Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons

00:00:00.000 | This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime.

00:00:05.000 | Clear signs of fascism.

00:00:09.120 | Clear signs of the state's control

00:00:13.920 | and pay any price to stay in power.

00:00:16.680 | - So even violence.

00:00:18.080 | - Extreme violence.

00:00:19.400 | - The following is a conversation with Abbas Aminat,

00:00:26.000 | a historian at Yale University,

00:00:28.100 | specializing in the modern history of Iran.

00:00:31.800 | My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people

00:00:37.000 | in their current struggle for freedom.

00:00:39.560 | I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen

00:00:43.660 | understand the nature and the importance of this struggle.

00:00:48.660 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:50.880 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:52.820 | in the description.

00:00:54.080 | And now, dear friends, here's Abbas Aminat.

00:00:58.820 | Let's start with the current situation in Iran.

00:01:01.940 | On September 16th, protests broke out in Tehran

00:01:05.420 | and quickly spread over the death

00:01:07.900 | of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

00:01:11.860 | Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death

00:01:13.740 | by the morality police.

00:01:15.580 | This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic.

00:01:18.820 | Can you explain what happened?

00:01:21.540 | - The protests are now in their sixth week.

00:01:26.060 | The death of that young woman, a Kurd,

00:01:30.080 | who was visiting Tehran as a tourist,

00:01:33.040 | sparked something very deep

00:01:36.600 | that particularly concerned the younger generations.

00:01:41.560 | That is what you would call the equivalent

00:01:44.480 | of the Z generation in this country.

00:01:48.600 | They call themselves Dahiy-e Hashdadi in Persian

00:01:52.600 | because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own.

00:01:57.560 | It's an ancient solar calendar.

00:01:59.680 | And the time that they were born,

00:02:02.400 | they were in the 1380s.

00:02:04.880 | That's what they called themselves, Hashdadi.

00:02:07.320 | '80s, Hashdad for the '80s.

00:02:09.360 | Well, the circumstances that surrounds

00:02:14.560 | the unfortunate death of this young,

00:02:19.160 | beautiful Kurdish woman is really tragic.

00:02:24.160 | She was arrested by what is referred to

00:02:27.640 | as the morality police, morality patrol,

00:02:31.520 | called the Gashd-e-Ershad,

00:02:34.560 | a guidance police, that is.

00:02:38.640 | Presumably, there were two women fully clad,

00:02:42.280 | that is, officers serving on that force,

00:02:45.800 | and two men.

00:02:47.200 | And nobody exactly knows what had happened.

00:02:50.840 | She had been beaten up,

00:02:53.840 | and apparently there was no sign

00:02:58.520 | of any wrongdoing on her side.

00:03:01.440 | She was fully covered.

00:03:03.640 | It seems that there was some altercation in the process.

00:03:10.000 | And the outcome was that she was unconscious,

00:03:17.040 | not necessarily when she was arrested,

00:03:20.880 | but in the course of the detention,

00:03:22.880 | when they take them to a center,

00:03:24.960 | presumably to re-educate them.

00:03:27.300 | And she apparently collapsed,

00:03:32.200 | and maybe my sense is that she must have had

00:03:35.080 | some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken

00:03:39.800 | or something had happened.

00:03:41.320 | And she died in the hospital the next day.

00:03:44.920 | And that, through the social media,

00:03:48.560 | was widely spread throughout Iran.

00:03:52.480 | And almost the next day, surprisingly,

00:03:55.400 | you could see this outburst of sympathy for her.

00:04:00.400 | People are in the streets weeping

00:04:04.080 | because she was seen as such an innocent young woman,

00:04:08.240 | 22 years old.

00:04:09.600 | And the family, the mother and the father,

00:04:13.120 | also mourning for her.

00:04:15.520 | And being a Kurd visiting Tehran,

00:04:19.240 | this all added up to really turn her

00:04:23.720 | into some kind of a martyr of this cause.

00:04:27.320 | And that's what it is.

00:04:28.600 | And her picture,

00:04:32.480 | graphics that were artistically produced

00:04:37.080 | based on her portrait,

00:04:39.060 | has now dominated basically as the symbol

00:04:41.800 | of this protest movement.

00:04:44.440 | And the protest movement goes on.

00:04:46.600 | Everybody was thinking,

00:04:48.000 | or at least the authorities were thinking,

00:04:50.480 | that it's going to die out in a matter of a few days.

00:04:54.220 | But it became more intense,

00:04:57.520 | first in the streets of Tehran by young women,

00:05:01.460 | mostly probably between, I would say, 17, 18, teenagers

00:05:05.720 | to 22, 23, or thereabout,

00:05:08.960 | and then to university campuses all around the country,

00:05:13.280 | and then even to high schools.

00:05:15.880 | And that also made it a very remarkable protest movement

00:05:19.720 | because, first of all, it involves the youth

00:05:23.600 | and not necessarily the older generations.

00:05:26.760 | You see them around, but not as many.

00:05:28.980 | Also, you see men and women together,

00:05:33.200 | young girls and boys,

00:05:37.440 | and they are adamant,

00:05:42.120 | they are desperate in the sense of the tone of their protest,

00:05:47.120 | and they are extremely courageous

00:05:50.240 | because they stand against the security forces

00:05:54.100 | that were immediately sent off to the streets,

00:05:59.100 | and in full gear, that is.

00:06:02.000 | - So what are the currents of pain, emotion?

00:06:07.040 | What is this turmoil that rose to the surface

00:06:10.240 | that resulted in these big protests?

00:06:12.600 | What are the different feelings, ideas

00:06:16.600 | that came to the surface here

00:06:18.240 | that resulted in such quick scaling of this protest?

00:06:21.720 | - Well, if you listen to the main slogan,

00:06:26.720 | which is the message of this movement,

00:06:29.680 | it's called Women, Life, Freedom.

00:06:34.200 | Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,

00:06:37.760 | which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent,

00:06:42.760 | which is close to Persian being in the European language,

00:06:47.280 | and it's apparently initiated first

00:06:51.760 | in the Syrian Kurdistan,

00:06:54.960 | where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces

00:07:03.160 | because they were attacking the Yazidis there,

00:07:08.160 | and the women being enslaved.

00:07:11.160 | But the message, as it moved,

00:07:12.880 | well, historians are interested in this kind of trends,

00:07:16.240 | so it just moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan,

00:07:19.000 | now being the message of this movement,

00:07:21.480 | reflects pretty much, sums up

00:07:25.560 | what this movement is all about.

00:07:27.760 | Women in the forefront,

00:07:30.520 | because of all the, one might say, discriminations,

00:07:34.120 | the treatment, the humiliation,

00:07:36.640 | that this younger generation feels,

00:07:38.420 | well, not only the younger generations,

00:07:40.300 | but most of the Iranian secular middle classes

00:07:43.720 | since 1979, basically, for the past 43 years.

00:07:48.720 | And they would think that these all basically symbolized

00:07:58.240 | or represented by the wearing,

00:08:03.240 | the mandatory wearing of the hijab,

00:08:08.080 | which is at the core of this protest.

00:08:11.560 | You see the young women,

00:08:12.960 | if you look at many of these clips

00:08:14.640 | that comes through in the past six weeks,

00:08:17.200 | women in streets take off their mandatory scarves,

00:08:21.840 | which is a young shawl,

00:08:23.640 | or some kind of a head covering, that's all,

00:08:26.920 | and they throw it into the bonfire

00:08:31.560 | in the middle of the street,

00:08:33.460 | and they dance around it, and slogans.

00:08:37.520 | So there is a sense of complete rejection

00:08:41.640 | of what this regime for 42 years, 43 years,

00:08:45.960 | have been imposing on women.

00:08:47.880 | It's not, as it's sometimes been portrayed,

00:08:51.040 | a movement against hijab through and through,

00:08:56.400 | but it basically says there has to be a choice

00:09:01.080 | for those who want to wear hijab

00:09:03.040 | and those who want to remain without hijab.

00:09:05.880 | - Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper.

00:09:08.520 | - Much deeper, and actually, before we get into that,

00:09:11.980 | it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations

00:09:15.520 | we see in the university campuses or in the streets,

00:09:19.260 | you see women with hijab, young women with hijab,

00:09:24.040 | or next to those who have to remove their hijab,

00:09:27.800 | and they're together basically protesting.

00:09:30.600 | That's the most interesting feature of these demonstrations,

00:09:35.280 | and then men and women together against the segregation

00:09:38.700 | that the regime has imposed upon them all these years.

00:09:42.960 | Now, in terms of what it represents, as I pointed out,

00:09:47.960 | one is the question of the whole series of,

00:09:51.200 | one might say, civil and legal discriminations against women.

00:09:56.200 | You are considered as a kind of a second-class citizen.

00:10:00.600 | You depend on your men.

00:10:02.820 | There's a kind of a patriarchy that has been institutionalized

00:10:07.820 | in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion,

00:10:12.360 | and that means that probably in matters of divorce,

00:10:20.120 | marriage and divorce, in matters of custody

00:10:23.480 | of your children, in matter of inheritance,

00:10:26.160 | in matter of freedom of movement,

00:10:29.640 | you depend on your husband, your father, your brother,

00:10:34.540 | a male member of your family, your child, your son,

00:10:39.540 | could be the case, and because of that,

00:10:43.960 | obviously a younger generation who is so well-informed

00:10:48.960 | through social media, knows about the world

00:10:52.560 | as much as an American does, American kid does,

00:10:55.080 | and probably sometimes more.

00:10:56.800 | They're very, very curious.

00:10:59.160 | It's from what I hear, or sometimes that I met

00:11:02.440 | a few of them outside Iran.

00:11:04.420 | You'll see that Hadi, this new generation

00:11:07.680 | is completely different from what the Islamic Republic

00:11:11.600 | wanted to create in its social engineering.

00:11:14.520 | It's basically the failure of 43 years

00:11:18.460 | of the Islamic Republic's acts of imposition

00:11:22.040 | of a certain so-called Islamic values on women.

00:11:27.040 | Then it's a matter of education.

00:11:29.600 | You would see that there is segregation in the schools.

00:11:32.440 | One of the issues that now, right now,

00:11:36.320 | is at the heart of this demonstration

00:11:38.480 | is that self-services in many of the campuses

00:11:42.740 | of the Iranian universities are segregated,

00:11:46.000 | male and female, to different rooms, to different halls.

00:11:50.140 | Now they are breaking through the walls

00:11:53.460 | virtually everywhere and sit together

00:11:56.420 | in order to basically resist the authorities

00:12:01.420 | who wants to impose segregation.

00:12:06.340 | In matters of appearance in the public,

00:12:10.340 | of course it may seem to us as kind of trivial

00:12:15.580 | and secondary, but appearance is important.

00:12:18.280 | Clothing is important.

00:12:19.640 | How you would imagine yourself is important.

00:12:22.180 | They don't want to be seen in the way

00:12:24.940 | that the authorities would like to impose upon them

00:12:27.580 | as this kind of an idea of a chaste Islamic woman

00:12:31.080 | who is fully covered and is fully protected.

00:12:35.920 | The idea of a male member of the family

00:12:38.580 | protects the female.

00:12:41.720 | That is what you would see at the heart of this rebellion.

00:12:45.560 | And of course, that goes with everything else.

00:12:50.720 | The second part of this message, the idea of life,

00:12:54.340 | basically means, if you like to use the American equivalent

00:13:00.320 | of this, the pursuit of the happiness.

00:13:02.280 | That's what they want.

00:13:03.400 | They want fun.

00:13:04.520 | They want music.

00:13:06.100 | They want dancing.

00:13:07.360 | They want to be free in the street.

00:13:08.960 | They want to have boyfriends.

00:13:11.400 | And live freely.

00:13:13.880 | And don't be constantly looked by the big brother

00:13:17.680 | to tell them what to do and not to do or not to do.

00:13:22.680 | So that is, that they share virtually

00:13:27.440 | with the entire Iranian society as a whole.

00:13:32.240 | Although the older generations, that's a big puzzle.

00:13:35.320 | What you would see, the older generation don't,

00:13:37.600 | so far at least, don't take part as extensively

00:13:42.400 | as one might imagine.

00:13:44.100 | And this is a variety of reasons.

00:13:46.240 | Perhaps we can get to that later on, if you like.

00:13:50.160 | But as far as this younger generation, they don't care.

00:13:53.420 | They don't listen even as much to their parents

00:13:57.440 | as the older generations did.

00:13:59.580 | So one might say even the nature of the relationship

00:14:02.840 | between the parents and the youth has changed.

00:14:07.840 | It's not the concept of again a patriarchy.

00:14:12.480 | That a father or even a mother would tell the daughter

00:14:17.480 | or son what to do.

00:14:19.960 | That's basically they have to negotiate.

00:14:22.760 | - It's fundamentally a rejection of the power of authority.

00:14:26.520 | Parents, government.

00:14:28.960 | - Yes.

00:14:30.040 | - That every person can decide their own fate.

00:14:33.760 | And there's no lessening of value of the wisdom

00:14:37.440 | of old age and old institutions.

00:14:39.920 | - Precisely, that's what it is.

00:14:41.840 | And they are surprisingly aware

00:14:45.800 | that where they are as a generation.

00:14:49.040 | So it's a sense of pride as we are different

00:14:52.720 | from the older generation.

00:14:54.560 | From your parents who compromised and lived

00:14:57.840 | with the restrictions that the Islamic regime put on you.

00:15:01.680 | Your grandparents who was the generation

00:15:05.040 | that actually involved in the revolution of '79.

00:15:08.440 | The parents which were the middle generation.

00:15:11.700 | And these are the third generation

00:15:13.360 | after the revolution of 1979.

00:15:15.960 | And therefore they differentiate themselves

00:15:19.320 | in terms of their identity from the older generation.

00:15:22.720 | So that's the life part of it.

00:15:24.920 | I mean one can go more and more.

00:15:27.000 | They want to access.

00:15:28.240 | And they see on social media what happens

00:15:30.880 | in the rest of the world.

00:15:31.840 | They're well aware.

00:15:33.360 | They're much better digitally skilled

00:15:37.360 | than my generation for instance.

00:15:39.240 | And they know about all the personalities.

00:15:43.600 | They know about all the celebrities.

00:15:45.600 | They know about all the trends that goes on outside Iran.

00:15:49.800 | So that's a second part of this message.

00:15:54.400 | And then of course the third part is the word azadi.

00:15:57.440 | Meaning freedom or liberty.

00:15:59.640 | Which is this long standing demand of the Iranians

00:16:04.640 | I would say for the whole century.

00:16:08.600 | Ever since the constitutional revolution of 1906.

00:16:12.840 | Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities

00:16:17.280 | that usually emerged at the end of a revolution

00:16:22.320 | to basically impose its own image on the population,

00:16:27.320 | on the youth.

00:16:28.880 | And create authoritarian regimes.

00:16:32.360 | Of which over the course of time I would say

00:16:35.720 | that the Islamic Republic is the worst.

00:16:38.080 | In the sense that its intrusion is not only

00:16:43.080 | in the political sense.

00:16:45.720 | In for instance banning the freedom of speech.

00:16:49.440 | You know meddling with the elections.

00:16:53.440 | Banning political parties.

00:16:54.760 | All kinds of that things which are the political

00:16:57.320 | or civil freedoms.

00:16:58.640 | But its intrusion into the personal life of the individual.

00:17:02.320 | Which is the worst kind in a sense as you would see

00:17:06.040 | that there is always an authority that basically

00:17:08.800 | dominates your life or monitors your life.

00:17:13.140 | So and they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion

00:17:19.140 | which makes this idea of freedom so important

00:17:24.140 | as part of the message of this new movement.

00:17:27.060 | You would see that in today's Iran

00:17:31.580 | there are no independent political parties.

00:17:34.300 | There is very little probably freedom of the press.

00:17:39.300 | I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone.

00:17:43.340 | But it's fairly limited.

00:17:46.840 | There's enormous amount of propaganda machine

00:17:50.340 | which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran.

00:17:55.340 | It's completely in the hands of the government.

00:18:00.600 | And of course you would see this variety of other tools

00:18:05.520 | for trying to indoctrinate Iranian population

00:18:10.520 | across the board.

00:18:13.420 | So that's another sign of this kind of a sense

00:18:16.180 | of being totally left out.

00:18:21.180 | You're not belonging to what's going on

00:18:27.160 | in terms of power, empowerment and disempowerment.

00:18:31.660 | So that's the situation as far as the idea

00:18:35.220 | of a freedom is concerned.

00:18:37.160 | And there's three somewhat miraculously

00:18:40.660 | and perhaps unintentionally,

00:18:44.160 | the three parts of this message complement each other.

00:18:49.160 | Because perhaps for the first time we see

00:18:52.680 | that women are in the forefront of a movement.

00:18:57.680 | I hesitate to say revolution

00:18:59.340 | because I'm not particularly happy with revolutions.

00:19:02.780 | Revolutions worldwide in Iran have always been so miserable

00:19:07.420 | in terms of their outcome that we have to be careful

00:19:10.140 | not to use the word revolution again.

00:19:12.900 | So that's where it stands now.

00:19:15.540 | And the regime was thinking that well, these are kids,

00:19:19.680 | they're going to go away.

00:19:22.020 | And then of course they're completely conspiratorial

00:19:25.540 | in their thinking.

00:19:26.700 | They constantly think that these are all the instigations

00:19:33.140 | and provocations of foreign powers.

00:19:36.620 | These are the great Satan, the United States,

00:19:40.140 | this is Israel, or these are the,

00:19:42.820 | it's actually the Supreme Leader says in so many words.

00:19:46.340 | His only response so far that he had in the past six weeks

00:19:51.180 | with regard to this demonstrations is that

00:19:53.700 | these are the children of the Sabaq,

00:19:56.140 | Sabaq being the security forces of the Shah's time.

00:19:59.460 | That's 43 years later, he claims that the children,

00:20:06.220 | 16, 17 years, 20 years old, kids in the street

00:20:11.100 | are the grandchildren or children of some imaginary

00:20:16.100 | survival of the Shah's security force.

00:20:19.580 | - So there's, the idea is that these protests are internal

00:20:24.580 | and external saboteurs.

00:20:29.740 | So people trying to sabotage the government.

00:20:31.860 | - Yes.

00:20:32.700 | And they are misled.

00:20:34.500 | - Misled.

00:20:35.340 | - As far as they can go.

00:20:36.260 | - And then there's the great Satan, United States,

00:20:39.220 | and other places are controlling,

00:20:43.700 | sort of either controlling the narrative,

00:20:46.780 | feeding propaganda, or literally sending people to instigate.

00:20:51.780 | - I don't think even they have that kind of imagination

00:20:57.300 | precise to say what you have said.

00:20:59.180 | - Yeah.

00:21:00.180 | - They would say that they're controlling the narrative.

00:21:03.140 | They basically say, no, these are agents

00:21:06.220 | of the foreign powers.

00:21:08.260 | And their families are all sold out

00:21:10.620 | and they are basically lost their loyalties

00:21:13.340 | to the great Islamic Republic.

00:21:16.580 | And therefore, they can be treated so brutally,

00:21:21.100 | they can be suppressed so brutally.

00:21:22.940 | Which I haven't actually said what they are doing

00:21:25.180 | because I thought perhaps first we should talk about

00:21:27.820 | who these kids are in the streets

00:21:29.900 | before we move on about the response of the government.

00:21:33.900 | But one major factor which seems to add to the anxiety

00:21:38.900 | of, well, the regime is extremely anxious now

00:21:44.860 | because they are in a position,

00:21:47.100 | this shows that they don't have the lack of confidence

00:21:49.780 | in a sense, that they would see them reacting

00:21:52.940 | in a very forceful way.

00:21:55.260 | Because basically they don't seem to have

00:21:58.220 | that kind of confidence to allow this message

00:22:03.060 | or the movement to be aired.

00:22:06.220 | But the one element which corresponds to that

00:22:09.900 | is that there is a expatriate population

00:22:13.820 | of Iranians worldwide.

00:22:16.180 | There are probably now, according to some estimates,

00:22:19.140 | close to four million, even more, Iranians abroad.

00:22:22.820 | And they're all over the world,

00:22:24.020 | from Australia and New Zealand, Japan,

00:22:27.860 | Western Europe, Turkey, and United States and Canada.

00:22:32.860 | So just to give you one example,

00:22:37.900 | last Saturday there was a mass demonstrations in Berlin

00:22:42.900 | by the Iranians from Germany and all over Europe,

00:22:48.860 | Western Europe.

00:22:50.300 | And it was at least, I think probably

00:22:52.820 | the conservative estimate was about 100,000.

00:22:56.500 | So 100,000 Iranians showed up in Berlin

00:23:00.580 | demonstrating against the treatment of the women in Iran

00:23:05.580 | or the movement in Iran.

00:23:08.960 | The government thinks obviously this must have been

00:23:12.740 | some instigation by foreign powers

00:23:16.940 | and they want to destroy the Islamic Republic.

00:23:20.320 | And not only that, but their propaganda

00:23:22.340 | is kind of ridiculous.

00:23:24.380 | Because I listened actually to how they portrayed it

00:23:28.320 | in the newspapers.

00:23:29.400 | I listened to the Iranian news,

00:23:32.200 | that is officially controlled, government-controlled news.

00:23:35.780 | And in the papers, much of the papers

00:23:39.280 | that are in the control of the government.

00:23:41.820 | One of them, or actually the major news program

00:23:46.820 | portrayed the demonstrations that 10,000 people

00:23:52.260 | showed up in Berlin and protested against the rising prices

00:23:57.260 | or rising rates for gas and oil in Germany.

00:24:03.740 | So that's how they mislead.

00:24:05.760 | In a very rather stupid fashion,

00:24:07.900 | because probably 95%, if not 100% of the Iranians

00:24:12.900 | are listening to Persian-speaking media outside Iran.

00:24:19.560 | So there's a BBC Persian, there is Iran International,

00:24:24.560 | there are at least five or six of them.

00:24:27.120 | - That's probably really important to highlight

00:24:29.240 | that Iran is a very modern and tech-savvy nation.

00:24:34.240 | Not just the young people.

00:24:37.560 | - Probably more than I feel sometimes

00:24:41.040 | when I compare myself to what they are doing.

00:24:44.200 | It's since 1979, the earlier years, for a decade or two,

00:24:50.200 | they tried in a very crude fashion

00:24:52.400 | to restrict access to media outside Iran.

00:24:57.400 | Because this is all through dishes, okay?

00:25:01.880 | And satellite dishes are everywhere.

00:25:04.160 | If you look at the buildings,

00:25:07.680 | small towns and villages in Iran,

00:25:12.000 | there's always a dish.

00:25:15.040 | And they watch all kinds of things through this.

00:25:18.600 | And particularly because of what's happening now,

00:25:22.400 | they listen to all the news broadcasts

00:25:25.400 | from all this media, and they're extremely active.

00:25:30.900 | There are probably, some of them, even 24 hours,

00:25:36.400 | or close, very extensive coverage

00:25:39.680 | of every clip that comes through.

00:25:42.400 | So what the government is doing now, the Islamic Republic,

00:25:46.640 | is that they restrict the entire internet.

00:25:50.920 | - They shut down the internet.

00:25:51.840 | - They shut down the internet,

00:25:53.520 | but they cannot afford shutting down the internet

00:25:56.440 | because much of the business, much of the everyday life,

00:25:59.760 | much of the government affairs depends on the internet,

00:26:04.460 | like everywhere else.

00:26:06.040 | And Iran is extremely,

00:26:08.520 | if I hear from many of the colleagues and friends,

00:26:15.120 | it's like, in certain respects, it's like Sweden.

00:26:18.400 | Where you go there, there's no more currency,

00:26:21.200 | and for a very good reason,

00:26:22.400 | because there's so much inflation,

00:26:24.320 | that the banknotes are worthless, in a sense.

00:26:28.160 | So everything is through sweeping your card.

00:26:32.620 | And that entire system is in a standstill

00:26:37.160 | because people cannot buy food.

00:26:40.160 | You go to the supermarket, that's how you would do it.

00:26:43.480 | You order food to come to your house,

00:26:47.400 | which Iranians, at least the middle classes,

00:26:50.440 | more prosperous middle classes, doing all the time.

00:26:53.560 | So they deliver everything.

00:26:55.640 | And because of the COVID, it became even more.

00:26:58.560 | And they have to pay all through this system.

00:27:02.000 | So what happens is that now they're estimating

00:27:05.400 | that every day, $50 million, the Iranian government

00:27:09.200 | or the Iranian economy is losing

00:27:11.440 | because of slowing the internet.

00:27:13.240 | - Plus the frustration is growing

00:27:15.840 | because you can't order food.

00:27:17.840 | - Among other things.

00:27:20.800 | I mean, they are in touch with,

00:27:24.000 | WhatsApp, every Iranian, virtually every Iranian,

00:27:30.000 | that has education, and education in the sense

00:27:35.360 | that has gone through the high schools and universities,

00:27:40.600 | knows how to use the WhatsApp.

00:27:42.240 | - So there's a big middle class,

00:27:44.080 | like you said, secular middle class in Iran.

00:27:46.520 | And there, there's a lot of, at least, capacity for,

00:27:50.980 | if not revolution, then political, ideological turmoil.

00:27:55.980 | - And a huge amount of hatred.

00:28:02.240 | - So the hatred has grown.

00:28:03.360 | - Yes, hatred of the policies of the regime,

00:28:08.920 | of isolation, that's a huge point

00:28:11.960 | that you hear a great deal about.

00:28:15.040 | We don't want to be isolated.

00:28:16.760 | We don't want to be humiliated.

00:28:18.320 | Iran is not about this miserable regime

00:28:23.320 | that is ruling over us.

00:28:27.080 | We have a great culture.

00:28:28.480 | So there's a sense of pride in their own culture,

00:28:32.840 | some of it Islamic, some of it pre-Islamic.

00:28:37.480 | So there's a huge sense of pride in that.

00:28:42.480 | And they see that they cannot communicate

00:28:46.080 | with the outside world.

00:28:47.760 | They want to travel abroad, which they do.

00:28:51.760 | I mean, for one thing, the Iranian regime never actually,

00:28:56.040 | for majority of the population, never puts restrictions.

00:29:01.760 | It's not like, what is it, Soviet Union,

00:29:04.200 | where you have to have, you used to have permission

00:29:08.560 | to move from one place to another.

00:29:10.440 | And then, of course, the Islamic regime, since 1979,

00:29:16.380 | basically chased away or destroyed the old middle class.

00:29:20.920 | That's my generation, basically, or my parents' generation.

00:29:24.160 | These are the secular middle class of the Pahlavi era,

00:29:27.960 | in the hope that they can do this social engineering

00:29:30.600 | and create this Islamic society of their own.

00:29:35.600 | The bad news for them was that that didn't happen,

00:29:41.380 | and that memory persisted.

00:29:44.640 | And the middle class that was created since past 40 years

00:29:49.240 | is much larger in size than what it was,

00:29:52.980 | because there was, of course, the demographic revolution.

00:29:56.080 | That's the very, there's a very foundation of it,

00:29:59.720 | is the demographic revolution.

00:30:01.840 | Population in Iran, I've written an article about it,

00:30:04.680 | actually, population in Iran,

00:30:07.760 | since the turn of the century, last century,

00:30:12.240 | it's 20th century, population of Iran

00:30:14.840 | was about nine million or so.

00:30:17.060 | It's now 83 million.

00:30:19.720 | And that is, since 1979, the population was 35 million.

00:30:27.360 | Between the past 40 years, it's basically doubled.

00:30:31.640 | So it's 83 million.

00:30:33.580 | Although, one of the great successes,

00:30:36.960 | I don't want to bore you with the details

00:30:39.640 | about the demography, but it's important.

00:30:42.440 | - Please, demographics is not boring.

00:30:45.960 | - You will, you can see that the birth rate was very high.

00:30:50.880 | Otherwise, you wouldn't have doubled your population

00:30:53.040 | in a matter of four decades.

00:30:55.120 | But Iranians, because of the urban,

00:30:58.200 | shift to an urban population,

00:31:02.200 | because of the growth of the middle class,

00:31:04.800 | because of the education,

00:31:06.540 | they basically, the pattern of the,

00:31:11.360 | of growth, population growth, changed.

00:31:14.960 | Iran used to be 2.8 or 3% birth rate

00:31:22.200 | in around 1980s, I would say, 1970s, 1980s.

00:31:27.160 | Now, it is 1.1.

00:31:30.000 | And it's probably the most successful country

00:31:34.640 | in the Middle East, in terms of the population control.

00:31:38.360 | Despite the government's consistent attempt

00:31:43.360 | to try to encourage people to have more kids,

00:31:49.080 | middle class refuses to do that.

00:31:51.800 | And this is middle class, not only anymore in the capital,

00:31:55.720 | but this is, when in smaller towns and cities,

00:31:58.640 | places that used to be villages.

00:32:01.240 | Now you look at them, they have a decent population,

00:32:04.280 | 50,000, 100,000, and they live an urban life,

00:32:09.080 | and they don't want to be subjected

00:32:12.120 | to that old pattern of agrarian society

00:32:15.280 | when you had 10 children, or eight children.

00:32:18.000 | And of course, it's much more advanced

00:32:21.400 | in terms of health and medicine.

00:32:26.400 | So you don't lose children as they used to.

00:32:30.080 | The antibiotics, there's always kids to survive,

00:32:34.880 | and therefore, if you have 10 kids,

00:32:36.440 | you're sick with 10 kids.

00:32:38.080 | You don't end up with four as it used to be in the past.

00:32:41.220 | Six of them would have died,

00:32:46.200 | up to the age of five, actually.

00:32:48.120 | But now, because of that, you see that this urban population

00:32:53.120 | in the cities have completely different demands.

00:32:57.680 | And of course, the education is important.

00:32:59.840 | That's another area of how the social engineering

00:33:03.600 | of the Islamic Republic went away,

00:33:06.440 | because they were thinking that the growth

00:33:10.280 | of the population, the growth of the educated,

00:33:13.440 | higher educated middle classes in their benefit,

00:33:17.800 | or they could not even control it, in a sense.

00:33:21.620 | Now, Iran, in my time, probably had,

00:33:25.440 | in the 1970s, probably by the time of the revolution,

00:33:31.360 | had 10, 12 universities.

00:33:34.360 | Now it has 56 universities all across the country,

00:33:39.120 | and there is something referred to

00:33:41.160 | as the Free University, Azad,

00:33:44.080 | which has campuses all over the country.

00:33:46.360 | It has 321 campuses all around Iran.

00:33:49.960 | What does that mean?

00:33:52.840 | In many respects, this youth that are brought up

00:33:57.260 | in these families, even in small towns,

00:34:00.540 | in very traditional families,

00:34:02.720 | in families that belong to that kind of a more religious,

00:34:07.600 | loyal to the clergy, or to the clerical classes,

00:34:12.600 | their children can now move on, particularly women.

00:34:18.040 | Because in my times, it would have been unheard of

00:34:22.760 | that you would have a young woman of 18,

00:34:25.760 | or 17, 18, 19, from a traditional city,

00:34:30.760 | such as, for instance, Yazd,

00:34:34.560 | or in Southeastern Iran,

00:34:38.320 | to move on elsewhere for education,

00:34:42.720 | as you do in this country.

00:34:44.100 | Now, it's completely accepted

00:34:48.520 | that a woman wears hijab

00:34:52.000 | because she's forced to wear hijab,

00:34:54.400 | to go to a university completely

00:34:57.260 | on the other side of the country.

00:34:59.720 | And this movement of the population,

00:35:02.920 | not only because of the universities,

00:35:05.240 | but in general, if you now visit Iran,

00:35:08.580 | you hear accents, local accents,

00:35:13.720 | provincial accents, all over the country.

00:35:16.620 | That is a Azerbaijani-Turkish accent

00:35:21.680 | from the northwest of the country.

00:35:24.480 | You can hear it in the first province in the south,

00:35:27.280 | and vice versa.

00:35:29.060 | So, and Kurdish, for instance.

00:35:32.040 | Or even more marginal regions,

00:35:34.400 | such as Sistan province in the southeast of Iran,

00:35:38.400 | which has been the subject of this recent massacre,

00:35:41.920 | when they actually attacked the population

00:35:44.360 | when demonstrating, and killed a fair number,

00:35:47.200 | at least 60 people.

00:35:48.620 | So, this movement of the population,

00:35:54.040 | this creation of a larger middle class,

00:35:57.800 | the better-educated middle class,

00:35:59.920 | much better educated.

00:36:01.160 | Iran has 86% literacy,

00:36:06.160 | which I think probably, I haven't checked that,

00:36:11.180 | but probably is better than Turkey, even.

00:36:13.620 | Is probably better than anywhere else in the Middle East.

00:36:16.920 | - And it sounds like that's quickly increasing.

00:36:20.400 | - Yes. - Because of the movement,

00:36:21.920 | because of the growth of the education system,

00:36:24.000 | that's-- - Precisely.

00:36:25.760 | Iran has one million school teachers,

00:36:30.040 | which may not seem as much if you're in the United States,

00:36:33.920 | but it's a fairly big number, actually.

00:36:36.560 | - Can you linger on the massacre?

00:36:38.280 | What happened there?

00:36:39.120 | - Well, the Sistan province is a Baluch ethnicity,

00:36:44.120 | of Baluch ethnicity.

00:36:45.760 | Baluch is a particular ethnic group in southern Iran,

00:36:50.680 | which is Sunni rather than Shi'i, majority.

00:36:54.360 | - And we should say that most of Iran--

00:36:57.120 | - Is Shi'i. - Is Shi'i,

00:36:58.440 | and that's a branch of Islam.

00:37:01.720 | - Shi'ism, yes.

00:37:03.040 | - Let's maybe just briefly linger Shi'ism and Sunni.

00:37:06.920 | What-- - What?

00:37:08.120 | - Just, let's not get into it.

00:37:10.000 | - (laughs) Yeah, I don't want to.

00:37:11.560 | - Let's do a one-sentence summary,

00:37:14.120 | and that maybe, which is what most of Iran is.

00:37:18.680 | - Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis.

00:37:23.120 | These are mainstream, if you like to call it that.

00:37:27.600 | Actually, sunnah means that kind of a mainstream.

00:37:31.160 | - Can you actually linger on the Sunni, sunnah, Shi'a?

00:37:36.160 | - Shi'a means a party,

00:37:39.160 | means those that belongs to a party of Ali,

00:37:42.960 | which goes back to the early Islamic history

00:37:45.480 | of seventh century.

00:37:46.960 | - I mean, I'm almost lingering to the silly notion

00:37:49.760 | of pronunciation and stuff like that.

00:37:51.400 | So, ah, ah means part, like what?

00:37:55.360 | What does the extra I at the end do?

00:37:57.960 | - Shi'i means belonging to the Shi'i community.

00:38:02.960 | Shi'a means a person of a Shi'a.

00:38:06.120 | - That belongs to that community.

00:38:06.960 | - If you say, "Are you a Shi'a?"

00:38:08.440 | Yes, I am a Shi'a.

00:38:09.600 | - Yeah, and Shi'i is the community.

00:38:11.520 | - Community, and in English, when it was Anglicized,

00:38:14.840 | it becomes Shi'ite.

00:38:16.080 | So, if you say Shi'ite in today, it's perfectly acceptable.

00:38:20.720 | And of course, I myself, in my writings,

00:38:23.160 | I always switch between one and the other.

00:38:26.760 | One of my books is always Shi'ite,

00:38:28.920 | the other book's always Shi'.

00:38:30.960 | And that hasn't been settled.

00:38:33.840 | But the Shi'i population is the smaller

00:38:36.840 | compared to the Sunni population in the world.

00:38:39.560 | - In the world.

00:38:40.400 | - In the world.

00:38:41.220 | - But in Iran, it's the opposite.

00:38:42.760 | - The Iran and Iraq, and possibly now Lebanon,

00:38:47.440 | are the three countries who barely,

00:38:51.000 | Iraq and Lebanon have barely majority Shi'i population.

00:38:56.000 | Whereas Iran is a large Shi'i population

00:39:01.480 | due to its history of conversion to Shi'ism,

00:39:04.760 | that by itself is another story.

00:39:07.120 | But in the sense that,

00:39:10.080 | the way that historically it evolved,

00:39:14.520 | the center became more Shi'i,

00:39:18.080 | and the peripheries remained Sunni.

00:39:22.480 | So you have communities of the Baluch in the southeast,

00:39:26.020 | you have the Kurds, a large portion of the Kurds are Sunnis,

00:39:31.880 | they have Shi'is as well,

00:39:34.040 | and they have the indigenous religion

00:39:36.040 | of their own, what's called Ahlul Haqq,

00:39:39.180 | which is the religion of indigenous to Kurdistan.

00:39:42.860 | There are Turkmen in the northeast of Iran,

00:39:46.400 | who are also Sunnis,

00:39:48.120 | there are other communities in Khurasan region,

00:39:50.520 | in the peripheries of Afghanistan,

00:39:53.040 | they are also Sunnis.

00:39:54.680 | And you have some Arab population,

00:39:57.600 | Arab-speaking population in the Khuzestan province,

00:40:00.760 | in the southwest of Iran,

00:40:02.600 | which is also, or across the Persian Gulf.

00:40:04.920 | - Is there a lot of conflict between these regions?

00:40:07.080 | And also, if I blindfolded you,

00:40:11.120 | and dropped you off in one of the regions,

00:40:13.000 | would you quickly recognize the region?

00:40:15.000 | Like by the food, by the music, by the accents, by so on?

00:40:20.000 | - Yeah, the answer to your lovely question,

00:40:23.200 | which I think, I hope it would have happened to me,

00:40:26.120 | is that yes, you would see different cultures.

00:40:29.300 | But different food, most important, different accents.

00:40:35.440 | Or different languages, since they have dialects.

00:40:38.600 | There's Baluch, different language altogether.

00:40:42.560 | But, or so for that matter, Kurdish,

00:40:46.560 | which is closer to Persian,

00:40:48.160 | because they're all Indo-European languages.

00:40:50.360 | But Turkish, Azeri Turkish,

00:40:53.520 | which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey,

00:40:56.880 | Republic of Turkey,

00:40:58.240 | or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north.

00:41:00.680 | They're the same, basically.

00:41:04.340 | Actually, if you would have looked,

00:41:06.560 | that's a fascinating picture,

00:41:08.720 | if you have looked at the, let's say even 19th century,

00:41:12.000 | early 20th century, linguistic map of Iran,

00:41:15.200 | you would have been amazed in the number of dialects,

00:41:19.360 | in the number of languages that have survived.

00:41:22.080 | This is an ancient country, it's an ancient land.

00:41:25.280 | And it's a lot of mountains all around it, or big deserts.

00:41:29.500 | So there's a sense of isolation.

00:41:31.100 | So you would say, here and there,

00:41:32.800 | you see a different community that speaks differently.

00:41:37.040 | - All ancient traditions and languages.

00:41:40.000 | - Yeah, and because of the great number of invasions

00:41:42.680 | that Iran witnessed over more than two and a half millennia,

00:41:47.680 | of course, all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran.

00:41:53.160 | There are all ethnicities were introduced to Iran,

00:41:57.080 | mostly coming from the northeast of Iran,

00:42:00.640 | from the lowlands of Central Asia and beyond,

00:42:05.640 | and continued into Iran proper.

00:42:10.300 | So, but now, what has happened,

00:42:12.600 | that's my point that I wanted to make.

00:42:14.720 | Century of modernity, or modernization,

00:42:20.180 | has produced a national culture

00:42:25.020 | of great strength, in a sense, I would say.

00:42:28.660 | I ended my book, the book on Iran, Iran in Modern History,

00:42:33.660 | basically saying that despite everything else

00:42:37.560 | that has created so much trouble for today's Iran,

00:42:40.640 | there is a sense of a cultural identity

00:42:45.640 | that is very strong.

00:42:48.100 | And I think I can say with some confidence

00:42:53.100 | that despite this regional identities

00:42:59.580 | that are still there and they're great

00:43:02.260 | and they should be celebrated,

00:43:06.340 | today, if you go to Kurdistan,

00:43:10.140 | or if you go to Cistan, they all can speak Persian.

00:43:15.140 | They all have an education in Persian.

00:43:18.180 | So they all basically are becoming part of,

00:43:21.900 | whether they like the regime in power or not,

00:43:25.960 | they have a sense of belonging to a culture

00:43:29.340 | and an identity with the center.

00:43:32.180 | And of course, the idea of a center versus periphery

00:43:35.940 | in Iran is very old.

00:43:38.020 | It goes back to ancient times,

00:43:40.040 | because even the name of the country

00:43:43.060 | was the guarded domains of Iran.

00:43:44.860 | This is the official name,

00:43:47.700 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:43:50.180 | Namely, that it was recognized

00:43:53.540 | that this is not just one entity,

00:43:57.540 | but it's a collection of entities--

00:44:00.620 | - Like the United States of America.

00:44:02.660 | - Exactly, exactly.

00:44:04.780 | But the United States of America,

00:44:07.780 | in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful,

00:44:11.020 | well, it remains to be seen how successful--

00:44:13.500 | - To be continued.

00:44:14.900 | - To be, that was basically invented, created,

00:44:19.220 | that you would have this sense of it.

00:44:21.920 | In the case of an old nation,

00:44:24.300 | which has been on the map of the world

00:44:25.940 | for 3,000 years, 2,500 years,

00:44:29.980 | this is not an exaggeration.

00:44:31.380 | I am not a nationalist per se,

00:44:34.700 | but if you look Persia on the map of the world

00:44:38.580 | in ancient times, it is still there as it is today.

00:44:41.700 | Very few countries in the world are like that,

00:44:44.700 | that they would have that kind of a continuity

00:44:47.180 | over a course of time.

00:44:48.500 | And that's not without a reason,

00:44:50.020 | because there was this sense of a center versus periphery

00:44:55.020 | that had found, there's a huge amount of tension,

00:44:59.660 | but there is also a sense of belonging to something.

00:45:03.060 | And state is very much at the center of it.

00:45:05.780 | I mean, that's why the concept of a state matters

00:45:10.780 | for the creation, for the shaping of this culture.

00:45:15.700 | What happened is therefore, you can see that today

00:45:18.380 | in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded,

00:45:22.340 | is that you would be surprised to see

00:45:27.340 | how much people share

00:45:32.460 | in terms of, I just give you one anecdote.

00:45:35.680 | In 1968, I believe, must have been,

00:45:41.620 | I traveled to Azerbaijan.

00:45:45.020 | I used to travel and actually photograph.

00:45:47.540 | - Not blindfolded.

00:45:48.820 | - No. (laughs)

00:45:49.780 | - Mostly.

00:45:50.620 | - Well, yeah, not blindfolded, no, no, not blindfolded.

00:45:54.340 | So I went to a bazaar in the city of Khoyi,

00:45:58.020 | which is in the northwestern Iran.

00:46:02.540 | On the border with what is today the Republic of Turkey.

00:46:07.080 | And I went to the bazaar and I was interested

00:46:11.300 | in the kind of leather work that they produce.

00:46:13.820 | So I tried to buy some stuff and I was surprised to see

00:46:17.900 | that how few people knew Persian.

00:46:20.720 | So they could not communicate in Persian with you.

00:46:26.100 | Either they have to ask somebody from some other store

00:46:30.160 | to come and translate for you.

00:46:32.540 | This is 1968.

00:46:33.980 | - 1968, so even though it's the official language--

00:46:38.620 | - Was Persian.

00:46:39.980 | - Of the country, there's still--

00:46:42.140 | - Yeah.

00:46:42.980 | - So what are they teaching school?

00:46:44.100 | So it doesn't matter.

00:46:44.940 | - It was Persian.

00:46:45.860 | But this guy--

00:46:46.860 | - He doesn't go to school.

00:46:48.060 | - He hasn't been to the school

00:46:49.540 | or he was not fully exposed to it.

00:46:51.860 | - Or forgot it.

00:46:52.700 | - Bazaars usually are very conservative places.

00:46:55.340 | So it stuck in my mind.

00:46:57.160 | Now, recently in 2004, I was traveling to the same area,

00:47:02.160 | not to the same city, but to the same area.

00:47:06.620 | And I was amazed to see how the youth,

00:47:10.860 | as soon as they would know that you're coming

00:47:13.420 | from somewhere else, so to say,

00:47:15.440 | opening conversation with you,

00:47:16.960 | talking about the latest movies

00:47:19.740 | that was produced in the West.

00:47:21.120 | And it's not only Hollywood.

00:47:22.320 | Of course, there's a huge amount of fascination

00:47:24.960 | with Hollywood and Western cinema.

00:47:27.280 | Cinema is a major thing.

00:47:29.200 | Filmmaking is a major thing.

00:47:31.000 | - Yeah.

00:47:31.840 | - So these kids in the city of Ahar

00:47:34.720 | were asking me, we were having lunch,

00:47:36.760 | they're asking me, okay, then what do you think

00:47:39.440 | about this producer, not producer,

00:47:42.400 | this director or that actor?

00:47:45.080 | - American.

00:47:45.920 | - American, European as well, but mostly American.

00:47:49.300 | - Were they speaking Persian?

00:47:50.140 | - It was a complete Persian

00:47:52.160 | that I would converse with them.

00:47:54.880 | - Do they speak English too?

00:47:56.160 | Interesting.

00:47:57.000 | - Yes, actually you would be surprised

00:47:58.640 | to see what percentage of the Iranian youth,

00:48:01.760 | at least in big cities, are fascinated

00:48:05.280 | with learning language, and for a reason.

00:48:07.880 | Because they think that's the way to get access

00:48:10.680 | either on social media or eventually leave Iran,

00:48:14.240 | unfortunately.

00:48:15.640 | And because they don't see a future

00:48:18.200 | for themselves in the country,

00:48:19.760 | either you have to be part of this regime,

00:48:24.760 | or if you hate them and you don't like

00:48:27.360 | the way of their life, you look up outside.

00:48:31.720 | I was having drivers to drive me around the country

00:48:35.680 | in the cities around Tehran.

00:48:37.640 | And the guy was young, extremely well-educated,

00:48:41.600 | well-dressed, and we would have looked at him,

00:48:44.240 | we could have found him in any street

00:48:46.280 | in any country in the Western world.

00:48:48.840 | And his major concern, knowing that I'm from outside,

00:48:53.120 | major concern is, well, tell me which would be

00:48:56.040 | a better place for me to go.

00:48:58.200 | So what's wrong with the place that you're in right now?

00:49:01.040 | You are in your own country, you speak your own language,

00:49:03.280 | no, this is no good.

00:49:05.720 | I have to have a better future.

00:49:07.560 | This has no future for me.

00:49:09.680 | - Well, it's really interesting because the thing

00:49:12.440 | I feel about the protests right now is there's

00:49:16.720 | a large number of people that instead of giving

00:49:20.280 | into cynicism about this government is no good,

00:49:25.280 | they're actually getting this energy,

00:49:30.240 | this desire for revolution in a non-violent,

00:49:35.240 | in the democratic sense of that.

00:49:39.960 | Let's actually find the ideas,

00:49:41.960 | let's build a great nation here.

00:49:44.080 | This is a great nation, this is my nation,

00:49:46.000 | let's build something great here.

00:49:47.320 | - Well--

00:49:48.560 | - That's my hope, that's the outside--

00:49:50.400 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:49:51.520 | - That's what I'm hoping for.

00:49:53.200 | - I share your aspiration, but I'm fearing that,

00:49:58.200 | I hope it's not a wishful thinking.

00:50:00.800 | Certainly that's what they want.

00:50:03.960 | Certainly that's what they want to create.

00:50:06.840 | But the historian always tells you from where they start

00:50:11.720 | to where they finish, there's going to be a huge

00:50:16.160 | kind of a change.

00:50:18.900 | And in this particular case, I wouldn't be,

00:50:23.480 | I would very much hope that it's not going to be

00:50:26.160 | a revolution like 1979, Islamic revolution.

00:50:29.200 | And I have my hopes in that.

00:50:33.040 | For one thing, this is a revolution

00:50:35.320 | that doesn't have a leader, okay?

00:50:38.400 | And it seems that they're comfortable with that.

00:50:41.400 | At least so far, because we are,

00:50:43.320 | well, the sixth week of this movement.

00:50:45.800 | And I hope it's not going to be actually a revolution,

00:50:48.080 | as I pointed out before.

00:50:49.880 | I hope it's going to be more of a sense of trying to come

00:50:54.880 | to some compromise and gradually move toward change

00:51:01.000 | rather than a collapse of this regime

00:51:05.440 | and replacement with what?

00:51:07.680 | - So the anxiety of the regime, you hope,

00:51:10.320 | will turn into a kind of realization

00:51:14.280 | that you have to modernize, you have to make progress,

00:51:17.980 | you actually have to make certain compromises.

00:51:20.280 | - Yes.

00:51:21.120 | - Or constitutional changes, all those kind of stuff.

00:51:23.400 | So the basic process of government and lawmaking.

00:51:28.360 | - The problem is that they say we have it all, you know?

00:51:33.360 | We have our parliament, we have our constitution,

00:51:36.400 | we have our elections, which has all been, of course, fake.

00:51:41.400 | But they claim they have all of that.

00:51:44.080 | But the problem for them is that they try to superimpose

00:51:49.080 | a certain ideology, like all other ideological autocracies

00:52:01.440 | or autarchies, as in this case, that tend to dominate

00:52:06.440 | all these institution buildings that they have,

00:52:12.160 | and they constantly claim we have this, we have that.

00:52:16.240 | And of course, it's a generational thing.

00:52:18.860 | The upper echelons of this regime

00:52:23.840 | are mostly older people, turbaned, they are the clergy,

00:52:30.640 | that are afraid of the fact that they may lose their control

00:52:35.640 | over their whole system, that it is a sophisticated,

00:52:39.080 | huge system of government.

00:52:41.680 | And they rely on certain tools of control,

00:52:46.400 | which is the revolutionary guards and other institutions

00:52:51.400 | that are loyal to the state.

00:52:57.920 | And they spend enormous amount of funds

00:53:01.120 | that is available to them, at least before the sanctions.

00:53:04.880 | But even during the sanctions,

00:53:06.320 | they still have enough funds to do so.

00:53:10.240 | And in order to remain in power.

00:53:12.980 | And they're extremely ruthless in that regard.

00:53:16.640 | This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime.

00:53:23.620 | This is a regime that I would see easily in it.

00:53:27.780 | Clear signs of fascism, clear signs of the state's control

00:53:34.200 | and pay any price to stay in power.

00:53:38.440 | - So even violence?

00:53:39.840 | - Extreme violence.

00:53:41.540 | - To return to the massacre,

00:53:43.020 | what were the uses of violence to suppress protests?

00:53:47.700 | - Well, yes, it was actually quite remarkable

00:53:50.660 | to see that from the first or the second day

00:53:53.220 | of the protest, you see out in the streets,

00:53:56.140 | this riot police, okay?

00:53:58.320 | Which comes out in large numbers, fully geared up.

00:54:04.820 | Their appearance are rather terrifying,

00:54:09.300 | like any other riot police,

00:54:10.960 | probably more than any other riot police.

00:54:13.920 | They're violent.

00:54:15.380 | They stand in the streets

00:54:19.340 | when the students are demonstrating,

00:54:21.980 | even in smaller number.

00:54:23.780 | Because before I go to that,

00:54:24.940 | I should point this out to you as well.

00:54:29.100 | That these demonstrations are not large ones in one place.

00:54:34.100 | You don't see 100,000 people in one place.

00:54:39.900 | But you see in every neighborhood,

00:54:41.820 | couple of thousand of kids are demonstrating.

00:54:46.420 | - All over Iran?

00:54:47.300 | - All over Iran.

00:54:48.140 | - Now all over the world in different parts?

00:54:49.780 | - Yes, yes, yes.

00:54:51.460 | Actually, during the demonstrations three weeks ago,

00:54:56.460 | as I said, they had people in Sydney, Australia,

00:55:01.580 | New Zealand, Tokyo, all over the world.

00:55:04.660 | - All protesting high gas prices, it's funny.

00:55:07.540 | Everywhere.

00:55:09.820 | - Everywhere.

00:55:10.660 | (laughing)

00:55:11.820 | To the extent that they could be ignored.

00:55:14.020 | - Yeah.

00:55:14.860 | - Nothing, but if they could not be ignored.

00:55:17.220 | And it's actually quite remarkable

00:55:19.500 | that this is very embarrassing to them.

00:55:21.780 | But somehow they think that this propaganda machine

00:55:24.940 | of them is working.

00:55:26.340 | - Also you think they don't have a good even sense.

00:55:28.860 | I mean, so there's an incompetence

00:55:30.900 | within the propaganda machine.

00:55:32.100 | - Yes, it is.

00:55:32.940 | There's an incompetence across the board.

00:55:35.580 | I mean, despite all of this massive government

00:55:40.540 | administration or whatever you would call it,

00:55:42.820 | all these various components of it,

00:55:45.860 | there is a sense of inefficiency

00:55:49.340 | and incompetence that is associated

00:55:52.060 | with every action that you see.

00:55:54.100 | Even in their suppression of this street movement.

00:55:58.540 | But in answer to that question,

00:56:00.980 | you would see that they're, this riot police,

00:56:05.660 | very, it's quite obvious that they were trained

00:56:10.020 | for the purpose.

00:56:11.180 | So their appearance, everything,

00:56:13.140 | these are not just regular army forces

00:56:17.060 | or soldiers, conscripts.

00:56:19.340 | They are professional forces.

00:56:22.300 | And they come not only on foot number,

00:56:27.300 | but they come on motorbikes.

00:56:29.380 | So there are, you would see in any of these demonstrations,

00:56:31.980 | there are 10, 12, 15, 20 motorbikes with two passengers.

00:56:36.980 | One in front riding, one in the back,

00:56:42.060 | fully equipped with a baton, with paint guns,

00:56:46.580 | with pellet guns, and with bullets.

00:56:50.700 | So they are very fully equipped.

00:56:53.980 | And they are terrifying.

00:56:54.900 | They go through the demonstrations

00:56:56.900 | and hit and beat people.

00:56:59.240 | And then they arrest.

00:57:03.020 | And then you see behind the first line

00:57:06.220 | of these riot police, you would see all this latest

00:57:10.620 | models of these special

00:57:16.100 | armored trucks for moving to the demonstrations

00:57:21.100 | and arresting people, throwing them into this.

00:57:26.300 | And then behind that, water cannons, you see.

00:57:31.300 | And I was looking at that, I was saying,

00:57:33.380 | okay, this is Tehran probably.

00:57:35.660 | They have this.

00:57:36.500 | But then you look at the smaller cities,

00:57:38.380 | they still have the same thing.

00:57:40.540 | So all over the country, one thing that they had managed

00:57:43.940 | to produce extensively, irrespective of the fact

00:57:47.660 | that whether they are effective or not,

00:57:50.260 | but you see them everywhere.

00:57:51.860 | So this shows that how afraid this regime is.

00:57:56.220 | - But that also shows that there's an infrastructure

00:57:59.140 | that can implement violence at scale.

00:58:02.820 | - Yes, very much so.

00:58:04.900 | And it's probably part and parcel of this regime.

00:58:08.320 | From day one, the number of prisons that they have,

00:58:13.620 | according to perhaps an exaggerated version,

00:58:18.620 | they said that about 12,000 or so arrested

00:58:23.980 | that are in jails today, since past six weeks.

00:58:29.700 | They were 230 or 40 people were killed, including children.

00:58:34.620 | I under 18.

00:58:37.660 | They are, they beat up women,

00:58:43.340 | women in the street, which is extremely, actually,

00:58:46.600 | disturbing when you see these scenes of--

00:58:51.820 | - So there's a lot of this is on video, too, right?

00:58:54.220 | - Everything is on video.

00:58:55.420 | Everybody has a camera.

00:58:57.300 | And everybody sends to major news outlets outside Iran.

00:59:04.220 | And they immediately showed every night,

00:59:08.700 | if you look at BBC Persian or Iran International,

00:59:12.860 | or a few, I think it is six of them, actually.

00:59:16.540 | All over, in England, they are in Deutsche Welle in Germany,

00:59:20.900 | which has a particular interest in the Iranian,

00:59:25.300 | BBC World Service and so forth in London,

00:59:28.360 | and Voice of America Persian here in this country.

00:59:31.840 | There is another one, Radio Fado,

00:59:34.020 | which is also funded by the American government.

00:59:38.760 | Also fully covers all of these events.

00:59:42.200 | So there is no way that these people can,

00:59:46.680 | that the Iranians can miss what's going on in the streets

00:59:50.140 | of these demonstrations and the scenes of beating up women,

00:59:54.680 | which in Iranian culture, as I presume in most cultures

00:59:59.520 | in the world, there is a certain sanctity

01:00:02.200 | that you don't attack women.

01:00:05.200 | But they do, and this is an Islamic regime

01:00:08.480 | that supposedly have to have a certain sense of concern

01:00:13.480 | and protection.

01:00:15.400 | - Well, like a protection, like a deep respect for women

01:00:20.400 | grounded in a tradition of protecting them,

01:00:25.000 | but instead this kind of idea that was instilled in law

01:00:29.200 | has turned into a deep disrespect of women.

01:00:32.040 | - Exactly, or fear that these women are not any longer

01:00:37.040 | the girls that we thought we are bringing up in this society.

01:00:43.600 | - The source of you losing your power will be these women.

01:00:47.520 | That's the fear. - Yes, yeah.

01:00:49.280 | And you see, of course, this government

01:00:52.560 | do have a support base.

01:00:55.360 | I mean, it would be totally wrong to think

01:00:58.480 | that the Islamic Republic has not created

01:01:00.720 | its own power base.

01:01:02.560 | It does, but it's probably, if there's no way,

01:01:07.160 | there are no statistics that we can,

01:01:09.600 | or I'm not aware of any statistics

01:01:11.960 | that I can give you in numbers,

01:01:13.760 | what's the percentage of support for the regime in Iran?

01:01:17.440 | But quite frankly, I don't think it's more than

01:01:20.440 | probably 10% of the population.

01:01:22.880 | Be very generous.

01:01:24.400 | - I would be surprised if it's that low.

01:01:26.280 | I would say, so if my understanding,

01:01:28.760 | because I've been very deeply paying attention

01:01:32.280 | to the war in Ukraine, to Ukraine, to Russia,

01:01:35.680 | and to support in Russia for Putin,

01:01:41.000 | I think, without knowing the details,

01:01:45.040 | without even considering the effects of propaganda

01:01:48.000 | and stuff like that, is there's probably a large number

01:01:50.920 | of people in Iran that don't see this

01:01:54.760 | as a battle of human rights,

01:01:56.400 | but see it as a battle of conservatism,

01:01:59.920 | like tradition versus modernization,

01:02:03.000 | and they value tradition.

01:02:04.520 | What they fear from the throwing away of the hijab

01:02:09.200 | is not the loss of power and the women getting human rights.

01:02:14.000 | What they fear is the same stuff you fear

01:02:16.720 | when you're sitting on a porch and saying,

01:02:18.080 | "Kids these days have no respect."

01:02:21.400 | Basically, there's a large number of Iranians

01:02:24.520 | that probably value tradition and the beauty of the culture.

01:02:29.520 | And they fear that kids with their internet

01:02:35.880 | and their videos and their revolution

01:02:37.720 | will throw away everything that made this country

01:02:40.840 | hold together for millennia, right?

01:02:44.120 | - Yes, I know.

01:02:44.960 | I would agree with you in the sense that probably

01:02:47.360 | like everywhere else in the world,

01:02:49.240 | this is a generational thing.

01:02:51.480 | Every generation thinks differently

01:02:53.920 | about the younger generation, no doubt.

01:02:56.520 | And in Iran, it's the same.

01:02:58.520 | But there is another factor here is involved.

01:03:01.600 | Those that we would consider them as traditional

01:03:04.600 | no longer seem to have their loyalties to this regime.

01:03:10.600 | That's powerful.

01:03:11.920 | Meaning that they consider it as a brutal regime

01:03:16.920 | that is prepared to kill children in the streets.

01:03:22.760 | And does a lot of things wrong.

01:03:27.080 | Of course, it tries to take care of its own power base.

01:03:32.080 | There's a very strong sense of, if we start here,

01:03:36.280 | there's a very strong sense in this regime

01:03:38.960 | that there are people that is theirs

01:03:41.640 | and there are others which are not theirs.

01:03:45.440 | There's a word for it, if you're very impressed.

01:03:47.080 | They call it "khudi," one of us, okay?

01:03:50.400 | - Oh, so it's a, well, that's very fascistic.

01:03:53.880 | - Yes, yes, or for that matter,

01:03:56.600 | I suppose Soviet Union, if you were a member of the party

01:04:01.600 | and your children would have received

01:04:04.720 | a special kind of treatment, yourself as well.

01:04:07.580 | This sense of us versus them,

01:04:13.240 | for a while worked because the younger people

01:04:19.480 | coming from the countryside to the cities,

01:04:22.920 | certain sector of them would have found protection

01:04:27.920 | and support from the government.

01:04:32.320 | They wanted to belong to something,

01:04:36.020 | and the mosques and the morning associations

01:04:41.020 | in the neighborhoods and so forth would have given them.

01:04:44.840 | There's actually a term for it, it's called "basiji."

01:04:49.120 | Those have been recruited by the state,

01:04:53.720 | and this is the youth kind of vigilante, if you like,

01:04:58.720 | that you can see them also in these demonstrations.

01:05:02.760 | Sometimes thugs, they're called the civil cloth,

01:05:08.520 | so the people that comes to these demonstrations

01:05:11.320 | that start beating up these young people,

01:05:15.000 | and they are not in security police uniforms,

01:05:20.000 | but they are just regular clothes.

01:05:24.880 | And these people, yes, they still support,

01:05:29.880 | and they still benefit, 'cause they get jobs,

01:05:33.680 | they get privileges, and these are very important

01:05:37.960 | for a state that basically monopolizes

01:05:43.960 | most of the resources.

01:05:47.320 | You see, even during the sanction,

01:05:50.720 | let alone before the sanction, the oil revenue of Iran,

01:05:55.160 | which is the major source of the state government,

01:05:57.860 | was the monopoly of the state.

01:05:59.800 | It was monopoly of the state during the Pahlavi era,

01:06:02.400 | from the start, basically.

01:06:04.720 | So what does that mean?

01:06:06.280 | That means that the regime in power is not,

01:06:09.960 | no longer is particularly accountable

01:06:12.080 | to the majority population,

01:06:14.120 | 'cause it extracts wealth from underground,

01:06:18.000 | and it uses it for its own purposes,

01:06:21.180 | in order to make it more powerful,

01:06:23.440 | in order to make it more repressive

01:06:25.720 | than what it is, the regime today.

01:06:28.240 | So it feeds a small, or I wouldn't say,

01:06:32.240 | but a fair number of its own supporters.

01:06:35.880 | I mean, the revolutionary guard in Iran

01:06:38.200 | is probably about 350,000, or something like that.

01:06:42.800 | It's a very big force.

01:06:45.000 | And this is not the regular army.

01:06:47.200 | The revolutionary guards are independent from the army.

01:06:51.400 | - Revolutionary guard is armed forces

01:06:54.160 | controlled by the state.

01:06:55.920 | - Yes, the same as the army,

01:06:58.080 | but these are more ideologically tied up with the state.

01:07:03.080 | - And they're also in-facing, internal facing,

01:07:08.160 | what's the stated purpose of the revolutionary guard?

01:07:12.000 | - Well, from day one, when the revolution succeeded,

01:07:16.320 | the regime in power, the Islamic regime in power,

01:07:19.120 | was vulnerable to all kinds of forces of opposition

01:07:22.680 | within Iran itself.

01:07:24.120 | - To prevent further revolution.

01:07:25.800 | - Yeah, that's the revolutionary guards,

01:07:28.240 | and their job was to try to make sure

01:07:31.640 | that the regime stays in power.

01:07:33.920 | And of course, over the course of 40 years,

01:07:37.200 | they became more powerful, more organized,

01:07:40.160 | better funded, better trained.

01:07:44.160 | Well, at least we think they're better trained,

01:07:46.440 | but we don't know, because the level of incompetence,

01:07:49.880 | perhaps, can be seen through their rank and file as well.

01:07:53.840 | But, you know, they developed their own military industry.

01:07:58.840 | I mean, those drones that you see now,

01:08:04.960 | Putin's regime are throwing on Ukrainians,

01:08:09.160 | poor Ukrainians, those are all built

01:08:12.000 | by the revolutionary guards, by the military industry

01:08:15.440 | under the control of the revolutionary guards.

01:08:18.360 | And like similar regimes in the Middle East, at least,

01:08:23.160 | these are military industrial complexes.

01:08:26.140 | You can find them in Egypt, of course,

01:08:28.180 | which is very powerful, very traditional,

01:08:30.760 | has been in power and still is in power.

01:08:33.600 | You find them in Pakistan, which is extremely powerful,

01:08:38.400 | and they can change the prime ministers

01:08:42.800 | as they did in the case of the last one.

01:08:45.140 | You can find them probably in Myanmar,

01:08:52.020 | is the same phenomenon.

01:08:53.960 | And if you look around, you can find quite a number of them.

01:08:58.960 | And the revolutionary guards is the equivalent of that.

01:09:02.320 | This is a powerful establishment force,

01:09:07.320 | which militarily is powerful, industrially is powerful.

01:09:12.840 | And since the start of the revolution,

01:09:17.120 | they have been given projects.

01:09:19.520 | So you want to build dams,

01:09:21.400 | which they did a major disaster, environmental disaster.

01:09:26.080 | They built 100 and something dams all across the country.

01:09:30.400 | This is the revolutionary guard who does it.

01:09:32.700 | So they have all kinds of tentacles

01:09:38.000 | all around the country controlling various things.

01:09:41.200 | - And because it's their job,

01:09:42.800 | and they have power, they have prestige,

01:09:45.440 | there's a huge incentive to--

01:09:47.440 | - Join them.

01:09:48.280 | - Yeah, to join them and to stay.

01:09:49.640 | So like they, you know, when they're having dinner at home

01:09:52.560 | with their families, there's not an incentive

01:09:55.760 | to join the protests, sort of.

01:09:59.800 | - Well, that is the point.

01:10:02.280 | I think, and the revolutionary guards may be an extreme,

01:10:07.000 | but many of the people who depend on the state

01:10:11.080 | for their support, now the younger generation

01:10:14.880 | are telling their parents, you were wrong.

01:10:19.400 | You don't provide for us, this society,

01:10:21.960 | this state does not provide what we want.

01:10:25.520 | So there is a dissent within the family,

01:10:29.240 | it seems to me.

01:10:30.280 | I hope it's not a wishful thinking.

01:10:32.440 | You know, there is a kind of a joke going around.

01:10:35.800 | You see this, a terrible guy is the clergy,

01:10:39.040 | bearded, traditional clerical appearance.

01:10:44.040 | When you see them talking about women,

01:10:48.220 | they are very, of course, politically incorrect.

01:10:52.400 | They are very looking down towards women.

01:10:56.440 | As I said, you know, they have to be inside,

01:11:00.400 | they have to be protected, they have not to be seen,

01:11:03.760 | and so forth.

01:11:04.720 | But if they have a young person,

01:11:07.760 | a young daughter in their family,

01:11:10.640 | you see that their discourse changes.

01:11:15.540 | They no longer seem to be referring to women

01:11:19.440 | as second-class citizens.

01:11:21.240 | - Yeah.

01:11:22.120 | - So that's very important, that's precisely that point,

01:11:25.480 | that when you have this younger generation,

01:11:28.400 | no matter how privileged they are,

01:11:30.200 | and many of them are privileged, you know,

01:11:33.160 | and there is also, the regime has created

01:11:37.680 | its own privilege class

01:11:42.680 | that are not necessarily directly paid by the regime,

01:11:47.720 | but they benefit from contractors,

01:11:52.240 | certain professions that benefit

01:11:56.520 | from what the state provides for them.

01:11:59.320 | And Iran is a, I mean, the past 40 years,

01:12:02.760 | you can see Iran has developed,

01:12:04.580 | in terms of material culture, remarkably.

01:12:08.260 | Iran has good communication, has roads all over the place.

01:12:14.280 | It's not like a, it's more like,

01:12:19.080 | I don't know whether you have ever visited Turkey,

01:12:21.320 | for instance. - No, I haven't.

01:12:22.480 | - In certain respects, even more advanced than Turkey,

01:12:25.680 | but it's closer to that, rather than if you travel,

01:12:29.480 | I don't want to bring particular names,

01:12:31.640 | in North Africa, or parts of the Middle East,

01:12:35.560 | or other parts of the Islamic world, it's much, much different.

01:12:38.820 | So in this respect, you would see

01:12:43.320 | certain contrasts or paradoxes here.

01:12:48.240 | On the certain respect, there is the growth,

01:12:51.200 | and there is urbanization, there is modern economy.

01:12:56.600 | On the other hand, you see this superimposed ideological,

01:13:01.600 | doctrinal aspect that has driven the regime

01:13:06.200 | over all these years, and they cannot get rid of it.

01:13:10.440 | They cannot, in this respect,

01:13:12.200 | they cannot modernize themselves.

01:13:13.800 | They think that they are already perfect

01:13:18.280 | in ideological sense, this is the best solution

01:13:20.720 | for the world, not only for Iran,

01:13:23.420 | but for the Muslim world, and for the world as a whole.

01:13:26.360 | We are anti-imperialist, we have managed to survive

01:13:31.320 | either under sanctions, this is all part of the rhetoric.

01:13:34.560 | But of course, at the huge expense,

01:13:38.840 | the huge expense for their own population.

01:13:41.620 | And the point that you have raised is the fact

01:13:45.040 | that we now witness there is not only a generation gap

01:13:50.040 | between the youth and their parents,

01:13:55.160 | but there is a break, in a sense,

01:13:59.840 | from the older generations.

01:14:02.640 | And they are very distinctly the youth

01:14:06.760 | that has a different view of the world.

01:14:11.320 | And it does not want to compromise.

01:14:13.500 | Whether they would be able to succeed or not

01:14:16.940 | remains to be seen.

01:14:18.680 | Whether this regime is going to suppress it, maybe.

01:14:22.180 | But it actually brought to surface many of aspects

01:14:28.500 | of the weaknesses of this regime in power.

01:14:32.900 | - Well, I hear from a lot of people

01:14:34.740 | that are in these protests now,

01:14:36.220 | and so my love goes to them, and stay strong.

01:14:40.740 | Because it's inspiring to see people

01:14:44.300 | fighting for those things, the women, life,

01:14:48.700 | and freedom, especially freedom.

01:14:50.620 | Because that can only lead to a good thing

01:14:54.300 | in the long term, at least.

01:14:55.640 | And if possible, to avoid a violent revolution.

01:15:00.000 | Of course, that is something that we all want to see.

01:15:05.140 | Before we return to the present, let's jump around,

01:15:07.980 | let's go to the past.

01:15:09.700 | We mentioned 1979.

01:15:12.420 | What happened in 1979 in Iran?

01:15:15.380 | - Well, in 1979, there was a revolution

01:15:20.380 | that eventually came to be known as the Islamic Revolution.

01:15:24.260 | And even up to this day, many of the observers

01:15:28.260 | or those who have strong views would not like

01:15:31.380 | to refer to it as an Islamic Revolution,

01:15:33.580 | or even a revolution.

01:15:36.780 | Because the nature of it, in the earlier stages of it,

01:15:39.980 | started really probably around 1977, it took two years.

01:15:43.860 | Was much more all-embracing.

01:15:47.660 | It was not Islamic in a particular fashion,

01:15:52.380 | or at all, in a sense.

01:15:54.500 | It started with a kind of a very liberal,

01:15:57.700 | Democrat agenda, which required,

01:16:04.620 | which demanded, mostly by people who were the veterans

01:16:09.620 | of the older generations of Iranian liberal nationalists

01:16:14.260 | that were left out in the Pahlavi period,

01:16:17.820 | is a period of the Shah,

01:16:20.500 | became increasingly authoritarian,

01:16:25.720 | increasingly suppressive,

01:16:30.860 | and therefore, basically, leaving no space,

01:16:35.860 | no political space open for any kind of a give and take,

01:16:41.540 | any kind of a conversation or participation.

01:16:45.900 | - That was in the '70s. - '70s, '70s.

01:16:48.020 | Particularly in the '70s.

01:16:49.460 | - Can we actually even just do a whirlwind review

01:16:53.900 | from 1906 to 1979?

01:16:58.300 | - Okay, sure.

01:16:59.620 | In 1906, there was a period, actually, as you might know,

01:17:04.060 | the first decade or so of the 20th century,

01:17:08.900 | witnessed numerous, what we refer to

01:17:12.500 | as constitutional revolutions,

01:17:14.420 | including Russia in 1905, the first revolution,

01:17:18.700 | including the Chinese Revolution in 19,

01:17:20.820 | constitutional revolution in 1910,

01:17:23.340 | the Young Turks Revolution in 1908,

01:17:26.020 | and the Iranian Revolution in 1906.

01:17:28.020 | - Do I understand why the synchronicity of all of it,

01:17:31.700 | why in so many different places,

01:17:33.100 | very different cultures, very different governments?

01:17:34.860 | - Very different cultures, but all of them,

01:17:37.220 | in a sense, were coming out of regimes

01:17:42.220 | that became progressively powerful

01:17:47.260 | without having any kind of a legal system

01:17:52.540 | that would protect the individual vis-a-vis the state.

01:17:55.580 | So the idea of law and the constitution,

01:17:59.100 | according to which there should be a certain protection,

01:18:03.660 | a certain civil society, became very common.

01:18:07.100 | - Yeah, but I wonder where that,

01:18:08.900 | 'cause that's been that way for a very, very long time,

01:18:12.780 | and so I wonder, you know, it's funny,

01:18:17.340 | certain ideas, just their time comes.

01:18:21.060 | - Exactly, it's like 1848, when you would see

01:18:24.060 | that there's a whole range of revolutions across Europe,

01:18:28.860 | or you would see, for instance, the Arab Spring.

01:18:33.060 | You see all these revolutions in the Arab world,

01:18:35.060 | which unfortunately, nearly all of them failed.

01:18:38.700 | So yes, these are very contagious ideas

01:18:41.900 | that moves across frontiers from one culture to another,

01:18:46.740 | and I presume we can add to that there are two elements

01:18:50.620 | which one can say there was a greater communication,

01:18:54.140 | there is a greater sense of a world economy,

01:18:57.580 | and the turn of the century witnessed,

01:18:59.740 | the first decade of the century,

01:19:01.140 | witnessed a period of volatility,

01:19:05.700 | particularly in currency.

01:19:09.700 | So many of the countries of the world,

01:19:11.620 | particularly non-West, suffered,

01:19:18.060 | particularly the businesses suffered,

01:19:20.700 | and not surprisingly, the business class

01:19:24.780 | were in the forefront of many of these

01:19:27.340 | constitutional movements, requiring the state

01:19:31.460 | to give the, kind of create the right kind of institutions

01:19:36.460 | to listen to their voices, to their concerns,

01:19:41.980 | and the creation of a democratic system,

01:19:45.180 | parliamentary system in which there would be

01:19:48.020 | a representation, popular representation,

01:19:51.580 | proper elections and so forth, and constitutions.

01:19:55.180 | And this very much is a kind of a French idea

01:19:58.660 | of the constitution going back all the way,

01:20:01.420 | perhaps to 1789 revolution, Montesquieu,

01:20:06.100 | all this kind of philosophes were greatly appreciated,

01:20:11.100 | particularly the French system.

01:20:12.740 | - So what were the ideas in the 1906 Iranian constitution?

01:20:16.740 | - They, precisely the same, they were demanding

01:20:20.820 | a creation of a legal system with division of power

01:20:24.820 | between the three, executive, legislative,

01:20:29.300 | and the judiciary, not unlike the American system.

01:20:34.300 | And they requested basically a certain public space

01:20:42.260 | to be created between the two sources of power,

01:20:45.540 | the state, which had this kind of a control

01:20:49.800 | over the, if you like, the secular aspect of life

01:20:54.320 | in the society, and the religious establishment

01:20:57.140 | that had a full control over the religious aspects.

01:21:02.140 | And both of them, from the perspective of the constitution,

01:21:05.940 | it is considered as repressive, and therefore,

01:21:09.960 | there has to be a new space open between these two.

01:21:13.620 | And that was the idea of a constitutional revolution.

01:21:16.580 | By its very nature, it was an idea of modernity.

01:21:20.740 | They wanted a modern society.

01:21:22.900 | They wanted a better material life.

01:21:26.380 | They wanted more representation, and so forth.

01:21:30.580 | The constitutional revolution, as I always would say,

01:21:33.940 | is much more of an innocent revolution.

01:21:37.860 | It's a revolution that did not particularly

01:21:40.240 | have much violence in it, contrary to many other revolutions.

01:21:44.200 | It did not have a centralized leadership, per se.

01:21:49.060 | That's why, actually, I'm getting,

01:21:51.120 | I mean, besides the practices,

01:21:53.680 | I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews

01:21:56.400 | to compare what's happening now

01:21:58.800 | with the revolution of 1906, 1909.

01:22:02.520 | - Are there any echoes?

01:22:03.960 | - Yes, yes, there are, there are.

01:22:05.920 | Because that was a movement that started

01:22:08.060 | without a centralized leadership,

01:22:13.060 | but actually various voices that emerged

01:22:17.620 | in various, among the merchants,

01:22:20.740 | or the businessmen in the economic community,

01:22:24.460 | among the representatives who came to the first parliament,

01:22:29.340 | the press, the new generation

01:22:31.940 | of the privileged aristocracy

01:22:35.380 | who were educated and believed in the constitutional values.

01:22:40.380 | All of these voices emerged at the same time,

01:22:43.980 | and somehow they managed to coexist

01:22:47.460 | in the first and the second parliaments

01:22:55.980 | that were created between 1906 and 1910, or 1911.

01:23:03.940 | But they all faced huge problems,

01:23:06.420 | in the sense that Iran was in a dire economic situation.

01:23:11.540 | This is before the days of the discovery of oil,

01:23:15.020 | which actually coincides in the discovery.

01:23:17.060 | There are two important coincidences.

01:23:19.980 | One is that the oil was discovered in the South in 1909,

01:23:24.500 | during the course of the constitutional revolution.

01:23:28.820 | The second is that in 1907,

01:23:32.020 | the two great powers of the time,

01:23:34.140 | the Russian Empire and the British Empire,

01:23:37.740 | who always honored Iran as being a buffer state

01:23:41.100 | between them, because they didn't want

01:23:43.180 | to get too close to one another,

01:23:45.060 | basically came to an agreement facing the fear

01:23:50.140 | of the rise of the German Empire.

01:23:52.800 | So this is the period of Entente,

01:23:55.260 | as you might know in European history,

01:23:57.500 | whereby the French, the British, and the Russians

01:24:02.060 | all create an alliance that ultimately leads

01:24:07.060 | to the First World War against Germany.

01:24:10.220 | - And at the same time, the discovery of oil,

01:24:12.900 | that the oil industry being a very powerful,

01:24:16.940 | defining factor of the 20th century for Iran.

01:24:19.380 | - Exactly.

01:24:20.340 | - Source of a lot of money.

01:24:22.140 | - Lot of money, but not all of it

01:24:24.100 | in the hands of the Iranians.

01:24:25.420 | Only one fifth of it, by way of royalties,

01:24:28.780 | came to Iran.

01:24:29.820 | Much of it went to the Anglo-Persian oil company,

01:24:34.820 | which they actually discovered the oil in the province,

01:24:38.500 | Khuzestan province in the southwest of Iran,

01:24:41.780 | where the major oil industry is today, right now.

01:24:45.740 | And this was an extremely profitable enterprise

01:24:50.740 | for that company, and for the British government.

01:24:53.740 | It was actually purchased by the British government.

01:24:56.300 | Churchill purchased Anglo-Iranian oil company

01:24:59.900 | for the British government.

01:25:01.620 | So it was not anymore a private company.

01:25:04.220 | It was a British interest, as a matter of fact.

01:25:07.380 | And in the course of the 20th century,

01:25:09.100 | although it helped the modernization in Iran,

01:25:12.180 | but it also helped the creation of a more authoritative,

01:25:16.420 | a more strong state, if you like to call it.

01:25:20.900 | That 19th century Iran never had that kind of a power.

01:25:24.860 | Never had that kind of resources.

01:25:26.940 | Is it 20th century, even that one fifth of the income

01:25:31.940 | that reached the Iranian state gave it a greater power.

01:25:36.120 | - That's another coincidence.

01:25:38.900 | So yes, yes, you could say the oil was one of the catalysts

01:25:43.500 | for absolute power, but the 20th century

01:25:47.260 | saw quite a few countries

01:25:50.220 | have dictators with power

01:25:53.100 | unlike anything else in human history.

01:25:55.100 | - Yes.

01:25:56.060 | - That's weird too.

01:25:57.740 | - Precisely.

01:25:59.180 | And you know, you can name them

01:26:01.020 | from the beginning of the century with people like,

01:26:04.700 | I don't know, Lenin, Stalin, of course Hitler.

01:26:09.420 | - Mao.

01:26:10.620 | - Mao, of course, you can name them.

01:26:13.460 | And probably, as I would say,

01:26:15.260 | the last of them is Khomeini in that century,

01:26:18.020 | that you would see this strong man

01:26:20.620 | with a sense of a,

01:26:21.620 | either artificial or real,

01:26:25.500 | or a sense of a so-called charisma,

01:26:29.660 | and with this total power over the regime that they create.

01:26:34.660 | Some of them do, Nasser,

01:26:38.660 | he didn't have much of an oil resources in Egypt,

01:26:42.060 | but he was also one of these strong men, okay,

01:26:45.160 | in the 20th century.

01:26:46.920 | Loved by some, hated by others.

01:26:49.160 | So it necessarily does not tie up

01:26:54.220 | to economic resources underground.

01:26:59.220 | But in the Iranian case, unfortunately it did.

01:27:02.520 | And it was a,

01:27:04.720 | it was more than,

01:27:07.580 | it created more than one issue for Iran.

01:27:10.420 | It's created a strong state,

01:27:12.740 | which is the Pahlavi state,

01:27:13.900 | from 1921 onward.

01:27:17.040 | Because in 1921, at the end of the First World War,

01:27:21.160 | Iran was in almost a state of total bankruptcy.

01:27:24.840 | And the British had a desire

01:27:30.460 | to try to bring Iran to the system

01:27:32.820 | that they created in the Middle East

01:27:34.300 | in the post-war era, the mandate system.

01:27:37.360 | Palestine, Iraq, and then, of course,

01:27:40.380 | French mandate of Lebanon and Syria, all of this.

01:27:43.740 | And Iran was separate because Iran

01:27:45.460 | was an independent country.

01:27:46.700 | It wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire that collapsed.

01:27:50.260 | So they had to somehow handle it.

01:27:52.680 | And what they tried to do didn't work.

01:27:56.300 | As a result, partly domestic,

01:28:01.020 | partly international issues,

01:28:03.260 | wrote about a regime which is headed

01:28:06.700 | by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah.

01:28:10.940 | Okay, a first military officer called Reza Khan,

01:28:14.860 | actually a military officer of the Cossack forces.

01:28:18.060 | And the Cossack forces was the force

01:28:20.380 | that was created in the 19th century

01:28:22.420 | model of the Russian Cossacks.

01:28:24.980 | When the ruler in the 19th century visited Russia

01:28:29.980 | as in a royal tour, and the desire showed

01:28:33.780 | the great Cossack forces, he said, "I like this."

01:28:38.460 | And he created one for himself

01:28:40.660 | with Russian officers, actually.

01:28:43.140 | So Russian officers served in Iran

01:28:44.980 | from around 1880s up to the revolution of 1917,

01:28:49.860 | the collapse of the Cossack regime.

01:28:51.940 | - So many revolutions.

01:28:53.220 | - So many revolutions.

01:28:54.580 | And Reza Shah was an officer in that, Reza Khan

01:28:58.780 | was an officer in that force.

01:29:00.260 | And he created a new monarchy for reasons

01:29:02.500 | that we need not to go to it.

01:29:04.180 | And this called the Pahlavi regime.

01:29:05.900 | Pahlavi regime was a modernizing regime, okay?

01:29:10.860 | That brought, in effect, fulfilled many of the ambitions

01:29:15.860 | of the Constitution, many of the aspirations

01:29:20.700 | of the Constitutional Revolution.

01:29:22.380 | Better communication, secular education,

01:29:27.380 | centralized states, centralized army,

01:29:33.660 | better contact with the outside world,

01:29:36.980 | greater urbanization, that's what a modern state

01:29:40.060 | is all about.

01:29:40.940 | And in that regard, in a sense, for the first 20 years

01:29:46.380 | up to the Second World War, was successful.

01:29:49.600 | Despite, and more significant of all,

01:29:54.180 | it managed to keep the European powers,

01:29:57.740 | which was always interfering in the local affairs

01:30:01.260 | of Iran, in an arm's length.

01:30:03.740 | So they were there in an arm's length,

01:30:06.740 | but they were also respecting the power of the state,

01:30:12.660 | power of the Pahlavi state.

01:30:16.100 | During the Second World War, the same phenomenon

01:30:20.620 | as earlier interference led to the occupation of Iran

01:30:25.620 | by the Allied forces, the British from the south,

01:30:29.620 | the Russians from the north, the Red Army.

01:30:33.340 | They took over Iran, and of course they said--

01:30:36.180 | - The Second World War.

01:30:37.140 | - Yes, from 1941 up to 1945.

01:30:41.340 | And of course, when the Red Army refused to withdraw

01:30:46.340 | from Iranian Azerbaijan, and with some thought

01:30:54.780 | of possible annexation of that province,

01:30:59.780 | there was a big issue in the post-war Iran.

01:31:03.460 | - So after 1945--

01:31:05.140 | - Yes, 1945 to 1946, there was a big--

01:31:09.980 | - Soviet Union getting greedy.

01:31:11.380 | - Yes, but eventually they agreed.

01:31:13.580 | Eventually Stalin agreed to leave the Azerbaijan province

01:31:17.980 | in the hope that it would get some concessions from Iran,

01:31:21.380 | which in the oil of the Caspian area,

01:31:25.700 | which didn't work, and it's a different story altogether.

01:31:29.460 | But what happened is that in the post-war era,

01:31:34.460 | between 1944, '45, and 1953,

01:31:39.700 | is a period of greater democratization,

01:31:47.460 | because Reza Shah's dictatorship basically disappeared.

01:31:52.460 | And this is where you would see political parties,

01:31:57.180 | free press, a lot of chaotic, really,

01:32:00.420 | as democracies often are.

01:32:04.100 | - So something like, was it officially a democracy?

01:32:07.380 | - Yes, it was a democracy.

01:32:08.900 | - Was there elections?

01:32:10.240 | - There were elections, yes, of course, yes, of course.

01:32:13.300 | And there were very diverse political tendencies

01:32:18.100 | came to the picture, including the Tudeh Party of Iran,

01:32:21.820 | which is Communist Party of Iran.

01:32:23.900 | This Communist Party of Iran is probably the biggest

01:32:27.080 | Communist Party of the whole of the Middle East,

01:32:30.300 | and one of the biggest in the world, actually, at that time.

01:32:34.020 | - Did the Soviet Union have a significant influence on--

01:32:37.140 | - Of course, they were basically following orders

01:32:40.620 | from the Soviets, although they denied it,

01:32:43.180 | but in reality, that's the case.

01:32:45.740 | But what happened, they were seen by the Americans

01:32:49.100 | during the Cold War as a threat,

01:32:53.860 | and Iran was going through a period

01:32:56.900 | of demanding nationalization of its oil resources.

01:33:00.380 | That's a very important episode, with Mossadegh,

01:33:03.140 | whom you might have heard about his name.

01:33:05.440 | Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who was the prime minister

01:33:08.660 | and the national charismatic leader from 1951 to 1953.

01:33:13.660 | Prior to that, he was a famous parliamentarian,

01:33:17.760 | but this period, he was the prime minister of Iran,

01:33:20.460 | and he nationalized the Iranian oil industry,

01:33:23.500 | and the British didn't like it at all,

01:33:25.400 | and eventually resulted in a famous coup,

01:33:29.560 | which at least partly was supported by the funding

01:33:36.860 | and by the moral support of the British and the Americans,

01:33:41.860 | particularly by the Americans.

01:33:44.580 | It was always seen as one of the earliest

01:33:48.740 | and the most successful CIA operations during the Cold War.

01:33:53.740 | - So CIA had something to do with it?

01:33:55.420 | - Yes, of course, that's one of the earliest operations

01:33:57.620 | of the CIA.

01:33:58.620 | - Wait a minute, what was, yes, of course,

01:34:01.500 | what was the CIA doing?

01:34:03.980 | - CIA, this is the time at the post-war era.

01:34:06.940 | - In the '50s.

01:34:07.900 | - In the '50s, '40s and the '50s.

01:34:11.040 | The British Empire, which was really the major superpower

01:34:16.040 | of the region after the collapse of the Tzarist Empire,

01:34:20.700 | gradually took the second seat to the Americans,

01:34:25.700 | who were the newcomers and the great power

01:34:29.460 | and the victors of the Second World War,

01:34:32.860 | and the Americans viewed Iran as an important country,

01:34:36.440 | since it has the largest common borders

01:34:44.500 | with the Soviet Union, and it was,

01:34:48.500 | and in the south was the Persian Gulf,

01:34:51.260 | which at the time was the greatest supplier

01:34:54.540 | of oil to the outside world,

01:35:00.780 | and therefore the Americans had a particular interest

01:35:04.620 | in Iran, and in the earlier stages,

01:35:07.220 | their interest was in the interest of the Iranian government

01:35:10.140 | because they wanted to get rid of both the Soviet Union,

01:35:15.140 | which made a return in the post-war era,

01:35:20.260 | and of course the British that were gradually withdrawing

01:35:23.980 | from Iran, but they had a full control

01:35:27.820 | over the Anglo-Iranian oil company.

01:35:30.140 | They changed the name to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

01:35:33.780 | When the name of the country officially changed

01:35:35.780 | from Persia to Iran, in the west,

01:35:39.260 | the name of the company changed,

01:35:42.900 | and they got into a huge dispute with the other government

01:35:47.780 | that eventually led to the coup of 1953,

01:35:52.100 | which eventually created a very,

01:35:56.420 | a very distressful memory in the minds

01:36:00.500 | of many of the Iranian nationalists,

01:36:03.160 | that this was the betrayal of the great powers,

01:36:06.100 | the British and Americans.

01:36:08.140 | Yes, CIA played a part because CIA feared,

01:36:12.660 | contrary to the British, that they were afraid

01:36:14.740 | of their own oil in Iran, the CIA was afraid

01:36:18.940 | of the Soviet penetration in the south,

01:36:24.260 | and particularly because there was a very powerful,

01:36:27.020 | very powerful Communist Party in Iran,

01:36:29.620 | the Tudeh Party of Iran.

01:36:31.620 | So they gradually shifted between the Truman administration

01:36:36.620 | and Eisenhower administration,

01:36:39.180 | these are early days of the CIA,

01:36:41.560 | and then they actually did participate

01:36:45.300 | to send their agents.

01:36:48.220 | There's a long story to that,

01:36:50.740 | and it eventually resulted in a successful coup

01:36:54.820 | that removed Mossadegh from power.

01:36:57.100 | - What's the United States' interest here?

01:36:59.460 | Why are they using CIA?

01:37:00.900 | Are they trying to make sure there's not

01:37:03.860 | too much centralization of power in this region?

01:37:06.340 | - They were afraid of the fact that the,

01:37:08.300 | that of the Soviet Union, and during the Cold War,

01:37:12.820 | that was their concern, only concern.

01:37:15.140 | - They actually almost want to protect Iran

01:37:17.940 | and its own sovereign processes from influence

01:37:21.300 | of the Soviets. - Yes.

01:37:22.660 | 'Cause they were afraid of the fact if Iran,

01:37:26.540 | or at least this is part of the,

01:37:29.020 | I'm simplifying a very complex picture,

01:37:31.460 | but the Americans basically were thinking

01:37:35.300 | that if Iran is going to be lost to Soviet influence,

01:37:40.140 | then eventually, basically, all the oil resources

01:37:44.460 | in the Persian Gulf are going to be threatened.

01:37:47.360 | - Yeah.

01:37:48.200 | - And this would basically is the national security

01:37:52.540 | of the United States and all of the Western allies,

01:37:56.780 | European allies.

01:37:58.340 | So in a sense, this was the long arm of the CIA

01:38:02.620 | to try to make sure that that's not going to happen.

01:38:07.620 | And then, of course, they were persuaded by the British.

01:38:11.100 | Because British were the old hand,

01:38:12.980 | which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century.

01:38:16.540 | They always had relations with Iran and so forth.

01:38:19.520 | So they gradually replaced.

01:38:22.300 | And of course, I don't want to give them

01:38:25.680 | this kind of a satanic view that Americans

01:38:28.620 | was a bad influence, because they had also

01:38:31.620 | some very good influences in Iran.

01:38:33.820 | But this particular episode somehow shed a dark light

01:38:38.820 | on the American presence and was used

01:38:43.180 | and abused time and again, particularly

01:38:46.220 | the revolution in 1979, which was this great Satan idea

01:38:51.140 | that Khomeini created, basically was based

01:38:54.180 | on the fact is 1953, you were responsible

01:38:58.520 | for the downfall of a national government in Iran.

01:39:02.100 | Which as a matter of fact, he had no respect for it.

01:39:04.820 | Khomeini had no respect for the secular,

01:39:08.580 | nationally liberals, including Mohammad Mossadegh.

01:39:12.660 | But he was using it as a rhetorical tool

01:39:17.020 | for his own purposes.

01:39:18.580 | But what happened is that after 1953,

01:39:22.320 | we see again the rise of authoritarian

01:39:28.460 | Mohammad Reza Shah's power.

01:39:30.900 | - And that he's, that's the Shah?

01:39:33.520 | - That's the Shah, that we know as Shah.

01:39:36.100 | This is son of Reza Shah.

01:39:37.780 | - And technically, what is Shah?

01:39:40.980 | - Shah is an old term in Persian

01:39:43.860 | that comes from a pre-Islamic Persian of ancient times.

01:39:49.420 | - So in the context of democracy,

01:39:51.140 | should it be seen as like a supreme leader, king?

01:39:54.740 | - Is the head of the executive power,

01:39:58.300 | according to the Constitution of 1906.

01:40:00.860 | - Oh, that's in the Constitution, the actual term Shah.

01:40:02.740 | - Of course, he has a place in the Constitution.

01:40:04.620 | - But the actual term Shah, okay, interesting.

01:40:06.660 | - But the Shah is a very old term.

01:40:08.860 | - Yeah, it's almost like a monarchic term, like a king.

01:40:13.020 | - Yeah, it is actually is a term peculiar to Iran.

01:40:16.960 | I've written about it somewhere.

01:40:18.740 | But because the term, the Western word in the ancient times

01:40:22.860 | has been rex for royalty and the king.

01:40:26.680 | In the Eastern world, in India, is raj,

01:40:30.320 | is the same origin, the same root.

01:40:33.260 | Iran never shared that.

01:40:34.580 | They had the idea of, because rex and raj,

01:40:37.860 | I don't want to get into too much of etymology,

01:40:40.700 | but this is an interesting one.

01:40:42.980 | Rex and raj both means the one that opens the road

01:40:46.780 | for basically enforcer of religion, okay?

01:40:51.500 | Enforcer of the right religion.

01:40:56.580 | Because rex and raj both have the,

01:40:59.380 | of the etymological origin of right, you see?

01:41:05.160 | And raj means the right religion, basically.

01:41:07.920 | - By the way, there's so much beautiful language here.

01:41:10.600 | I'm just looking at the Persian Constitution in 1906,

01:41:14.280 | and it says it's the constitution

01:41:15.960 | of the sublime state of Persia, Qajar Iran.

01:41:20.880 | I mean, just the extra adjectives

01:41:23.600 | on top of this stuff is beautiful.

01:41:25.320 | - Yeah, because that was actually the change that came about.

01:41:29.280 | I don't want to go too much into it.

01:41:31.640 | But it was called, as I pointed out before,

01:41:34.680 | the guarded domains of Iran.

01:41:36.880 | They changed that to the sublime state of Iran

01:41:39.960 | during the constitutional revolution.

01:41:41.800 | Because they wanted to give a greater sense

01:41:44.560 | of centrality of the state.

01:41:46.920 | And sublime was the term we used.

01:41:48.840 | - But also, what permeates all of this is a poetic,

01:41:53.400 | I mean, there is a history of poetry to the culture.

01:41:57.200 | - Of course, very strong, very strong.

01:41:58.020 | - Which is fascinating.

01:41:58.860 | So I mean, of course, I don't speak the language,

01:42:01.440 | but even in Russian, there's also a music

01:42:06.440 | to the soul of the people that represents itself,

01:42:10.600 | that presents itself in the form of poetry and literature

01:42:13.620 | in the way that it doesn't in the English-speaking world.

01:42:17.160 | I don't know what that is.

01:42:18.080 | There's a--

01:42:19.080 | - Yeah, there's a romantic side.

01:42:20.480 | - Romantic side.

01:42:21.320 | - To all my students.

01:42:22.140 | - Romantic side, that's right.

01:42:22.980 | - Yeah, I agree with you.

01:42:24.040 | In Iran, of course, you know,

01:42:25.440 | there's a time of the constitutional revolution,

01:42:27.440 | is a time of great poetry.

01:42:30.600 | This kind of a patriotic sentiments

01:42:35.400 | that comes through poetry plays a very important part.

01:42:39.480 | Of course, these days, poetry has kind of declined,

01:42:45.440 | and instead, you see the visual image

01:42:49.080 | that is at the center.

01:42:50.120 | That's why cinema is so important.

01:42:52.040 | - Kids these days with their TikTok.

01:42:54.700 | - Yeah, let me finish this about the period

01:42:57.520 | of Muhammad Reza Shah.

01:42:59.000 | He built up, because he received a greater income

01:43:04.000 | from the oil revenue, and he built up a very strong state

01:43:09.840 | with a strong security force, a strong security apparatus,

01:43:14.840 | which is the SAVAK, which is an acronym

01:43:19.400 | for the security force in security organization.

01:43:23.960 | And he, of course, unfortunately,

01:43:27.360 | in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the 1970s,

01:43:31.600 | basically suppressed the voices of,

01:43:35.000 | or the possibility of any kind of a mass participation

01:43:39.320 | in the political process.

01:43:42.360 | It became very much an authoritarian regime

01:43:44.840 | with its own technocrats,

01:43:46.520 | very much a modernist vision of Iran's future,

01:43:52.360 | and almost kind of messianic,

01:43:56.200 | that he was hoping that Iran, in a decade,

01:43:59.080 | would become the fifth most powerful state in the world,

01:44:03.120 | and the riches, as he would have said,

01:44:05.840 | the gates of the great civilization,

01:44:08.720 | very much in the mind, had this image of ancient Iran

01:44:13.400 | of the Achaemenid Empire.

01:44:15.400 | And we want to go back to that greatness

01:44:17.680 | of the Achaemenid Empire, somewhat rather naive

01:44:22.360 | and very nationalistic in a crude fashion.

01:44:25.720 | And what happened is that, as a result,

01:44:28.320 | there was built up some kind of a resistance

01:44:31.280 | from the intellectuals, from the left,

01:44:34.280 | eventually resulting in a kind of a protest movement,

01:44:38.960 | as I said, by 1977, 1978.

01:44:42.540 | Then, of course, the question that comes to mind,

01:44:44.920 | and that probably you would like to know about,

01:44:49.580 | is the fact that why it becomes religious,

01:44:51.880 | why it becomes Islamic,

01:44:53.720 | if it's the popular nationalist, liberal tendency

01:44:58.720 | of opening up the political space

01:45:04.920 | and allowing greater participation,

01:45:07.640 | going back to the Constitution of 1906, 1907,

01:45:12.640 | why it's all of a sudden, it becomes Khomeini,

01:45:16.480 | where does he come from?

01:45:18.420 | The reason for that, at least in a concise fashion,

01:45:22.440 | is the fact that on one area,

01:45:26.420 | that after the greater suppression

01:45:31.240 | of all the other voices remained open, was religion.

01:45:36.240 | Mosques, the mullahs on the pulpit,

01:45:42.040 | and the message that gradually shifted

01:45:48.200 | from all the traditional message of the sharia of Islam,

01:45:53.200 | I mean, all the rules and regulations

01:45:56.120 | of how one has to live, into something very political,

01:46:00.960 | and not only political, but also radical political.

01:46:05.560 | So, in the whole period from the Constitutional Revolution

01:46:11.720 | to the Revolution of 1979,

01:46:15.100 | basically the religious establishment

01:46:17.520 | gradually was pushed to the opposition.

01:46:19.920 | They were not originally very conservative,

01:46:22.680 | supporters of the state, as the Catholic Church,

01:46:25.680 | for instance, was supportive of majority

01:46:28.680 | of the authoritarian governments around the world.

01:46:32.460 | But the politicization was the result of isolation,

01:46:39.040 | because they were left out of the system.

01:46:42.520 | And while in isolation, they did not,

01:46:46.480 | they were not successful in trying to reform themselves,

01:46:51.480 | to try to become, to try to find answers

01:46:56.080 | to many of the questions of modern times.

01:46:58.740 | What happens to women?

01:47:00.140 | What happens to civil rights?

01:47:01.920 | What happens to a civil society?

01:47:05.000 | How modern law and individual freedoms

01:47:10.000 | have to be defined in Islamic terms?

01:47:13.400 | - How to separate religion and state?

01:47:16.280 | - Or how to separate religion and state?

01:47:19.000 | These issues were never addressed.

01:47:21.000 | What happened is that there was this bypass

01:47:25.200 | through political Islam, and revolutionary Islam,

01:47:30.200 | as it gradually, they learned, you know,

01:47:34.280 | that this is the bypass, bypass to power, basically,

01:47:37.480 | to become again a voice in the society,

01:47:40.920 | and eventually a prominent voice,

01:47:42.900 | and eventually a monolithic voice in the society.

01:47:46.700 | That's the process that led into the revolution of 1979.

01:47:51.700 | Basically, this period, greater attention was paid

01:47:56.200 | to religion, even among the secular middle classes,

01:47:59.900 | who were alienated for a very long time

01:48:04.580 | because of this extensive modernization

01:48:08.020 | of the Pahlavi period.

01:48:09.500 | They didn't have a sense of that old

01:48:13.020 | monolithic disturbance, but they became,

01:48:16.060 | they had a kind of aura in this period.

01:48:19.420 | Yes, they are those who remained not corrupted.

01:48:23.080 | They are the people who basically went against

01:48:28.300 | the suppression of the Pahlavi regime,

01:48:31.340 | and Khomeini became a leader, a symbol of that.

01:48:34.980 | Nobody ever thought in the earlier stages,

01:48:38.140 | among this very excited multitudes that came

01:48:41.900 | to the streets of the Iranian cities in 1979,

01:48:46.900 | or 1978, actually, thought that this old,

01:48:52.100 | more like in the '70s, that all of a sudden

01:48:56.460 | has appeared from the Najaf through Paris to Tehran,

01:49:01.460 | is going to take over and create a autocracy,

01:49:06.900 | a religious autocracy.

01:49:08.860 | - We have to back up for just a second.

01:49:10.340 | Who is Khomeini?

01:49:11.700 | You just mentioned a few disparate facts about the man.

01:49:17.500 | - Yes.

01:49:18.340 | - He was the person that took power in 1979,

01:49:20.980 | the supreme leader of Iran.

01:49:22.460 | - Yes.

01:49:23.300 | - You mentioned something about Paris,

01:49:24.660 | something about being in the '70s.

01:49:26.260 | - Yes.

01:49:27.300 | - What should we know about the guy?

01:49:28.940 | - Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually was known

01:49:32.460 | as Imam Khomeini, he was kind of promoted

01:49:35.380 | to an even more sublime position.

01:49:37.660 | - Okay, can we, just a million tangents.

01:49:40.600 | Ayatollah, Imam, what do these terms mean?

01:49:45.220 | - Well, Ayatollah means the sign of God.

01:49:49.660 | In the course of the 19th century, or early 20th century,

01:49:55.820 | as the religious establishment gradually lost

01:49:58.940 | its greater presence in the society

01:50:02.820 | and its prominent places in society,

01:50:05.380 | they had some kind of an inflation in titles.

01:50:08.460 | So they gave themselves more grand titles.

01:50:12.060 | - Yeah, more adjectives.

01:50:13.460 | - More adjectives, more grand titles, such as Ayatollah,

01:50:17.340 | that became a kind of a highest rank

01:50:21.320 | of the religious hierarchy.

01:50:23.580 | - But it's not--

01:50:24.420 | - Which incidentally was in an unofficial hierarchy.

01:50:27.580 | It was not like the Catholic church that you have,

01:50:32.780 | you know, bishops and, you know, further off.

01:50:35.740 | It was very unofficial model.

01:50:38.100 | And he was an Ayatollah, was eventually recognized

01:50:42.220 | as an Ayatollah.

01:50:43.340 | - He wasn't the first Ayatollah?

01:50:45.740 | - No, no, no, not at all.

01:50:47.020 | The Ayatollahs were before him ever since the beginning

01:50:49.900 | of the century.

01:50:51.220 | But he was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah.

01:50:56.140 | And if I want to start it this way,

01:50:59.580 | Ayatollah Khomeini was born in 1900.

01:51:02.060 | And in a sense, all this tremendous change

01:51:08.180 | that Iran witnessed in the course of the 20th century,

01:51:13.440 | was in a sense materializing this person.

01:51:18.860 | He become a mullah of a lower rank,

01:51:23.620 | went to the traditional madrasas,

01:51:26.300 | to the traditional centers for the education

01:51:31.220 | of the seminarians, never had a secular education,

01:51:35.920 | had a very complex Islamic education

01:51:40.900 | on this one hand jurisprudence, on the other hand,

01:51:43.760 | probably a little bit of Islamic philosophy and mysticism,

01:51:47.260 | which is unusual for the jurists,

01:51:50.980 | for the faqih, as they call them.

01:51:55.640 | These religious scholars or legal scholars of Islam.

01:52:00.640 | And then he, in the 1960s,

01:52:05.300 | when he was residing in Tehran,

01:52:10.060 | and gradually becoming more important,

01:52:13.620 | he became a voice of opposition against the Shah.

01:52:18.140 | And the reason for opposition in the early 1960s

01:52:24.820 | was the fact that the Shah carried through a series

01:52:29.160 | of extensive modernization policies,

01:52:34.160 | of which the most important was the land reform.

01:52:37.680 | So in effect, the land distribution that took place

01:52:43.200 | in the early '60s, removed or weakened greatly

01:52:47.940 | that class of landowners from the 19th century.

01:52:53.680 | And he, Khomeini, saw himself as a voice

01:52:58.680 | of that old class that felt that,

01:53:04.240 | actually declared that this land redistribution

01:53:08.620 | is un-Islamic according to the Islamic law.

01:53:12.940 | Property is honored, and you cannot just,

01:53:20.420 | no matter how much and how large are these estates

01:53:25.420 | that the landowning class has,

01:53:27.520 | the government has no right to redistribute it,

01:53:29.960 | even among the peasants, among the people

01:53:34.760 | who are tilling the land.

01:53:37.080 | So that was a major issue.

01:53:38.760 | Shah also gave the right of vote to women.

01:53:48.980 | And that also he objected,

01:53:51.840 | he said women should not have a right.

01:53:54.480 | - Can we just linger on the Islamic law?

01:53:58.040 | How firm and clear is the Islamic law

01:54:01.980 | that he was representing and embodying?

01:54:04.880 | Is this-- - Codified?

01:54:07.480 | - Codified, yes, that's a good term.

01:54:10.040 | - That's another issue.

01:54:11.800 | Not only the hierarchy was unofficial and informal,

01:54:16.840 | but also Islamic law, particularly Shia law,

01:54:21.840 | did not have any codified system,

01:54:26.540 | because these religious authorities always resisted

01:54:33.740 | becoming under a umbrella of a more codified system

01:54:39.780 | of Islamic law, because they were outside the state

01:54:44.780 | in a sense, civil law was in the hand

01:54:48.100 | of the religious establishment,

01:54:49.500 | they had their own courts independent of the state.

01:54:52.900 | But other matters, legal matters,

01:54:55.360 | was in the hand of the government.

01:54:56.720 | There was a kind of de facto division

01:54:59.840 | between these two institutions,

01:55:01.740 | state versus the religious establishment.

01:55:04.720 | Therefore it was not codified.

01:55:06.920 | So he could declare that this is unofficial,

01:55:10.260 | or sorry, illegal, according to the Islamic law,

01:55:13.700 | that you would distribute land to the peasants.

01:55:17.180 | And another mujtahid, or another religious authority,

01:55:20.580 | would say no, no, it is perfectly fine,

01:55:22.620 | because he would have a different reading of the law.

01:55:26.220 | So that being in mind, that adds to the complexity

01:55:29.540 | of the picture, he, in 1963, there was a period

01:55:34.540 | of uprising of the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini.

01:55:37.820 | That was a turning point in a sense,

01:55:41.420 | to try to politicize the religious supporters

01:55:46.420 | of Ayatollah, who were loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini.

01:55:50.900 | And in a sense, all the community

01:55:53.500 | of more religiously orientated,

01:55:56.060 | against the secular policies of the Shah,

01:55:59.860 | and against, of course, the dictatorship of the Shah.

01:56:03.900 | - So that's where the religious movement

01:56:05.420 | became a political party.

01:56:06.260 | - Became, in 1963 is the first moment,

01:56:09.100 | it's a huge uprising.

01:56:10.780 | And the government suppressed it.

01:56:12.700 | - But then, suppression would start to build.

01:56:17.940 | - Of course.

01:56:19.180 | And he was sent to exile.

01:56:21.660 | He went to Najaf, which is this great center in southern.

01:56:24.900 | - So became a martyr on top of this.

01:56:26.820 | - At the martyr, he was probably even forgotten

01:56:30.500 | to some extent.

01:56:32.100 | But not, he was forgotten for the secular middle class.

01:56:39.220 | But not to those supporters of his,

01:56:42.740 | who were paying him their dues,

01:56:45.220 | because in Islam, you would pay dues to religious leaders.

01:56:50.220 | You know, there's religious dues and alms

01:56:53.060 | that you would pay to the clerical authorities,

01:56:56.540 | and they redistribute them among their own students,

01:56:59.680 | and so forth.

01:57:00.540 | So they built, actually, a network of loyalty

01:57:03.020 | based on these donations.

01:57:06.100 | And these donations that received by Ayatollah Khomeini

01:57:10.020 | was very effectively through his network,

01:57:13.460 | was distributed, even if he was in exile outside Iran.

01:57:17.720 | So, the 1977, 1978, when the situation changed,

01:57:23.660 | and there was a little bit of opening

01:57:28.540 | in the political climate,

01:57:32.140 | then you saw that Ayatollah Khomeini

01:57:34.660 | started sending cassette messages.

01:57:39.360 | That was his mean of communication.

01:57:41.700 | Was sending cassettes, and cassettes were sent

01:57:43.780 | through the country by his network.

01:57:48.180 | So, or declarations, and saying first

01:57:52.100 | that we would like to see a greater democratization,

01:57:57.040 | and the Shah has to abide by the constitution

01:58:02.020 | of 1907, this is a constitution,

01:58:05.740 | this is a democratic system, and so forth.

01:58:07.660 | - Was he charismatic?

01:58:09.020 | - Well, it depends who would call,

01:58:11.040 | what you call charismatic.

01:58:12.380 | He had a long beard, he was kind of a man

01:58:16.540 | in turban and the gown, which was a very unusual

01:58:21.540 | leadership for people who were much more accustomed

01:58:26.620 | to the civilian clothing, or to the equipments

01:58:29.900 | of the Shah's military uniforms that he used to wear.

01:58:33.460 | - But I also mean like, he is a man

01:58:35.580 | that was able to take power, to become popular,

01:58:38.080 | sufficiently popular. - Yes.

01:58:39.460 | - So, I would like, is it the ideas, is it an accident,

01:58:44.420 | or is it the man himself, the charisma,

01:58:47.060 | or something about the man that led

01:58:49.020 | to this particular person basically changing

01:58:54.020 | the tide of history in this part of the world,

01:58:56.740 | in a way that was unexpected?

01:58:58.820 | - All the above that you mentioned--

01:59:01.500 | - Or was it just the beard?

01:59:02.860 | - No, I think no, it's beyond the appearance.

01:59:06.700 | The appearance greatly helps, as you know.

01:59:09.060 | - Yeah. - You know?

01:59:10.060 | - In the 20th century, appearance is helpful.

01:59:12.660 | Yeah, pictures for propaganda, for messaging.

01:59:15.300 | - Yeah, that's an important factor.

01:59:17.260 | And he was kind of adamant and very severe

01:59:28.460 | in his own positions.

01:59:30.020 | He could appear very uncompromising,

01:59:34.380 | and he had a sense of confidence, self-confidence,

01:59:40.740 | that virtually everybody else lacked.

01:59:43.380 | And he was a man of opportunity.

01:59:49.580 | As soon as he would see that a chance,

01:59:54.220 | an opportunity would open up, he would jump on it.

01:59:58.740 | And that's what he did, basically.

02:00:02.100 | As more the political space opened,

02:00:05.780 | the weaknesses of the Shah's government became more evident.

02:00:09.820 | His indecision became more evident.

02:00:13.380 | His lack of confidence became more evident.

02:00:17.540 | Khomeini managed to move further

02:00:19.900 | into the center of the movement

02:00:22.540 | because he was the only authority

02:00:27.020 | that had this network of support through the mosques,

02:00:31.740 | through the people who paid homage to him,

02:00:36.700 | who followed him, because there's a sense of following

02:00:40.220 | of the religious leader in Shi'ism.

02:00:43.300 | You are a follower of this authority,

02:00:45.100 | you're a follower of that authority.

02:00:47.620 | And he's basically created an environment

02:00:52.620 | in which people looked upon him

02:00:56.980 | as a kind of a messianic figure

02:00:59.260 | that came to save Iran from what they considered

02:01:05.260 | at the time the problems of dictatorship under the Shah.

02:01:10.260 | - So there's not a suspicion about Islamic law

02:01:15.100 | being the primary law of the land?

02:01:16.540 | - Not at all.

02:01:17.540 | People had very little sense

02:01:19.980 | that what Islamic law is all about,

02:01:22.500 | because the secular education has left that

02:01:26.020 | into the old religious schools.

02:01:28.980 | This is not something that ordinary educated Iranian

02:01:32.700 | who goes to the universities is going to learn.

02:01:36.140 | Therefore, there is a sense of idealization

02:01:38.460 | that there is something great there.

02:01:40.260 | And there were quite a number of intellectuals

02:01:45.060 | who also viewed this kind of an idea

02:01:49.020 | of they would refer to as West's toxication,

02:01:52.540 | that is this civilization of the West

02:01:55.980 | that has brought with it all the modernity

02:02:00.780 | that we see around ourselves,

02:02:03.020 | has enormous sinister features into it.

02:02:07.940 | And it has taken away from us our authenticity.

02:02:12.900 | That was the thing, that there is something authentic

02:02:15.980 | that should be protected.

02:02:17.980 | And therefore, a man in that kind of a garb and appearance

02:02:22.980 | seemed as a source for return to this originality

02:02:28.540 | of their own culture, authenticity of their own culture.

02:02:33.580 | And he perfectly took advantage of that, that is Khomeini,

02:02:41.100 | took advantage of it and the secularity

02:02:44.460 | at the expense of everybody else,

02:02:47.100 | which he managed in the course of 1979 to 1989,

02:02:52.060 | which he passed away, he died in the 10 years

02:02:55.380 | during this period, managed to basically transform

02:02:59.180 | the Iranian society to create institutions

02:03:06.100 | of the Islamic Republic

02:03:09.520 | and to acquire himself the position

02:03:12.420 | of the guardian jurist.

02:03:15.800 | That was something completely new,

02:03:17.640 | it didn't ever exist before.

02:03:20.700 | As a matter of fact, as you might know,

02:03:23.880 | the model of government that a religious establishment

02:03:28.440 | takes over the states is unprecedented

02:03:33.080 | throughout the course of Iranian history,

02:03:35.560 | throughout the course of the Islamic history, I would say.

02:03:38.760 | This is the first example, and probably the only example

02:03:43.760 | of a regime that the religious establishment

02:03:49.080 | that has always, in the course of Iranian history,

02:03:52.780 | ever since I would say probably at this 16th century,

02:03:55.900 | if not earlier, has been always separate from the state

02:04:00.900 | and always kind of collaborating with the state

02:04:07.400 | with certain tensions in between the two of them.

02:04:10.040 | They were two, basically as they would call themselves,

02:04:13.280 | the two pillars of stability in the society.

02:04:16.680 | That situation changed.

02:04:19.360 | For the first time, the religious establishment

02:04:21.760 | took over the power of the state,

02:04:25.280 | and that's at the core of what we see today

02:04:28.840 | as a major issue for Iranian society,

02:04:33.180 | because these are basically that old balance

02:04:37.080 | between the religion and the state,

02:04:40.160 | which was kind of a de facto separation

02:04:44.080 | of the authorities of the two, has been violated.

02:04:48.800 | And now you have in power a theocracy in effect,

02:04:53.800 | which of course only in its appearance is theocracy.

02:04:59.280 | Deep down, it's a, in my opinion,

02:05:02.600 | it's a brutal fascist regime that stays in power,

02:05:06.000 | but it has the appearance of religion into it.

02:05:10.480 | So this is really the story of the revolution.

02:05:13.120 | And as a result of that,

02:05:16.100 | the Iranian middle class has greatly suffered.

02:05:18.760 | It's not without a reason

02:05:19.980 | that you see four million Iranians abroad,

02:05:23.040 | because basically the emergence of this new power

02:05:26.960 | gradually isolated or marginalized

02:05:33.360 | the secular middle class,

02:05:35.200 | who could not survive under that regime,

02:05:38.360 | and gradually moved out in the course of perhaps 30, 40 years

02:05:43.360 | Up to now, Iran has the largest,

02:05:48.400 | I think I'm right to say so,

02:05:51.080 | has the largest brain drain in any country in the world,

02:05:55.040 | - So-- - in relation to its population.

02:05:57.280 | - So fascinating that,

02:05:59.720 | how much of a weird quirk of history is it

02:06:02.800 | that religion would take hold in a country?

02:06:07.800 | Like, does it have to do with the individual?

02:06:12.600 | It seems like if we re-ran the 20th century a thousand times

02:06:17.600 | we would get the '79 revolution resulting in Islamic law

02:06:25.840 | like less than 1% of the time, it feels like, or no.

02:06:32.480 | Which percentage would you put on that?

02:06:33.560 | - Well, I think it has something to do

02:06:37.840 | with the very complex nature of how Iran evolved

02:06:42.840 | over a long period of time, since the 16th century.

02:06:47.680 | That's why, if I would for a moment

02:06:51.520 | talk about what I have written,

02:06:53.460 | I've written a book that's called "Iran, a Modern History,"

02:06:57.840 | and it does not start in the 20th century.

02:07:00.600 | It starts in the 16th century.

02:07:02.200 | - Yeah.

02:07:03.040 | - Because that's what I've argued,

02:07:05.000 | that this complex process that at the end of today

02:07:09.000 | resulted in what we see around us today

02:07:12.360 | is something that was in making for a very long time.

02:07:15.640 | - And religion was a big part of it.

02:07:17.360 | - Yes.

02:07:18.200 | - She and the Messiah complex.

02:07:21.360 | - Yes, exactly.

02:07:22.720 | - The longing for this great vision of a great nation

02:07:27.000 | that somehow is a sublime nation

02:07:32.000 | that can only be fully sublime through religion.

02:07:37.000 | - Or at the time, it was thought that it's through religion.

02:07:41.520 | Ever since then, it's disillusionment with that image,

02:07:46.520 | or at least a process of disillusionment.

02:07:49.300 | The outcome of it is what we see today.

02:07:52.040 | Basically, that process of 40 years

02:07:55.000 | is a process of readjusting to the realities of the world.

02:07:59.720 | That great moment of romantic success of a revolution,

02:08:04.720 | like most revolutions, of course,

02:08:08.480 | that is going to change Iran

02:08:10.480 | and bring this kind of a moment of greatness

02:08:13.760 | led into this great disappointment.

02:08:15.880 | So it's a movement of the great disappointment in a sense.

02:08:19.440 | Like most Messianic movements, by the way,

02:08:21.720 | Messianic movements in general

02:08:23.200 | are always leading into great disappointment.

02:08:26.480 | But what I have here that perhaps should be added to it,

02:08:31.480 | that yes, it was a peculiarity of Iran as a society

02:08:37.080 | that had to experience this eventual encounter

02:08:44.080 | between religion and state.

02:08:48.280 | That's something to do with the nature of Shi'ism.

02:08:51.120 | That's just one point that should be pointed out.

02:08:54.240 | Most of Sunni Islam don't have that kind of,

02:08:57.440 | I say most because there is something there,

02:09:00.080 | but Sunni Islam in general does not have

02:09:03.140 | that kind of an aspiration

02:09:05.440 | for the coming of a Messianic leader.

02:09:10.440 | Shi'ism does.

02:09:13.920 | Shi'ism in its very shaping,

02:09:18.080 | particularly the way that it was set up in Iran,

02:09:22.640 | was a religion that has always this element

02:09:26.040 | of expectation to it for the coming of this Messianic leader.

02:09:31.040 | Of course, I mean, between parentheses,

02:09:36.200 | all societies look for Messianic leaders.

02:09:40.040 | I mean, just look around us.

02:09:42.560 | - But some societies more than others.

02:09:45.160 | There's certain culture, it might have to do

02:09:47.000 | with the romantic poetry that we mentioned earlier.

02:09:50.400 | (laughing)

02:09:51.520 | I mean, surely, I mean, not to draw too many parallels,

02:09:55.520 | but with the Soviet Union, there was romanticism too.

02:09:59.080 | I mean, I don't know.

02:10:00.560 | It does maybe idealism.

02:10:03.580 | - A sense of a savior who would bring you

02:10:09.520 | out of the misery that you are in.

02:10:12.560 | And always looking for a third party

02:10:20.520 | to solve your issues.

02:10:23.320 | That's why probably this movement

02:10:26.560 | has a particular significance,

02:10:29.440 | because it probably doesn't look for a Messiah.

02:10:33.080 | Although, I was talking to my brother,

02:10:34.920 | who is a historian also, and he was saying,

02:10:37.280 | perhaps the Messiah of this movement is that Mahsa Amini,

02:10:41.220 | the 22-year-old girl that was killed.

02:10:45.880 | It's a martyred Messiah who is now leading a movement

02:10:50.880 | which no longer has that charismatic leadership with it.

02:10:55.880 | But yes, I would say that Iran has been the birthplace,

02:11:02.400 | if I might say that, of Messianic aspirations,

02:11:08.360 | going back to ancient Zoroastrianism,

02:11:12.520 | which is really the whole system that you see

02:11:16.560 | in major religions, or at least so-called Western religions,

02:11:21.040 | so Abrahamic religions, is parallel,

02:11:26.040 | or perhaps influenced, by Zoroastrianism,

02:11:29.800 | in which there is an idea of this world

02:11:33.160 | and the other world, there is a hereafter.

02:11:35.400 | There is an idea of a judgment at the end of the time.

02:11:40.360 | And there is a concept that there is a moment of justice

02:11:44.160 | that is going to come with the rise of a religious

02:11:48.940 | or a charismatic figure.

02:11:51.320 | So it's a very old phenomenon in Iran, very old.

02:11:54.960 | And it's time and again repeated itself

02:11:57.720 | in the course of its history, but never as powerfully

02:12:01.760 | as it happened in 1979, and never in the form

02:12:06.120 | of authority from within the religious establishment.

02:12:10.600 | It was always the dissent movements

02:12:13.720 | that were kind of antinomian.

02:12:17.440 | They were against the authority

02:12:19.120 | of the religious establishment.

02:12:22.000 | That changed in the 20th century.

02:12:24.800 | - But the revolution in 1979,

02:12:26.880 | that change is still with us today.

02:12:29.040 | Can we just linger on, are there some practical,

02:12:35.560 | games of power that occurred, you know,

02:12:40.560 | in the way that Stalin took power

02:12:43.120 | and held power in the early days?

02:12:45.900 | Is there something like this in terms

02:12:48.240 | of the establishment of the Revolutionary Guard

02:12:50.680 | and all those kinds of stuff?

02:12:51.680 | - Yes, yes.

02:12:52.520 | - So the messianic figure has some support

02:12:55.960 | from the people, but does he have

02:12:58.240 | to crush his enemies in competition?

02:13:00.280 | - It certainly did.

02:13:03.880 | Probably not, certainly not as brutal

02:13:07.680 | in terms of the victims as you would see

02:13:11.120 | in Soviet Union under Stalin, who the bloodshed

02:13:16.120 | or the destruction of the population was far greater

02:13:21.520 | than what you would find in Iran

02:13:25.440 | of the Islamic Republic, it's uncomparable.

02:13:28.000 | Perhaps I would find a greater parallel

02:13:31.600 | with Mao Zedong, and particularly

02:13:36.140 | because China has a very strong messianic tradition

02:13:39.720 | since the ancient times, so they have something,

02:13:43.200 | and Mao appeared as a kind of a messianic figure.

02:13:46.480 | There I can see there is a parallel,

02:13:51.480 | but also you can see with any other authoritarian regime

02:13:55.640 | with a messianic figure at the head of it,

02:13:58.800 | that it destroys all the other forces.

02:14:01.720 | So during the course of the first 10 years

02:14:04.080 | of the Islamic Revolution, it destroyed

02:14:07.600 | the liberal nationalist secular,

02:14:11.720 | it destroyed the guerrilla movements,

02:14:16.600 | some of them Islamic, some of them Marxist,

02:14:19.760 | who turned into political parties or tendencies

02:14:23.760 | in the course of the post-revolution 1979.

02:14:26.840 | They were completely destroyed,

02:14:29.320 | and in a very brutal fashion.

02:14:31.120 | And their opposition, even within

02:14:35.980 | the religious establishment, because it wasn't a uniform,

02:14:39.840 | there were many different tendencies,

02:14:42.920 | those that were opposed to the authority

02:14:45.840 | of Ayatollah Khomeini, or now Imam Khomeini,

02:14:49.260 | meaning almost a sacred religious figure

02:14:53.460 | above the level of a religious authority.

02:14:58.260 | He's a saint kind of a figure.

02:15:01.200 | Since Shi'ism has this idea of Imams,

02:15:03.900 | there were 11 of them, the 12th is hidden,

02:15:08.060 | and would come back at the end of the time,

02:15:10.340 | this is a messianic figure.

02:15:11.780 | So the title that was always used for them only in Shi'ism,

02:15:17.740 | never used for any other person.

02:15:21.420 | He is the first person in the revolution of 1979,

02:15:25.740 | first referred to as Deputy of Imam,

02:15:30.740 | but the term Deputy gradually disappeared

02:15:33.380 | and he became Imam Khomeini.

02:15:35.740 | That's his official title.

02:15:37.220 | - I love human beings so much.

02:15:40.000 | It's so beautiful, these titles that we give each other.

02:15:44.100 | It's marvelous to observe.

02:15:46.660 | - You love it because you haven't been under that system.

02:15:49.380 | - No, I love it in a very dark--

02:15:54.020 | - Dark fashion, yes.

02:15:55.500 | - Kind of way.

02:15:57.180 | It caricatures itself.

02:15:58.820 | It's almost funny in its absurdity,

02:16:03.140 | if not for the evil that it has led to in human history.

02:16:07.240 | - But also the fact that it's a man,

02:16:10.460 | it's in fact fulfillment in a kind of completely

02:16:14.780 | unintended fashion.

02:16:18.380 | It's a fulfillment of that idea of a Messiah

02:16:21.540 | that they've been fighting for.

02:16:23.060 | This Imam which is in a hidden for a thousand years

02:16:26.780 | is here and not here.

02:16:29.240 | And therefore Khomeini would have in a sense

02:16:33.620 | fulfilled those anticipations.

02:16:36.300 | But beyond that, I just give you one example.

02:16:38.620 | I know that you may have other concerns.

02:16:41.100 | But when I say elimination,

02:16:44.700 | at the end of the Iran-Iraq War

02:16:47.300 | by the direct order of Ayatollah Khomeini,

02:16:50.540 | a fatwa that he wrote,

02:16:52.620 | a group of prisoners

02:16:54.900 | who belonged to a variety of

02:17:00.300 | political parties, the left, religious left,

02:17:05.560 | majority of them, the left,

02:17:09.820 | the Marxist left and the religious left.

02:17:11.940 | In a matter of a few weeks, or perhaps a few months,

02:17:16.180 | I'm not actually quite sure about the time span,

02:17:19.200 | in a series of, these were people who have already

02:17:23.220 | been tried and they were given sentences.

02:17:28.220 | They were brought back before the

02:17:31.660 | summary trials of three judges,

02:17:36.020 | or more, three, four of them.

02:17:38.560 | One of them is now the

02:17:43.460 | new president of the Islamic Republic, Raisi.

02:17:46.380 | And they were given quick summary sentences

02:17:52.020 | which meant execution.

02:17:54.940 | So something between probably six to 8,000

02:17:59.260 | were executed in a matter of a month or two months,

02:18:02.860 | something like that.

02:18:04.780 | Mostly in Tehran, but also in provinces.

02:18:07.400 | And that remained an extraordinary trauma

02:18:13.360 | for the families, for those who had these kids.

02:18:16.940 | They're all young, all young.

02:18:18.940 | So this remains very much

02:18:22.980 | kind of original sin of the Islamic Republic

02:18:28.900 | that cannot get rid of.

02:18:31.020 | And it's in people's memories,

02:18:33.160 | they didn't allow them, even the families,

02:18:37.260 | to go and mourn their dead

02:18:40.780 | in an official symmetry which they created for them.

02:18:44.740 | Now the latest thing is that they put a huge

02:18:49.080 | concrete wall around it so nobody

02:18:51.240 | would be able to get into it.

02:18:53.180 | So these all part of this extraordinary level of,

02:18:58.180 | level of atrocity, brutality,

02:19:03.920 | that you see that the regime who claimed

02:19:06.640 | that it comes with the morality of religion and Islam

02:19:11.040 | to bring back the justice and be more,

02:19:16.040 | in a sense, kind to people,

02:19:21.600 | ended up with what it is in the memory

02:19:24.760 | of many of the people in Iran.

02:19:26.680 | - So developing these fascistic tendencies.

02:19:29.040 | - Very much so.

02:19:29.940 | Destroying minorities, Baha'is, one of them.

02:19:34.160 | Hundreds of Baha'is were, without any reason,

02:19:36.920 | without any involvement, were picked up and executed.

02:19:40.560 | Their properties were taken over.

02:19:45.280 | Their rights were taken away from them,

02:19:47.960 | even up to this day.

02:19:49.640 | It's the largest, by the way, religious minority in Iran.

02:19:53.360 | So you would see that in many areas,

02:19:57.840 | this is a, acts very much as a, beyond authoritarian.

02:20:02.240 | It's a kind of really a fascistic regime.

02:20:04.400 | - So Khamenei held power for 10 years,

02:20:10.540 | and then took power, the next supreme leader,

02:20:16.880 | who is still the leader today, for over 30 years.

02:20:20.600 | Who is he?

02:20:22.120 | - Well, he was one of the, this is Ali Khamenei.

02:20:26.600 | - Ayatollah.

02:20:27.520 | - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

02:20:29.000 | - Imam one day, perhaps?

02:20:30.160 | - No, well, they hesitated to use the term Imam for him,

02:20:35.160 | but in any other respect, he was given all of that adulation

02:20:41.040 | that they did to Khamenei.

02:20:42.520 | He is the guardian jurist.

02:20:44.500 | That's what's important.

02:20:46.380 | Because the guardian jurist in the Constitution

02:20:48.760 | of the Islamic Republic is an authority

02:20:51.360 | that is above the state.

02:20:54.080 | He is not elected, quote unquote,

02:20:58.280 | because this is a divine authority,

02:21:02.520 | although he has been designated by the group

02:21:05.160 | of determined mullahs like himself.

02:21:08.680 | And he has the full power over all institutions

02:21:13.680 | of the state, the army, the media, the economy,

02:21:27.160 | every aspect of it.

02:21:28.000 | He acts like a shah.

02:21:29.720 | He acts like this authoritarian authority.

02:21:33.320 | - Did that gradually develop, or was that very early on?

02:21:36.400 | - Well, that's part of the Constitution

02:21:38.640 | of the Islamic Republic.

02:21:40.700 | The first Constitution, the first draft of the Constitution

02:21:45.700 | did not have the authority of the guardian jurist.

02:21:50.860 | But then it was added by Khamenei and his supporters.

02:21:55.880 | - Is there actually in the Constitution

02:21:57.760 | any limits to his power?

02:21:59.400 | - Yes, there is a council of the experts, so to say,

02:22:06.360 | that would remove him from power, I think theoretically.

02:22:11.720 | But there is so much restrictions to that

02:22:17.720 | that I don't think it would have ever happened

02:22:20.000 | in reality, in his case, at least.

02:22:21.840 | - But in terms of executive to make decisions

02:22:24.760 | and all that kind of stuff,

02:22:25.880 | does he need to check with anybody?

02:22:27.880 | - No.

02:22:28.720 | He does check with his own advisors,

02:22:34.520 | but he doesn't have any constitutional obligation

02:22:39.520 | to check on the decisions that he's making.

02:22:45.460 | - So that's the supreme leader,

02:22:47.680 | but there's been presidents.

02:22:50.360 | - Yes.

02:22:51.200 | - And what's the role of the president?

02:22:52.920 | - The president, in a sense, is the executive power

02:22:56.520 | under the Islamic Republic.

02:23:01.260 | There are three heads of powers.

02:23:05.360 | There is the president that presumably

02:23:09.600 | has the executive power.

02:23:11.440 | There is the head of the judiciary,

02:23:16.160 | and there is the head of the,

02:23:20.280 | the speaker of the parliament, majlis,

02:23:23.760 | Islamic majlis, which is the legislative.

02:23:28.760 | So there's the legislative, judiciary, and executive.

02:23:34.200 | Raisi, who is not a president,

02:23:38.380 | is the head of the executive.

02:23:41.560 | Above them is the supreme leader,

02:23:45.160 | or the guardian jurist.

02:23:47.320 | - Can you give me some insight,

02:23:49.080 | because I especially, I'm not exactly sure why,

02:23:54.080 | but the president, Ahmadinejad,

02:23:58.160 | is somebody I'm, as an American, really familiar with.

02:24:03.660 | Why is that exactly?

02:24:05.060 | But why was the president the public-facing person

02:24:10.060 | to the world versus the supreme leader?

02:24:14.000 | Is that just an accident of a particular humans involved,

02:24:17.600 | or is this by design?

02:24:19.120 | - No, because the supreme leader tries to keep himself

02:24:22.040 | out of issues of everyday politics, supposedly.

02:24:27.040 | But therefore, he is not coming to the United Nations

02:24:31.320 | to give a speech during the session.

02:24:35.760 | But Mr. Ahmadinejad, who at the time was the president,

02:24:40.320 | would come and make outrageous statements.

02:24:46.200 | That's why you probably know something about him.

02:24:48.560 | - So all of them make public statements,

02:24:50.500 | but he had a proclivity for outrageous statements.

02:24:53.560 | (laughing)

02:24:55.240 | - He does all kinds of things.

02:24:57.640 | He makes all kinds of statements.

02:25:00.100 | But he is somewhat above the everyday politics, in theory.

02:25:05.100 | But of course, he's pulling all the strings,

02:25:09.080 | without doubt, in every respect.

02:25:12.320 | And it seems that you were asking,

02:25:15.000 | I thought you were going to ask me this question,

02:25:17.840 | almost without an exception,

02:25:21.640 | since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979,

02:25:27.520 | up to the last of the presidents of the Islamic Republic,

02:25:31.120 | Rouhani, before the guy that is last year,

02:25:35.280 | or a year and a half ago, was in a phony election,

02:25:39.860 | got into the position of the president.

02:25:45.060 | All of them, and it's a long list,

02:25:48.140 | all of them eventually fell out with the regime.

02:25:53.040 | So there is no president,

02:25:57.300 | except perhaps to some extent Rouhani,

02:25:59.380 | but we'll wait and see what's going to happen to him.

02:26:02.620 | But prior to him, all of them, including Ahmadinejad,

02:26:06.420 | fell out with the regime, with the current regime in Iran.

02:26:09.380 | - Who's Rouhani?

02:26:10.460 | He was officially president for eight years.

02:26:12.660 | - Yeah, prior to Raisi.

02:26:15.060 | - Ibrahim Raisi, the 221,

02:26:17.900 | what you're saying is a phony election.

02:26:19.820 | - Yes, it's a phony election.

02:26:20.980 | - What happened?

02:26:21.820 | What's interesting, what happened?

02:26:23.820 | - Because the process of actually candidacy

02:26:28.740 | for presidency is completely controlled

02:26:33.220 | by a council that is under the control

02:26:36.620 | of the supreme leader.

02:26:40.200 | So they have to approve who is going to be the candidate.

02:26:45.200 | So not everybody can enter and say,

02:26:49.840 | "I would like to be a candidate."

02:26:52.040 | - So did Rouhani fall out of favor?

02:26:54.400 | You're saying there's some--

02:26:55.480 | - Well, he is kind of out of favor now,

02:26:59.320 | because he was more moderate than this most recent regime.

02:27:04.040 | But the point is that if you look,

02:27:07.740 | this is something almost institutional,

02:27:12.560 | constitutional to the regime.

02:27:14.840 | This is a regime that rejects all of the executive powers,

02:27:18.840 | because the division between the supreme authority,

02:27:24.640 | as the place of a supreme authority,

02:27:27.480 | versus the presidency, is problematic.

02:27:33.880 | It is as if there would be a supreme leader

02:27:38.880 | in the United States above all the three sources of power.

02:27:43.060 | That's the kind of view that you can see in today's Iran.

02:27:48.100 | And of course, he's at the focus of all the criticism

02:27:52.180 | that he receives from the demonstrators in today's Iran.

02:27:59.240 | - So on top of all this, recently,

02:28:03.700 | and throughout the last several years,

02:28:05.660 | US and Iran are in the midst of nuclear deal negotiations.

02:28:10.660 | This is another part of the story of Iran,

02:28:14.060 | is the development of nuclear weapons, the nuclear program.

02:28:19.900 | They're looking to restore the nuclear deal

02:28:22.700 | known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA.

02:28:27.080 | What is the history, the present, and the future

02:28:31.340 | of these negotiations over nuclear weapons?

02:28:34.700 | What is interesting to you in this full context

02:28:37.340 | from the 16th century of the messianic journey?

02:28:41.340 | What's interesting to you here?

02:28:46.020 | - You can argue that for a long time, even under the Shah,

02:28:51.020 | but much more expressively and decisively,

02:28:57.320 | under the Islamic Republic, there was a determination

02:29:01.760 | to have a nuclear power or nuclear weapon, in a sense.

02:29:06.760 | I think the bottom line of all the negotiations,

02:29:13.760 | everything else, is that Iran, of the Islamic Republic,

02:29:18.160 | had the tendency of having its own nuclear weapon.

02:29:23.240 | The reason for that is that Iran was subject

02:29:27.000 | of nearly nine years, eight and a half years,

02:29:30.720 | of Iran-Iraq war, when not only Iran faced an aggressor,

02:29:35.720 | Iraq, that actually attacked Iran at a very critical time,

02:29:43.900 | at the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution,

02:29:46.700 | but the fact that Iran felt kind of a helpless,

02:29:52.760 | in the course of this war, and has to make great sacrifices,

02:29:57.760 | actually, which supported the Islamic regime,

02:30:01.760 | and consolidated the Islamic regime, because of this war.

02:30:06.760 | And most of the time, their support of the United States

02:30:11.820 | was behind Iraq vis-a-vis Iran.

02:30:16.700 | And Iran felt that it's been isolated

02:30:22.160 | and has to protect itself.

02:30:25.160 | So there is some argument for having nuclear capabilities.

02:30:30.160 | But in reality, this has resulted in a completely

02:30:38.040 | mindless, crazy, wasteful attempt on the side

02:30:43.040 | of the Iranian regime to try to develop a nuclear power.

02:30:51.040 | And therefore, the rest of the world,

02:30:53.200 | particularly in this region, were very worried

02:30:57.320 | that if Iran would get access to a nuclear weapon,

02:31:02.320 | then the entire region of the Persian Gulf might,

02:31:07.040 | particularly Saudi Arabia, possibly Turkey, possibly Egypt,

02:31:12.040 | all of them may require, may demand to have

02:31:17.200 | also nuclear weapon, given the fact that Pakistan

02:31:20.720 | and India already have it.

02:31:22.680 | So there was a determined attempt, as you might know,

02:31:27.860 | on the side of the Western communities,

02:31:30.200 | or now gradually world communities, to try to,

02:31:33.960 | as much as possible, to control Iran from getting access

02:31:38.960 | to a nuclear capability, or actually limit Iran's

02:31:43.840 | nuclear capabilities, to what was defined usually

02:31:48.180 | in a euphemism as a peaceful fashion, okay?

02:31:52.240 | That being said, there was also Israel,

02:31:57.020 | which viewed the Islamic Republic as a arch enemy.

02:32:03.600 | And some of it might be due to the Israelis' own

02:32:10.000 | exaggeration of Iran's threat, and some of it is

02:32:16.020 | because Iran has developed a fairly strong military,

02:32:20.440 | as we see today.

02:32:21.960 | And as such, this attempt to try to prevent Iran

02:32:28.360 | from ever getting access to a nuclear weapon,

02:32:33.360 | which resulted, as you might know, in these massive

02:32:38.200 | sanctions that were imposed upon Iran,

02:32:43.600 | ever since the beginning of the revolution in 1979,

02:32:47.800 | and of course more intensively since 2015, 2016,

02:32:52.800 | even prior to that, probably a little bit earlier.

02:32:56.400 | This agreement, the nuclear agreement, was supposed

02:33:02.000 | to control or monitor Iranian nuclear industry,

02:33:08.780 | or nuclear setup, in exchange for removing the sanctions.

02:33:13.780 | But this never worked, as a matter of fact,

02:33:20.500 | in a very successful, satisfactory way for the Iranians,

02:33:25.500 | or for the Americans, particularly under Trump

02:33:30.800 | administration, which I think foolishly decided

02:33:35.300 | to scrap the agreement that was reached

02:33:39.780 | under President Obama.

02:33:41.880 | Like many other policies that was implemented

02:33:45.340 | under Trump administration, this created a major problem.

02:33:50.100 | That is, how to, under Biden, how to try to come up

02:33:55.100 | with a new nuclear agreement with Iran.

02:34:02.340 | In this process, since 2016, where the United States

02:34:07.340 | withdrew from the agreement, Iran felt comfortable

02:34:12.380 | to try to go and do whatever they want,

02:34:16.820 | without any kind of monitor, being monitored

02:34:19.940 | by the international community.

02:34:21.680 | And that's the situation now.

02:34:25.440 | We don't know whether Iran is really sincere

02:34:30.100 | under the present regime to negotiate a deal.

02:34:35.100 | We don't know that every United States is willing to do so.

02:34:40.340 | And it seems that now, what is happening in terms

02:34:46.320 | of the protests in the Iranian streets,

02:34:49.220 | makes it even harder in public eye to try to negotiate

02:34:56.900 | a deal with Iran, because that means in the minds of many,

02:35:01.900 | and with some justification, that if the nuclear agreement

02:35:08.500 | would result in the removal of many of these sanctions,

02:35:16.380 | millions, billions, as the result of the removal

02:35:21.380 | of the sanctions and Iran's ability to sell it,

02:35:26.340 | it's oil in the international market

02:35:28.420 | without any restrictions, means that the Iranian government

02:35:33.420 | is going to become even more powerful,

02:35:38.640 | more financially secure, in order to suppress

02:35:41.980 | its own people.

02:35:43.460 | So that's the agreement that goes against coming to terms

02:35:48.460 | with Iran.

02:35:52.180 | But the problem is that there is no clear alternative,

02:35:57.180 | even I'm not particularly personally favorable

02:36:00.620 | for this agreement to be ratified.

02:36:05.340 | But the alternative is very difficult.

02:36:07.820 | There's no way to try to see what can be done.

02:36:11.200 | - Geopolitics where every alternative is terrible.

02:36:19.140 | Let me ask you about one of the most complex

02:36:23.780 | geopolitical situations in history.

02:36:26.800 | One aspect of it is the Cold War between Iran and Israel.

02:36:33.000 | The bigger picture of it is sometimes referred to

02:36:35.700 | as Israel-Palestine conflict.

02:36:39.280 | What are all the parties, nations involved?

02:36:46.140 | What are the interests that are involved?

02:36:48.620 | What's the rhetoric?

02:36:49.900 | Can you understand, make the case for each side

02:36:55.580 | of this conflict?

02:36:56.740 | - You're opening a new can of worms that takes

02:37:02.260 | another three hours of conversation.

02:37:05.860 | - Just three hours?

02:37:07.660 | - At least.

02:37:09.340 | What I can tell you is this.

02:37:14.220 | Iran prior to 1979 viewed itself under the Shah

02:37:19.220 | as a kind of a, if not supporter of Israel,

02:37:25.380 | was in very good terms with Israel.

02:37:29.380 | They had an embassy in Iran, or unofficial embassy in Iran.

02:37:33.540 | They had certain projects that's helping

02:37:35.980 | with the agriculture and so forth in Iran.

02:37:39.420 | But since 1979, that completely reversed.

02:37:44.420 | Part of it is that the issue of the Palestinian plight

02:37:52.100 | remained very much at the heart of the revolutionary

02:37:57.340 | Iranians who would see that part of the United States

02:38:02.940 | is to support, part of the United States guilt, sin,

02:38:09.580 | is to support Israel vis-a-vis its very suppressive,

02:38:14.580 | very oppressive treatment of the Palestinians,

02:38:22.380 | completely illegal taking over of the territories

02:38:29.620 | which is not theirs since 1967.

02:38:32.760 | And therefore it is upon the Iranian regime,

02:38:37.460 | Iranian Islamic Republic, to support

02:38:40.860 | the cause of the Palestinians.

02:38:43.460 | This came about at a time when the rest of the support

02:38:48.460 | for the Palestinians, including Arab nationalism,

02:38:54.040 | basically reached a stage of bankruptcy.

02:38:58.580 | I mean, much of the regimes of the Arab world

02:39:02.380 | either are now coming to terms with Israel,

02:39:05.540 | or in one way or another, because of their own contingencies,

02:39:09.460 | because of their own concerns and interests,

02:39:14.060 | are willy-nilly accepting Israel in the region.

02:39:19.060 | Now, that old task of rhetorically supporting

02:39:25.980 | the Palestinians falls upon the Islamic Republic

02:39:29.460 | that sees itself as a champion of the Palestinians now.

02:39:34.580 | Without, as a matter of fact, having either the support

02:39:38.140 | of the Iranian people behind him.

02:39:39.940 | If you ask, if tomorrow there would be a poll

02:39:43.620 | or a referendum, I would doubt that 80%

02:39:47.620 | of the Iranian people would approve of the policies

02:39:52.820 | of the Islamic Republic vis-a-vis the issue of Palestine.

02:39:55.960 | Nor the Palestinians themselves,

02:40:00.460 | because the Islamic Republic's only supporting

02:40:04.340 | those factions within the Palestinian movement

02:40:08.500 | which are Islamic, quote-unquote.

02:40:12.540 | And even within that, there is problems

02:40:15.180 | with Hamas, for instance.

02:40:17.740 | But nevertheless, it's for the Islamic Republic

02:40:21.700 | some kind of a propaganda tool to be able to use it

02:40:26.260 | for its own sake, and claim that we are the champions

02:40:31.260 | of the Palestinian people.

02:40:34.220 | Whether they have a solution, if you look at the rhetoric,

02:40:39.220 | if you listen to the rhetoric, it's the destruction

02:40:42.460 | of the state of Israel.

02:40:46.080 | And that, it seems to me, creates a certain anxiety

02:40:51.080 | in the minds of the Israelis, Israeli population,

02:40:57.020 | and Israeli government.

02:40:58.820 | Particularly those who are now in power.

02:41:02.620 | Netanyahu, the Likud, and more kind of a right-wing politics

02:41:07.620 | of, polity of today's Israel.

02:41:12.840 | That being said, I think also the Israelis try

02:41:19.460 | to get an extra mileage out of threat of Iran, quote-unquote,

02:41:27.780 | in order to present themselves rightful

02:41:32.780 | for terms of security and whatever else.

02:41:38.540 | The way that they're treating the Palestinians,

02:41:40.900 | which I think is extremely unjust.

02:41:43.380 | I think it's extremely unwise for Israel

02:41:47.860 | to carry on with these policies as they did

02:41:50.420 | since '67 at least, and not to try

02:41:53.940 | to come to terms with it.

02:41:55.300 | Of course, there are huge amount of,

02:41:57.620 | I'm not denying that at all,

02:41:59.580 | there's a huge amount of failures, mistakes,

02:42:04.580 | and stupidity on the side of the Palestinian leadership

02:42:12.300 | in various stages.

02:42:14.480 | Not to try to make a deal, or try to come to terms

02:42:19.480 | in some fashion, but it's a very complex picture,

02:42:24.260 | and it's rather unfair to the Palestinians

02:42:27.900 | to accuse them for not coming to terms with Israel

02:42:32.340 | under a very uneven circumstances,

02:42:36.080 | when they are not in a position to try to make a fair deal

02:42:41.080 | in terms of the territories, or in terms of their security

02:42:46.140 | in future vis-a-vis Israel.

02:42:48.260 | - So I think there's, as you probably know,

02:42:50.900 | quite a lot of people that would have

02:42:53.460 | a different perspective than you just stated,

02:42:56.100 | in terms of taking the perspective of Israel

02:43:01.100 | and characterizing the situation.

02:43:04.860 | Can you steelman their side?

02:43:07.700 | Can you steelman Israel's side,

02:43:09.740 | that they're trying to be a sovereign nation,

02:43:13.060 | trying to protect themselves against threats,

02:43:16.620 | ultimately wanting to create a place of safety,

02:43:21.740 | a place where people can pursue all the things

02:43:25.940 | that you want to pursue in life,

02:43:27.540 | including foremost, happiness?

02:43:30.860 | - I tend to agree with you,

02:43:32.940 | and I have all the respect for the fact

02:43:35.100 | that Israel would like to create security

02:43:39.300 | and happiness for its own people.

02:43:41.300 | But there are two arguments.

02:43:43.580 | One is a moral argument.

02:43:45.860 | To my mind as a historian,

02:43:50.500 | Jews across, around the world,

02:43:53.700 | for all through their history, suffered.

02:43:56.040 | And this is a history of suffering.

02:43:59.380 | It's a history, memory of suffering.

02:44:01.860 | And I find it enormously difficult to believe

02:44:05.460 | that a nation that's the product of so much sacrifice,

02:44:10.460 | suffering, loss of life,

02:44:18.020 | and variety of Holocaust above all,

02:44:22.020 | would find itself in a position

02:44:25.980 | not to give the proper justice

02:44:28.860 | to a people who could be their neighbors.

02:44:31.280 | And that is a moral argument,

02:44:35.820 | which I cannot believe under any circumstances

02:44:39.340 | can be accepted.

02:44:40.620 | Second, in real terms,

02:44:43.500 | what do you want to, you want to commit a genocide?

02:44:47.820 | Do you have a population there

02:44:49.380 | that you have to come to terms with it?

02:44:52.820 | And you cannot just postpone as they did.

02:44:56.700 | Since '67, they are postponing

02:44:58.700 | and hoping that it goes away somehow.

02:45:01.720 | I don't think it's going to go away.

02:45:05.400 | And it's going to get worse rather than better.

02:45:11.500 | - It's a long, nuanced discussion,

02:45:13.300 | and I look forward to having it.

02:45:15.660 | So we'll just leave it there for the moment.

02:45:20.660 | But it is a stressful place in the world

02:45:27.780 | where the rhetoric is existential,

02:45:33.100 | where Iran makes claims that it wants to wipe

02:45:37.540 | a country off the face of the earth.

02:45:40.180 | It's just the level of intensity of rhetoric

02:45:44.740 | is unlike anywhere else in the world.

02:45:46.820 | - And extremely dangerous.

02:45:48.740 | - And in both directions.

02:45:50.340 | So one, the real danger of the rhetoric

02:45:54.220 | actually being acted upon,

02:45:56.980 | and then the extreme political parties

02:46:01.220 | using the rhetoric to justify even a greater escalation.

02:46:06.220 | So if Iran is saying that this is,

02:46:14.180 | saying that they're wanting to wipe Israel

02:46:16.660 | off the face of the earth, that justifies any response.

02:46:20.900 | - On the other side.

02:46:22.920 | - On the other side.

02:46:23.980 | - Of course, I tend to agree with you fully.

02:46:26.500 | And unfortunately, this is a very critical situation

02:46:29.540 | that this region is facing, Iran in particular.

02:46:34.540 | I would say that, I hope that in the minds

02:46:40.260 | of the people of Israel, there is enough or common sense

02:46:45.260 | to realize that probably escalation on the Israeli side

02:46:54.340 | is not in the favor of anybody.

02:46:56.300 | And try to let the Iranians to go on

02:47:00.300 | with their empty rhetoric as they do so far.

02:47:06.220 | But at the same time, I cannot deny the fact

02:47:11.020 | that there is a danger on the side of this regime

02:47:16.020 | and what it says.

02:47:18.120 | It cannot be denied, nobody can justify that.

02:47:20.740 | Particularly because the Iranian population

02:47:25.020 | is not behind this regime.

02:47:27.960 | Certainly in the case of the Palestinians.

02:47:30.600 | Or for that matter, it's not Palestine.

02:47:33.220 | It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Lebanon

02:47:38.220 | with Hezbollah, it's the Islamic Republic's involvement

02:47:43.140 | in Syria with Bashar Assad, it's involvement

02:47:46.900 | in other parts of the world, perhaps even Yemen.

02:47:49.880 | That all of them creates extraterritorial responsibilities

02:47:55.860 | or interventions, unnecessary interventions

02:48:03.260 | that ultimately is not in favor of best interests

02:48:08.100 | of the Iranian people or Iran as a country.

02:48:11.620 | Iran has never been involved in this kind of politics

02:48:14.900 | before of the Islamic Republic.

02:48:17.680 | So in a sense, the Iranian regime, it seems to me,

02:48:22.140 | by going to the extreme, try to create for itself

02:48:26.020 | a space that it did not exist before.

02:48:32.000 | Did not have or did not deserve to have

02:48:35.080 | within the politics of the region.

02:48:37.400 | So in other words, that has become part of the tool,

02:48:43.520 | a kind of an instrument for, if you like to call it

02:48:47.280 | some kind of an expansionism of the regime.

02:48:51.480 | In parts of the world where it can see

02:48:55.980 | there is a possibility for its presence,

02:49:00.240 | for its expansion.

02:49:01.560 | Of course, historically speaking,

02:49:05.520 | Iran ever since 15th century,

02:49:08.960 | I think that's the earliest example I can see,

02:49:11.260 | in early modern times, has always a tendency

02:49:16.200 | of moving in the direction of not only what is today

02:49:20.400 | the state of Iraq, but further into the eastern coast

02:49:25.120 | of Mediterranean.

02:49:26.580 | So that's a long-term ambition that has been in the cards

02:49:31.580 | as far as Iran as a strategic unit is concerned.

02:49:37.020 | But by no means justified and by no means

02:49:40.880 | could be a reasonable, could be a sane policy

02:49:44.880 | of a nation state as today's Iran.

02:49:49.880 | But the second point is that also

02:49:56.460 | regimes are always victims of their own rhetoric.

02:49:59.540 | So it's, once you keep repeating something,

02:50:05.600 | then you become more and more committed to it.

02:50:10.280 | And it cannot remain anymore in the level of a rhetoric.

02:50:13.800 | You have to do something about it.

02:50:15.920 | So it's a compelling pressure to try to

02:50:22.680 | materialize what you've been saying in your rhetoric.

02:50:26.980 | And that is even extremely more dangerous

02:50:29.780 | as far as Iran is concerned.

02:50:33.700 | And it brings it to some unholy alliances

02:50:38.700 | that today we are witnessing Iran is getting involved.

02:50:43.660 | Even more dangerous than this rhetoric

02:50:47.220 | in terms of the, vis-a-vis Israel,

02:50:52.220 | is its involvement with Russia

02:50:54.840 | and to some extent with China, which we can't talk about.

02:50:58.760 | - What do you think about the meeting

02:51:00.780 | between Khamenei and Vladimir Putin in July?

02:51:03.640 | What's that alliance?

02:51:06.500 | What's that partnership?

02:51:08.520 | Is it surface-level geopolitics

02:51:10.640 | or is there a deep, growing connection?

02:51:12.840 | - I cannot see the difference between geopolitics

02:51:17.180 | and these deep connections.

02:51:18.660 | I see it's one and the same.

02:51:20.980 | Why?

02:51:22.400 | Because I think the experience of 40 years

02:51:27.060 | of distancing from the West

02:51:30.820 | in terms of the Islamic Republic.

02:51:33.380 | And the fact that there is a shelf life

02:51:39.540 | to imperial presence for any empire anywhere in the world.

02:51:46.300 | So after the terrible experience of the United States

02:51:51.300 | in Iraq and in Afghanistan,

02:51:57.180 | pretty much like the British empire,

02:52:02.580 | that after the Suez experience in '56,

02:52:05.980 | decided to withdraw from east of Suez,

02:52:12.900 | maybe there is a moment here that we are witnessing,

02:52:16.420 | or it may come, that a great power

02:52:19.820 | like the United States sees in its benefit

02:52:22.940 | not to get too much involved into nitty-gritty things

02:52:26.500 | in other parts of the world,

02:52:28.340 | that it's not its immediate concern.

02:52:30.740 | And I think that is part of the reason,

02:52:36.540 | not the entire reason,

02:52:38.220 | part of the reason why we see the emergence

02:52:41.020 | of a new geopolitical environment

02:52:46.020 | in this part of the world,

02:52:49.580 | of which China, Russia, possibly Iran,

02:52:54.580 | possibly Turkey, possibly both of them,

02:52:59.020 | are going to be part.

02:53:00.320 | Perhaps Saudis also, but I doubt that the Saudis

02:53:06.580 | under the present circumstances,

02:53:08.740 | although we've witnessed some remarkable issue

02:53:12.540 | in the course of the past few weeks,

02:53:15.420 | where the Saudis giving assurances

02:53:18.100 | to American administration and then shifting

02:53:21.780 | and getting along with Putin,

02:53:24.840 | in terms of the oil production,

02:53:26.780 | I think it's more than that even.

02:53:28.460 | And it's not only them,

02:53:30.140 | but also the Emirates are doing the same thing.

02:53:32.820 | So what does that just tell us?

02:53:34.340 | - And that's another many-hour conversation

02:53:37.020 | about the oil industry in Iran and the whole region.

02:53:42.020 | - In emerging this kind of a world,

02:53:45.780 | which was perhaps even 10 years ago unimaginable,

02:53:50.420 | that you see now a great power, China,

02:53:54.500 | that it's going to remain from what we see around us

02:53:59.460 | as a great power,

02:54:00.760 | and Russia, adventurous,

02:54:06.220 | foolish, but nevertheless would remain criminal,

02:54:10.540 | I would say, as far as its behavior in Ukraine.

02:54:16.980 | But actually, it's a rogue nation

02:54:20.420 | that attracts another rogue nation.

02:54:23.040 | So Iran finds itself now in a greater place of security

02:54:28.040 | in alliance with Russia,

02:54:32.500 | in the hope that this would give Iran a greater security

02:54:37.380 | in this part of the world.

02:54:39.740 | Whether this is realistic or an illusion,

02:54:44.740 | I think remains to be seen.

02:54:48.420 | I think Iran-China relation makes more sense.

02:54:51.800 | Although, if you ask ordinary Iranians,

02:54:56.840 | they don't like it.

02:54:58.880 | They would tell, "Why should we be tied up

02:55:02.700 | "with China as the only trade party with America,

02:55:09.840 | "because of the foolish isolations

02:55:13.780 | "that you have created for us,

02:55:15.620 | "because of all the sanctions that you have created for us,

02:55:18.740 | "the Islamic Republic?"

02:55:20.940 | So in a sense, it's a very difficult question to answer.

02:55:24.940 | Probably Iranians also like to be more on the other camp.

02:55:28.580 | But what happens is that in real term,

02:55:32.540 | what surprises me most is not this alliance with China,

02:55:37.540 | but it's kind of becoming a lackey or subservient

02:55:43.540 | to Putin's regime in Russia.

02:55:49.660 | Since if you look at it,

02:55:52.380 | Iran, ever since at least the 19th century,

02:55:57.860 | not going further back,

02:56:00.020 | the beginning of the 19th century,

02:56:02.300 | always viewed Russia as the greatest threat strategically,

02:56:07.300 | because it was sitting right at the top of Iran.

02:56:10.480 | It was infinitely more powerful than Iran has ever been.

02:56:17.860 | And Iran fought two rounds of war

02:56:23.420 | at the beginning of the century,

02:56:25.620 | lost the entire Caucasus to Russia,

02:56:29.900 | and learned its lesson,

02:56:31.340 | that you have to be mindful of Russia,

02:56:36.840 | and you have to keep it at arm's length.

02:56:41.420 | And that's what was Iran's policy

02:56:43.740 | throughout the course of the 20th century,

02:56:47.340 | 19th and 20th century,

02:56:49.740 | up to what we see now around us,

02:56:53.380 | which is a very strange situation.

02:56:55.520 | Whether the balance has changed

02:57:01.660 | in terms of if Russia is purchasing weapons

02:57:07.500 | from Iran, which was unheard of,

02:57:12.260 | it means that there is a new balance is emerging,

02:57:18.180 | a new relationship is emerging.

02:57:21.740 | Perhaps remains to be seen.

02:57:24.060 | But if you look at the historical precedence,

02:57:29.060 | it would have been enormously unwise

02:57:33.700 | to be an ally of Russia,

02:57:38.140 | given its long history of aggression in Iran.

02:57:41.420 | See, Russians, part of the reason

02:57:45.220 | why it's actually Iran allied itself with British Empire

02:57:51.180 | was the fact that it was so much afraid

02:57:53.100 | of the Russian expansion.

02:57:55.200 | And as such, I don't know what's going to be

02:58:00.180 | the future of this relationship.

02:58:02.460 | - There is a big disconnect

02:58:05.060 | between governments and the people.

02:58:08.340 | And I think ultimately, I have faith

02:58:10.940 | that there's a love across the different cultures,

02:58:14.240 | across the different religions, amongst the people.

02:58:18.460 | And the governments are the source

02:58:19.860 | of the division and the conflict and the wars

02:58:21.900 | and all the geopolitics that is in part grounded

02:58:25.540 | in the battle for resources and all that kind of stuff.

02:58:28.740 | Nevertheless, this is the world we live in.

02:58:31.260 | So you looked at the modern history of Iran

02:58:34.420 | the past few centuries.

02:58:36.380 | If you look into the future of this region,

02:58:39.460 | now you kind of implied that a historian

02:58:42.860 | has a bit of a cynical view

02:58:47.100 | of protests and things like this

02:58:50.100 | that are fueled, at least in the minds

02:58:54.460 | of young people, with hope.

02:58:56.220 | If you were to just for a while

02:58:59.180 | have a bit of hope in your heart and your mind,

02:59:01.740 | what is a hopeful future for the next 10, 20, 30 years

02:59:05.020 | of Iran?

02:59:05.860 | - I'm not cynical.

02:59:07.140 | - Yes.

02:59:07.980 | - I try to be realistic.

02:59:10.180 | And I actually may be critical,

02:59:12.900 | but I have great hopes

02:59:15.980 | in Iran's future for a variety of reasons.

02:59:19.940 | I actually did write an article,

02:59:22.420 | only the last version of it is going to go out today,

02:59:26.080 | in which the title of it is

02:59:29.140 | The Time of Fear and Women of Hope,

02:59:33.340 | which in a sense is this whole coverage

02:59:37.060 | about what this movement means

02:59:41.060 | that we see today.

02:59:42.900 | It may fizzle in a few weeks' time,

02:59:46.660 | or it may just go on and create a new dynamics

02:59:51.320 | in Iranian society that would hopefully result

02:59:55.980 | in a peaceful process of greater accommodation

03:00:01.940 | and a greater tolerance within the Iranian society

03:00:08.020 | and with the outside world.

03:00:10.980 | And I think majority of the Iranian people

03:00:14.180 | don't want tension,

03:00:15.640 | don't want confrontation,

03:00:18.660 | don't want crisis.

03:00:22.320 | They, if 40 years they have suffered

03:00:27.820 | from a regime that have dictated an ideology

03:00:32.420 | that is regressive and impractical,

03:00:38.860 | they want to go back to a life

03:00:41.460 | in which they don't really create trouble

03:00:45.380 | for their neighbors or for the world.

03:00:47.500 | And therefore, I would see a better future for Iran.

03:00:53.360 | That's for one reason.

03:00:56.220 | Strategically or geopolitically,

03:00:59.780 | maybe in Iran's advantage in a peaceful fashion

03:01:05.140 | to negotiate as it's the fate of all the nations

03:01:09.660 | rather than commit itself

03:01:12.220 | or sworn to a particular course of policy.

03:01:17.220 | So there's a give and take as the nature of politics

03:01:23.340 | is art of possible, as it's been said.

03:01:26.740 | So probably Iran is going to be hopefully

03:01:30.140 | moving that direction.

03:01:32.060 | I think there is a generational thing.

03:01:34.520 | That's the third reason.

03:01:35.880 | No matter how much the Islamic Republic

03:01:41.500 | tried to Islamicize the Iranian society

03:01:46.220 | in its own image of kind of radical,

03:01:51.220 | ideological indoctrination, it has failed.

03:01:56.120 | It has failed up to what we see today

03:02:01.540 | in the Iranian streets.

03:02:04.140 | And the Iranian population said no to it.

03:02:06.920 | And I think if there would have been,

03:02:11.200 | and I very much hope there will be,

03:02:13.700 | a possibility for a more open environment,

03:02:17.660 | more open space where they would be able

03:02:20.740 | to speak their views out,

03:02:23.380 | Iranians are not on the side of moving

03:02:28.020 | in the extreme directions.

03:02:31.260 | They are on the side of greater accommodation

03:02:35.260 | and a greater interest in the outside world.

03:02:38.220 | And if you look at every aspect of today's,

03:02:43.420 | beside the government, every aspect of life

03:02:46.700 | in today's Iran, you can see that.

03:02:48.940 | From the way that people dress,

03:02:51.680 | to the way that they try to live their lives,

03:02:56.580 | to the way that they're educating themselves

03:02:59.020 | or educated in the institutions,

03:03:02.260 | do you see a desire, an intention to move forward?

03:03:06.860 | And I'm optimistic.

03:03:08.400 | - Well, in that struggle for freedom,

03:03:12.400 | like I told you offline,

03:03:13.820 | one of my close childhood friends is Iranian.

03:03:17.580 | Just a beautiful person, his family is a wonderful family.

03:03:21.300 | On a personal level, it is one of the deeper windows

03:03:26.020 | into the Iranian spirit and soul

03:03:28.080 | that I've gotten a chance to witness,

03:03:29.460 | so I really appreciate it.

03:03:31.080 | But in the recent times, I've gotten to hear

03:03:33.820 | from a lot of people that are currently living in Iran,

03:03:36.540 | that currently have that burning hope

03:03:39.660 | for the future of the country.

03:03:40.940 | And so my love goes out to them

03:03:43.700 | in the struggle for freedom.

03:03:44.820 | I have to-- - That's so nice

03:03:45.980 | of you to say so.

03:03:47.060 | And I very much hope so.

03:03:49.300 | There are moments of despair,

03:03:52.700 | and there are moments that you would think

03:03:55.700 | that there is no hope,

03:03:58.020 | but then again, something triggers,

03:04:03.020 | and you see 100,000 people in the streets of Berlin

03:04:09.300 | that are hoping for a better future for Iran.

03:04:14.500 | And I very much hope it eventually emerges,

03:04:17.160 | even I'm hoping at the same time

03:04:19.100 | there's not going to be a very strong leadership,

03:04:22.600 | as it was the case in the past.

03:04:24.780 | We started with hope, we ended with hope.

03:04:27.920 | This was a real honor.

03:04:29.500 | This is an incredible conversation.

03:04:30.900 | Thank you for giving such a deep

03:04:35.900 | and wide story of this great nation,

03:04:40.300 | one of the great nations in history.

03:04:41.980 | - Well, that's very kind of you to say so.

03:04:44.100 | - Thank you for sitting down today.

03:04:45.540 | This was amazing. - Well, a history that's,

03:04:48.640 | as I've said in the start of my book,

03:04:51.360 | I say it's the history of a nation

03:04:53.300 | which has learned a huge amount from the outside world

03:04:57.620 | by force of its geography.

03:05:00.260 | It was always located somewhere that people would invade,

03:05:04.140 | or come for trade, or something happened to it

03:05:07.900 | that this diffused culture continued to,

03:05:12.180 | and they were not afraid of learning or adopting,

03:05:15.600 | as they do right now today.

03:05:17.540 | This is a very different society.

03:05:21.220 | - Never a boring moment in its history, as you write about.

03:05:25.540 | Thank you so much, this was awesome.

03:05:26.740 | - Thank you.

03:05:28.280 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:05:29.940 | with Abba Samanat.

03:05:31.260 | To support this podcast,

03:05:32.500 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:05:35.260 | And now, let me leave you with a few words

03:05:38.020 | from Martin Luther King, Jr.

03:05:40.940 | From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

03:05:44.180 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:05:48.340 | (upbeat music)

03:05:50.920 | (upbeat music)

03:05:53.500 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons | Lex Fridman Podcast #334

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