, I'm sure, this picture of this woman standing up in a crowd, holding up her head covering, standing there.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Heroic beyond words.
I mean, we get into these bitchy back and forths in Twitter and so on, and people get all this drama going.
These people, after choking on theocratic dictatorship and being ground down for decades, the thirst that they have for freedom, for independence, for liberty, for freedom of conscience...
Is a force elemental in its nature and power.
And we should all be providing as much support as humanly possible.
To the incredibly brave men and women who are standing up to a kind of tyranny that we can only imagine in our worst nightmares.
And so I wanted to give you some context, some thoughts about this, but because I feel very strongly about this and I hope and wish with all of my heart that they are able to achieve the kind of liberty that they had, maybe even greater.
I just wanted to mention up front, I'm not going to be able to get through this without this passion spilling out.
Now you know why. So, Iran, I'm just going to give you a very, very brief overview.
Iran is one of the world's oldest empires, 2,500 years old, or Persia.
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to just use the terms back and forth.
And there was a brief flowering of intense human potential.
The Persians are a brilliant race, a brilliant group.
From 1941 until 1979, so this is Iran, there was a constitutional monarchy.
This was under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
This is Iran's Shah.
Shah just means king. And this was a renaissance in Iran.
So in 1900, around, it was a mess.
The thieves and bandits all over the place.
Literacy in Persia was 1%.
And, of course, there was these archaic Islamic dictates that stripped rights from women.
And it was, you know, the usual mess for the region.
Now, the Shah... Revolutionize this in a way that's just about the most compressed advance of a human society in the history.
And shows how incredibly the Persian people can improve when given basic freedoms.
So there was a fair amount of wealth that was generated from oil.
And the Shah liberalized the economy, helped to modernize the nation.
Rural roads were built.
There were postal services.
There were libraries. And the spread of electricity and so on.
There were dam construction. And the Shah helped to take, of course, Iran has this very arid land...
And he helped through these dams, he helped to irrigate it and to provide the only gold that desert countries really have, which is water.
And Iran then became 90% self-sufficient in food production, which is an astonishing feat for a desert country, largely desert country.
Under the Shah, there was the establishment of universities and colleges, and he actually used some of his own fortune to set up these educational foundations to train students in market-friendly disciplines to help grow the economy.
He freed the markets to some degree, and it was really just astonishing.
He wanted to transfer land from the government to the people.
So he actually donated half a million crown acres to 25,000 farmers.
Now, just going from the early 1940s to the late 70s is just a couple of decades.
Now, 1978 was the Shah's last full year in power.
So just 25 years earlier, the average Iranian earned $160.
This is all inflation adjusted.
In just 25 years...
The average Iranian had gone from making $160 to $2,540.
That's more than 15 times increase.
More than 15 times increase in earnings with basic freedoms and opportunities, and a pullback of theocratic dictatorship, more than 15 times increase in income.
Under the Shah, at the end of the Shah's reign, Iran had full employment, actually imported workers from overseas.
The national currency had been stable for 15 years.
There was a French economist, André Pietre, called Iran a country of growth without inflation.
That's just the big problem for a lot of the Western countries.
And there was a plan for the future as well.
So Iran was, at the time of the 70s, the world's second largest oil exporter.
But the Shah also planned construction of 18 nuclear power plants.
He built an Olympic sports stadium.
And he actually did apply to host the Olympics in 1988.
That, of course, eventually went to Seoul.
And there were no other Middle East nations that were even close to being able to do that.
Now, what happened?
So... There were two strains, and I talk about this in my presentation, which I highly recommend, of course, The Truth About Joseph McCarthy.
There are two strains in the American government.
There is the anti-communist strain, which tend to be the politicians, and then there is the pro-communist strain, which tend to be the bureaucrats, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
So the Shah was pro-Western, relatively pro-free market, and anti-communist.
And so he was considered a US ally by some in the US government.
But because he was anti-communist, he ran afoul, I believe, of the highly communist infiltrated State Department.
Now, the Shah Posted the main barrier to the communist Soviet expansion and ambitions in the Middle East.
And of course the pro-communists wanted the Soviet government to gain control of the Middle East and particularly its oil resources.
So... There's a foreign affairs analyst named Hilaire du Berrier, who said, and I quote, he determined to make Iran capable of blocking Russian advance until the West should realize to what extent her own interests were threatened and come to his aid.
It necessitated an army of 250,000 men.
He also helped fund and develop an air force that was ranked among the world's five best.
See, again, you take the Persian people and you give them freedom and stand back.
It is a supernova of expanding human potential.
And he was reasonable within the Middle East context itself, which is not the easiest thing in the world.
The Shah wanted peace with Israel, and he even supplied Israel with oil when it was beleaguered.
And at home, the Shah protected minorities.
And he permitted non-Muslims to freely practice their faith.
He wrote, all faith imposes respect upon the beholder.
So he basically brought this retrograde, ancient, pre-medieval Iranian culture into the 20th century.
He granted women equal rights.
Astonishing, amazing stuff.
And there's nothing more dangerous than success in a corrupt international environment sometimes.
So then what happened was Iran was becoming rich.
Now remember, he was anti-communist.
He liked the free market relatively.
And the success of Iran under the Shah, 15 times higher, Increase in annual income in just 25 years.
Astonishing. This flies in the face, of course, of communist thought.
Under communist thought, when you get free markets, the workers should become poor.
So again, it is successful.
It goes against the communist theory.
Therefore, it must be destroyed.
So what happened was Iran is doing incredibly well.
It is a robust, it's a growingly robust barrier to communist Soviet expansionist goals in the Middle East.
And then, boom, propaganda starts to hit the Shah, becomes the target of a slander and destruction campaign.
This is American and British foreign policy makers.
And of course they work hand in hand with the Western press, as has been so often the case.
So there were the bureaucrats in these foreign offices, there was the media, there were Soviet-inspired communist insurgents, and the mullahs who did not like the fact that women were studying, that women were going to the beach in bikinis, that women had equal rights.
They all combined to try to take down the Shah.
And it didn't take very long.
Again, there was no internet to oppose this narrative, to oppose the pen truly being mightier than the sword.
And it took only three years.
The guy goes from a monarch at the height of his powers to being exiled.
This happened January 16th, 1979, and then he died.
Iran in turn fell to the Ayatollah Khomeini's terror regime.
Even Teddy Kennedy ranted against the Shah And in December 1977, the Kennedy family financed, and it was called a Committee for the Defense of Liberties and Rights of Man.
This was in Tehran.
It was basically just a headquarters to help coordinate the revolution.
Betrayed by Carter, Iran fell.
To the theologians. And it has since been mired in that.
With, I believe, the aid of Obama and the support of Obama.
And now, in the age of Trump, things are changing.
So what has happened? Just over the past few days, we have thousands of protesters who've taken to the streets of Iran.
And they're railing against the government, these Ayatollah's government.
And the secular government of President Hassan Rouhani.
They say, death to the dictator, death to Rouhani.
These are the chants this is going on in, it's hard to know for sure, at least eight Iranian cities.
And the movement does appear to be spreading and growing at the moment.
The UK Daily Mail reports protesters Our surrounding an Iranian mullah, who is a powerful member of the theocratic ruling class, and are chanting, Mullahs be ashamed and leave Iran, right in his face.
God. I just really, really want you to understand how incredibly courageous, especially in the age of social media, when stuff gets recorded, stuff gets photographed, stuff gets spreaded, videos get spreaded.
It is brave beyond words.
There's a big protest that's been held in Mashhad.
This is one of the holiest sites in Iran and in all of Shia Islam because it contains the shrine of a revered 9th century imam.
And this just happened yesterday.
Reports of protesters filling the streets of Qom.
This is the spiritual center of Iran.
And the chants are, we don't want an Islamic republic!
There's another protest chant, and these don't translate perfectly of course, another protest chant is, Iran is haphazard without the Shah!
And of course that's, they remember, this stuff all has to happen before those who lived under the Shah and the growth of freedoms and equality for women die off and it all falls down the memory hole.
Now this is incredibly powerful defiance against the Mullahs, the government, the revolution of 1979, which of course is considered year zero of the glorious new world in Iran.
And there's a woman, she's standing there, above the crowd, standing up, no veil, no headscarf.
So what is going on? There is, of course, a great passion for freedom.
The proximate cause seems to be public anger over sharply rising prices for food, high inflation, and high unemployment.
Some estimates put it at 40%.
Because for the average Iranian, the standard of living has declined about 30% over the past...
And compared to, I mean, they knew what it was like to live in this ground-down theocracy.
They had this couple of decades of relative freedom and equality under the Shah.
Now it's come back down.
And this is, of course, tyranny breeds poverty.
Freedom, economic freedom, property rights, freedom of trade, freedom of contract breeds wealth.
The free market breeds wealth.
Tyranny breeds poverty. Poverty, destruction.
And there are Iranian dissidents that are talking about an uprising.
And this uprising, there was a Green Revolution in 2009.
This may be more significant.
And it may be more difficult for the government to use violence to suppress it.
Because some demonstrators seem to be willing to fight back.
Or at least stand their ground.
Now, reports just came in.
From Al-Arabia that three people have been killed and many people injured after the Revolutionary Guard opened fire on protesters in the city of Darud.
So who knows where this will go.
I don't, of course, favor any kind of military intervention.
This is not going to work.
But the kind of messages that I want to get across to everyone about this is cross your fingers and hope for freedom.
The Persians, the Iranians, have an incredible capacity for industriousness, for liberty, for engagement intellectually, for great writing.
It breaks my heart how much human potential is kept from the world stage.
How much thought and art and literature and reason and evidence and science Persian scientists are legendary.
How much, how many of the gifts the Persian people could give to the world are held back by the black veil of tyrannical theocracy?
I, of course, thirst for freedom for all.
I thirst for the gifts that this incredibly gifted group can give to the world.
My heart breaks for the horrifying tragedy of the U.S. betrayal of the Shah under Carter and the manipulations of the pro-communist forces in the foreign offices of both the U.K. and the U.S., in my opinion.
And we should stop interfering in countries.
We should stop selling people down the river out of our hatred for freedom.
We should give people liberty.
We should support emotionally, intellectually, passionately.
We should support those who are risking life and limb to become free.
And we should also remember that our freedoms also hang by a thread and can vanish like that.
And that we ourselves may face decades of repression before even the possibility of any kind of liberalization comes along.
So I strongly suggest and urge that you tweet your support for what is going on for those thirsting for freedom in Iran.
Do it because they deserve freedom.
They need freedom. Do it because the gifts they can give you will defy imagination once they are free.
And do it because the West did a lot to help enslave them.
It's fair more on you. Thank you so much for watching.
