To Young Liberals and Leftists Regarding Iran

If you are a young liberal or leftist, no doubt you have not heard much of anything about what the current regime in Iran is like. Let me fill you in: this regime is the most anti-liberal, anti-leftist regime in the world. It remains a mystery to me why any liberals and leftists are supporting it, but if they are so psychotic as to want to support people who want to kill them, I suppose no amount of argumentation will convince them otherwise.

Let me begin with the situation as it was when I first heard about it in the early 1970s. At that time, Iran was run by the Shah, who was firmly anti-communist and who held all opponents in check with a vicious secret police force. It was depressingly similar to many other regimes of that era, which American conservatives supported only because they were anti-communist. Because it had seemed as though Iran might go communist in 1953, we interfered with their election to guarantee that it would not, and thus the Shah came to power.

Throughout the 1970s, leftists in Iran worked to overthrow the Shah. At some point, I became aware that conservative Muslims, too, were working to overthrow the Shah. “How nice,” I thought, “that these two groups are working for the same goal.” As the decade neared its end, the pressure against the Shah grew until at last he was forced to go into exile. “Hurray!” I thought. "Now a socialist regime will take over, and it will align with the Soviet Union." I wasn’t exactly a fan of the Soviet Union, but I thought the U.S. had discredited itself by supporting such a brutal leader as the Shah.

A month later, I knew it was all a ghastly mistake. A socialist entity did not emerge. Instead, the Muslims took over and began murdering as many opponents as they could. At first, it was just people associated with the old regime that were murdered. Ok, that was understandable, though still rather brutal. But then they went after others. More on that later. But the big thing, even ignoring all the murders, was the way they set up a horrid theocracy that went against everything that liberals and leftists were promoting here in the West. A joke back then was that there was no point in bombing them back to the stone age, because they were already there. Here are some of the things they did:

• Forced women to cover up and set up a religious police force to enforce this rule

• Fired all female judges

• Overturned a liberal abortion law

• Denounced soccer as a decadent Western sport [after Ayatollah Khomeini died, this was reversed, but women were not allowed to go to soccer games]

• Frowned on all other Western cultural products (like movies and music)

• Prohibited dancing and drinking

The worst part was the executions, which I alluded to above. Keep in mind that both leftists and Muslims had worked to overthrow the Shah. Also, Iranian leftists had welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini as he returned from exile. But this didn’t mean anything to the new regime, for they murdered many liberals and leftists. As Nick Cohen points out in his book Waiting for the Etonians (p. 118), “the Islamists murdered tens of thousands of leftists, perhaps up to 100,000, after the 1979 Iranian revolution.”

I don’t know to what extent this has continued, but I do know that they torture leftists there. An account in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago by one victim who eventually managed to get to the West told of how he tried to placate his torturers by mentioning how he had written approvingly of Edward Said and was friends with Noam Chomsky, but they weren’t having any of it, and they denounced those two as insufficiently supportive of the Palestinians. (See here).

I also read an account several years ago in I believe the Times (of London) by an Iranian woman, who like me realized about a month into the new regime that getting rid of the Shah was a terrible, terrible mistake. (Unfortunately, I neglected to clip this article and have no way to find it again.) It was especially bad for women, she said. She was a lawyer, and she said she spent most of her time looking through dusty archives of legal decisions going back centuries in the hope that she could find a precedent that would allow Iranian women to have some tiny little right under the new regime, a right which they had taken for granted when they had had it under the Shah.

In short, feminism (to the extent that it existed under the Shah) was totally destroyed by the new regime. Leftism itself was totally destroyed. The communist party fled, and its headquarters are still located outside of Iran. Many leftists fled to Moscow or else came to the West.

And this is why I say it is the most anti-liberal, anti-leftist regime of our era. No other regime in my lifetime has murdered as many leftists as it has. No other regime comes close.

Now I know that all of this negative information about the regime will surprise you, since it is not in accord with what you have heard from your parents, teachers, and professors. You may even want to reject it. But what I’ve said is the reality of the regime. Let me point out that I’ve never heard anyone provide evidence against what I've said. They either agree with my account, or else they never mention it. So, I take it that what I’ve said is more or less the truth.

So, when you find yourself inclined to side with the current regime against the protesters, think about what I’ve said. Would you want to live under such a regime? And also, do you as a liberal or leftist really want to support a regime that is so far to the right, that is so ultra-conservative?

Comments

[Harland]

Sorry, but the 1953 CIA coup wasn't because Iran was going to go communist. It was because the PM was going to audit British Petroleum and see if they were cheating the Iranian people. Needless to say, they were. The CIA sent in a man without informing Eisenhower and did the dirty deed. They were shocked at how cheap and easy it was, and that started a long history of meddling that continues today.

[John Pepple]

Here’s a statement from a Wikipedia article on the coup:

Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a Communist takeover in Iran, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided to overthrow Iran's government....

Here’s a link to the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

You are correct that the surface controversy was about oil, but underlying it was the fear of communism. It is entirely possible, of course, that the likelihood of a communist takeover was small, in which case the whole business was a big mistake. But that doesn’t mean that the fear of a communist takeover wasn’t their basic reason for the coup. And of course this article could be wrong, but that is the way I learned it.

Also, I can’t see why the CIA would get involved in a mere trade dispute, unless they thought the communists were involved.