Camp Gagnon - The Secret War That Destroyed Iran's Last Monarchy

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Today we dive into the 1979 Revolution of Iran, the cassette‑tape leaks that intensified the conflict, and other interesting topics… WELCOME TO History CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsors: Shoutout to our sponsors: Chubbies and Morgan & MorganGet 20% OFF With Code ‘CAMP’ When You Visit http://chubbiesshorts.com/CAMP👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 Christos YAPPIN2:35 Iran Before The Revolution + SHAVAK9:46 Young Ali Khamenei11:36 Cassette Tapes Leak14:01 Protests Begin in Iran + Martial Law21:35 Khamenei Returns Home + Shah Exiled28:30 Israel Relationship w/ Iran30:40 What’s Next?#camping #history #podcast #mystery #historyfacts #war #culture #iran #iranisraelwar

Just go in the streets and question anybody. You will see the whole country has joined the movement. January 16th, 1979, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, the king of kings, boarded a plane and left his country forever. He had ruled as the Shah since 1941 and as an unchallenged monarch since 1953. He had transformed Iran from a poor, largely a grand country into this emerging industrial power. He also crushed his enemies with a secret police force trained by the CIA. He had accumulated vast personal wealth while positioning himself as a guardian of his people. And now he was fleeing, sick and broken and despised by the millions who had once cheered his name. Two weeks later, a 78-year-old cleric named Rahala Khomeini would land into Iran to a crowd of several million people.

And within months, Iran would become an Islamic Republic. the first modern theocracy governed by religious law and ruled by clerics. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 didn't just change Iran. It challenged the entire world. It reshaped the Middle East, redefined the relationship between religion and politics, and created tension that still dominate the world to this very moment. This is the story of how it all happened in 1979. So, sit back, relax, and welcome to History Kim.

What's up people and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I'm trying to do here. So I'm trying to understand everything that's ever happened ever. And there's a lot of stuff. And every day, more history is made. So I'm just in a constant game of catching up. But I'm glad that you join me. Because every time you click on a video or support the show in any way, you truly make my dreams come true. Keep the lights on. You keep the fire burning and you keep on putting hundreds of thousands of rubles in Christos's pocket. Right? I like to call them Shekels, but yeah.

Whoa. Hell yeah, dude. You're taking A-PAC money? I will. Crestos, how much? How much to get you to flip for APEC? Not a lot. 100 bucks? $1.25. Chippoli gift card that's half used. I'll take it. Well, you have your price. Anyway, let's move on. All right. Guys, I don't know if you've seen. The world order has shifted fundamentally once again. And there is currently a conflict. No one has been brave enough in an official capacity to call it a war yet, but that's probably what it is. And it's happening right now in Iran. A joint strike has been carried out from the United States and Israel against Iran. And now many American allies have been hit in a retaliatory horizontal escalation. What does that all mean? We'll have to see. But where did it all start? Where did this happen? Okay. Where's the genesis of this entire conflict? Well, it goes back a long time, okay? A very, very long time. We try to pick up the story in 1953 with our most recent episode where we discuss Muhammad Mossadegh and the coup that was carried out by the CIA to basically install the shop. Now, we're going to rehash that a little bit, but today we want to talk specifically about 1979.

And this is ultimately the revolution that turned Iran into the regime that it currently is. And ultimately, the regime that was recently decapitated in the strikes from the United States and Israel. But in order to understand this revolution that happens in 79, you have to understand this coup that happened in 1953. So in short, again, we did a longer episode on this. You can check that out just the last video that we did. But to give people a refresher, if you don't know. basically in 1953 the CIA and British intelligence overthrew the democratically elected Muhammad Mosadegh as Iran's prime minister. Now Mossadegh had committed the unforgivable sin that

every leader should never do, which is trying to nationalize your country's oil. You can't do it. All right. I'm sorry. As long as America exists on this globe, if you try to nationalize your oil, you're going to be, you're going to be having some real problems. All right. Now, this wasn't necessarily initiated by the United States. This was, was actually started by the British and the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company that is known today as BP that was basically about to lose a ton of their money. So they were able to convince the United States to go in and basically do what they had to do. Now, the coup reinstated Muhammad Reza Shah with vastly expanded powers and really paved the way for a absolute rule for many decades.

But it also planted a seed of resentment and anger that would be. grow for 26 years. The Shah, who emerged from the 1953 coup, was not the nervous young man who fled to Rome when the first coup attempt failed. He returned, emboldened, and determined to never be weak again. And how do you do that? How do you rule when you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder? Well, he consolidated power. He eliminated rivals. He built a security apparatus that would make opposition basically impossible. I mean, once again, I don't want to just paint the Shaw purely as a simplistic villain, right? But I just want to make the situation clear of why this happened, why the revolution in 79 basically gets precipitated. What was the Shah doing

that made the people feel like revolution was the only option? Well, let's discuss. The centerpiece of this oppression apparatus was the Savak. This was the National Organization for Security and intelligence. And it was established in 1957 with training from the CIA. Savak became notorious for pervasive surveillance and torture. Savok had broad power, censoring media and screening job applicants that were trying to apply for government positions and surveilling dissidents. And according to numerous documented accounts, torturing political prisoners. I mean, that's electric shocks, sleep deprivation, beatings, mock executions. I mean, just insane stuff.

And by the 70s, Savak employed on the order of several thousand full-time agents plus a large network of informants. And it's Gestapo-esque. Its reputation was so fearsome that many Iranians believed it was omniscient, that no conversation was safe, everyone was extremely paranoid, and no dissident went unnoticed. The Shah justified this repression as necessary. We had to have this. This is the only way. And this is what we need to modernize Iran and to protect it from the war.

communism. His Western allies, specifically in the United States, they didn't really give a shit. I mean, they don't really, like, empires don't really care. As long as like you're serving the empire, then kind of do whatever you want. So as a result, America largely looked the other way. And then in January, 1963, the Shah launched what he called the white revolution, a comprehensive program of social and economic reforms designated and designed to modernize Iran from above. The reforms were ambitious and, in a lot of ways, genuinely progressive. Land reform basically redistributed agricultural land from, you know, a small group of, like, feudal landlords to, like, roughly, like, two million peasant families. The Shah personally handed out land deeds in ceremonies across the country, and people loved that.

Women gained the right to vote, to run for office, to serve as lawyers and judges. The minimum marriage age for women was raised to 15 years old. A literacy course sent educated young Iranians to rural villages to teach reading and writing. literacy rates rose from 26% to 42%, a health core extended medical care to remote areas where doctors had never practiced. I mean, nationalization of forest and water resources funded massive infrastructural projects, so dams and highways and railroads, all that stuff. And the results economically were really impressive. Real GDP grew rapidly, often close to double digits in the 60s and the 70s and per capita income tripled roughly. And a new middle class was emerging in Iran, small business.

business owners and professionals and factory workers with profit-sharing plans, but the white revolution also created a bunch of new problems. The land reform, while breaking the power of the old kind of aristocracy, often gave peasant plots too small to sustain themselves. Many just ended up selling their land and migrated to cities, which then created these sort of bloated urban slums. And this rapid industrialization enriched a new class of factory owners while traditional merchants like, you know, people that ran the bazaars were now increasingly marginalized. And then, of course, secular reforms antagonized the Shia clergy that were, you know, very prominent within the country. They saw their influence over education and family and, you know, the law and basically

the public and that morality was basically being stripped away. And perhaps most dangerously, the reforms created exactly the groups most likely to challenge authoritarian rule, an educated intelligentsia, an urban working class, and university students exposed to revolutionary ideologies from around the world. The Shah had effectively modernized Iran and also had a secret police that was very oppressive, but through this modernization, he created forces that would ultimately destroy him. Now, Rahola Khomeini was born in 1900 in a small town known as Khomein. His father was murdered when he was two years old, and he grew up studying the Quran, eventually becoming a high-ranking Shia cleric, an Ayatollah,

and a respected scholar of Islamic philosophy and mysticism. For decades, Khomeini was primarily known as a teacher and as a writer, but in 1963, everything changed. When the Shah announced the white revolution, Comini emerged as its fiercest critic. He denounced the land reforms as a plot to destroy the influence of the clergy. He attacked the entire reform package in general, including the enfranchisement of women, as contrary to Islamic law and going against the Quran and a capitulation to America. He accused the Shah of being a puppet of the United States and of Israel. And on June 3rd, 1963, the Holy Day of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom, of Imam Hussein at Karbalah, Khomeini delivered a blistering sermon comparing the Shah to Yazid, the hated tyrant who actually killed Hussein. And to Shia Muslims, this was the most damning possible accusation, literally calling him Yazid the terrible tyrant who killed one of the

most important people in Shia Islam. Two days later, Savak agents arrested Khomeini and protests erupted across Iran. The government responded with force. Estimates of the dead range anywhere from a few dozen into the hundreds. And the Shah basically faced a choice. He can either execute Khomeini and risk making him a martyr

which then can cause a bigger political issue or exile him and hope that he would just fade into obscurity. And so the Shah chose exile. In 1964, Khomeini was sent first to Turkey and then to Najaf in Iraq, one of Shia Islam's holiest cities. And there, for basically the next 14 years, he would develop the political philosophy that would

ultimately reshape Iran. His central idea was Vallejete Faki, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Cometini argued that the absence of the hidden imam, basically a messianic figure in Shia Islam, without this governance should fall to qualified religious scholars, a system in which a supreme Islamic jurist has ultimate authority over. over elected institutions and everything within the country. This was revolutionary even within Shia Islam at the time. Many senior clerics disagreed with Khomeini's interpretation. But in the charged atmosphere of the 1970s,

his uncompromising opposition to the Shah made him an icon, a rallying point for everyone who hated the current regime. From Iraq, Khomeini's sermons were recorded on cassette tapes and smuggled into Iran by the thousands. In mosques and bazaars, in private homes, university dorms, Iranians listened to the Ayatollah denounced the Shah as a tyrant and as a puppet and as an enemy of Islam. The Shah could silence his critics in Iran, but he could not silence the voice coming from Najaf. Now, by the late 1970s, the Shah's position was weakened on multiple fronts. Economically, the oil boom of the early 1970s had created rampant inflation.

Housing costs were going up, and the gap. gap between the rich and the poor became more visible. Politically, the Shah had banned all political parties, except, of course, his own party, the Rustak His Party, eliminating any legitimate outlet for any dissent at all. Internationally, a new American president, this guy, Jimmy Carter, was emphasizing human rights. The Shah, under pressure, relaxed some restrictions on political expression. He may have hoped that maybe this would satisfy the critics or, you know, give them an outlet, but instead, it just emboldened them. And in October of 1977, Khomeini's son Mustafa died suddenly in Iraq. His supporters blamed Savak. This again is the secret police that Pallavi has.

A memorial service in Tehran turned into a political demonstration and then protests started. On January 7, 1978, a government newspaper published an article attacking Khomeini as a British agent and as a reactionary. Theological students in the Holy City of Kome protested, and police opened fire on them, and several students were killed. In Shia tradition, mourning ceremonies are held 40 days after a death has occurred. The calm morning turned into brand new protests,

and those protests produced even more deaths, and then 40 days later, more mourning, more protests, and more death. This cycle of violence that was building throughout the, you know, 1978, and each round of mourning produced new martyrs, and each new martyr produced new outrage. And the Shah was starting to lose options. You know, he tried concessions, he replaced hardline officials with reformers, he promised free elections, he acknowledged the past mistakes, but at this point, none of it worked. And as a matter of fact, the opposition actually started to smell the weakness. And on August 19th, 1978, an event occurred that would prove decisive.

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com slash G-A-G-N-O-N or dial Pound Law. That is pound 529 and let them know that you got sent by the people here at the campsite. Also, this is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show. In the city of Abidon, a cinema rex movie theater was packed with a bunch of people going to see a movie called The Deer. And at 8.21 p.m., four men barred the exits, doused the building with jet fuel and set it ablaze. Between 377 and 470 people burned to death, and it remains one of the deadliest peacetime arson attacks on civilians in history in any country. The government blamed Islamic militants, and, of course, the opposition blamed the secret police Savak. Subsequent research and court testimony points strongly to,

Islamic militants, including Hossein, Taks Balazeda, and three accomplices as the arsonists, though the episode remains contested in public memory. But that's not what many Iranians believed in 1978. The opposite version that Savak had murdered hundreds of innocent people to discredit the revolution spread instantly. Comani's supporters declared that thousands have been massacred by Zionist troops. In this atmosphere of mistrust and anger, the truth doesn't matter. What matters was ultimately what people felt or what they believed, and they believed that the Shah had killed their families. This cinema wrecks fire radicalized millions of Iranians who had previously just stayed neutral. As one historian put it, suddenly for hundreds of thousands,

the movement was their own business. Three weeks later came the point of no return. On September 7, 1878, the Shah declared martial law in Tehran and 11 other cities. The announcement came late at night and many Iranians didn't hear it. The next morning, Friday, September 8th, thousands of protesters gathered in Jala Square in Tehran, unaware that demonstrations were now illegal. So when soldiers ordered them to disperse, they refused. And then the army opened fire. Official government figures claimed that 86 people died. Opposition leaders claimed that thousands died. The most reliable estimates based on later research suggests that around 64 protesters and 30 security personnel were killed in Jala Square that day with additional deaths elsewhere in Tehran.

The opposition, however, broadcasts far higher numbers, of course. Rumors spread that Israeli soldiers had been brought in to massacre Iranians, and this was largely discredited and thought to be a fabrication, but was widely believed by the people at the time. Black Friday, as it would be called, created what historian Irvon Abrahamian described as a sea of blood between the Shah and the people. Any possibility of compromise with the Shah and with the public just completely died in Jalas Square that day. And from that point forward, the protests would only grow. The Iranian revolution was not initially an Islamic revolution. It was a coalition.

Comani's followers organized through mosques primarily, funded. by merchants at bazaars and mobilized by religious networks formed the largest, most disciplined faction. But they were not alone. The National Front, a political movement of the martyred Mossadegh brought liberals and nationalists who wanted democracy and a constitutional government. The Today Party, the leftist party, basically, and other leftist groups brought communists who wanted economic transformation and an end to Western influence. The people's Moja Hadin, a radical organization blending Islam and Marxism brought young militants willing to fight. University students brought numbers and energy, bizarre merchants brought money and organizational

infrastructure, and what united them was ultimately the hatred of the Shah and also the opposition to American influence in their affairs. What ultimately divided them, and there were many things that divided them, was just temporarily set aside. Comani from his exile in Paris, he had actually been expelled from Iraq in October of 78 was deliberately vague about what would come after the Shah fell. I mean, he spoke of freedom and justice and, you know, good old-fashioned Muslim values. Different groups heard what they wanted to hear, ultimately. The liberals believe that there would be democracy. The leftists believe that there would be economic revolution.

The Muslims believe that there would be, you know, good moral rule brought back into the country. And only one group would be right. and even then kind of none of them were right. Because by late 1978, the Shah's regime was just disintegrating. In October, oil workers went on strike, and this was devastating. Oil experts provided the vast majority of the government's wealth, and without any oil money, the state couldn't pay for soldiers or bureaucrats or anything. And in November, the Shah appointed a military government under General Golam Reza Azari.

It was meant to try to bring some order, but instead it just convinced Iranians that the Shah had nothing left to offer but just more force. And on December 10th and 11th, the Holy Day of Tasua and Ashura, millions of Iranians marched in the largest demonstration in the country's history. Estimates, again, vary on this, but some say six, some say nine million people marched across Iran with well over a million in just the capital of Tehran alone. They chanted death to the Shah, independence, freedom, Islamic Republic. The Shah was paralyzed. I mean, at this point, also keep in mind, he had cancer. This was a

secret that he and his people had kept for years and was increasingly medicated and indecisive. His generals asked permission to crack down even harder, but he refused and his advisors urged him to compromise with the people. He couldn't decide what he could even offer them. And then on January 3rd, 1979, the Shah appointed Shapur Bakhtiar as prime minister. Bakhtiar was a liberal opposition figure, a member of the National Front who had been imprisoned by Savak. The Shah hoped that maybe this would be a good gesture to kind of show like, hey, actually, this other guy, this more liberal guy, he's in charge, okay?

But it didn't. It did basically nothing. The National Front expelled Bakhtiar for collaborating with the monarchy. And Khomeini denounced him as illegitimate. and just another piece of the Shah's rule. On January 16th, 1979, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi left Iran, and officially it was a vacation. Everyone knew that, you know, he was never going to come back. And so the Shah wept on his plane as it lifted off from Iran for the last time. Two weeks later, on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Rahola Khomeini's plane touchdown in Tehran. An Air France said,

747 carried the 78-year-old cleric from Paris. Several million Iranians lined the route from the airport to the city center. And when a journalist asked Khomeini what he felt upon returning to Iran after 14 years, he answered nothing. The revolution was not complete yet. Prime Minister Bakhtiar still controlled the government technically. The military had not yet declared its allegiance. Some generals were plotting their own coup in order to restore the Shah. But the momentum was just unstoppable. And on February 9th and 10th, armed clashes broke out between pro-Khomeni guerrillas and units of the Imperial Guard, and the fighting just continued to spread across Tehran. It seemed like there was going to be maybe a civil war. And on February 11th, the military Supreme Council declared its neutrality. The generals would not fight for a regime that had already lost. The monarchy was done. The Pahlavi dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1925 was over. Bakhtiar fled the country.

He would spend the rest of his life in exile in Paris until agents of the Islamic Republic assassinated him in 1991. The Shah wandered from country to country, from Egypt to Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, briefly for a cancer treatment, Panama, and then back to Egypt. And he died in Cairo on July 27, 1980, at the age of 60. In the immediate aftermath, Khomeini moved carefully. He appointed Medi Bezargan a religious but moderate figure as the prime minister. And this really reassured liberals who hoped that, you know, the revolution would lead to democracy.

But parallel to Bezogarn's government, Khomeini established revolutionary committees, revolutionary courts, and of course the Revolutionary Guard, institutions directly loyal to him and him alone that operated outside the normal government channels. A referendum on March 30th and 31st, 1979, asked Iranians to approve the Islamic Republic. The ballot offered only two choices, yes or no. Officially, 98.2% voted yes. The referendum offered no alternative to an Islamic Republic and occurred in a highly charged non-pluralistic environment,

leading many observers to question really how free or how fair this vote was. Over the following months, the coalition that had made the revolution, revolution ultimately fractured. The liberal nationalists and the leftists and the moderate clerics, all were systematically marginalized or eliminated. The revolutionary courts executed hundreds of former regime officials and then thousands of political opponents, including many who had fought against the Shah himself. On November 4th, 1979, radical students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and they took 52 Americans hostage. This crisis would last 400,000. 44 days and ultimately would define American perceptions of Iran for generations to come.

Khomeini used the hostage crisis to consolidate power, labeling anyone who opposed him as an American sympathizer. The moderate, Bazargan, who tried to negotiate with the Americans, resigned in protest. The new constitution approved on December of 1979, established Khomeini as the supreme leader, a position above the president, above the prime minister, above parliament, above everyone, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, that is who he was. And now he is the head and the law of the land. Iran had gone from this absolute monarchy to a theocratic system in which a supreme jurist stood above elected institutions. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 reshaped the entire world, and the ways that it did that are still unfolding. to this very moment. It demonstrated that in the modern era of religious ideology could mobilize

mass movements and overthrow powerful states. It inspired Islamist movements across the Muslim world, and it really terrified secular governments from Egypt to Indonesia. It poisoned American-Iranian relations for decades. The hostage crisis, the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655, a nuclear standoff, all were profoundly shaped by this specific moment in 1979. It really transformed the Middle East balance of power. Revolutionary Iran positioned itself as the champions of Shia Muslims everywhere and really as the champions of Islam itself backing or cultivating Shia movements such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen and various militias in Iraq. And it raises questions that remain unresolved to this day. Was the revolution inevitable?

Was there a path that Iran could? have taken to become a democracy rather than a theocracy. Did American support for the Shah make his fall more likely, or was it just irrelevant to the deeper forces that were already present in Iranian society? The Shah believed that, you know, he was saving Iran from backwardness and, you know, this old agrarian state, he was trying to modernize it. Kamani believed that he was saving Iran from Western influence and corruption. Both claimed to speak for the Iranian people. And unfortunately the Iranian people caught between these two visions made their choice in the streets of 1978 and 1979. Now, whether that choice led to liberation or to a new form of oppression,

it really just depends on who you ask. And it remains one of the most contested questions in modern geopolitical history. Now, the Iranian revolution wasn't simple. It wasn't just a simple story of good versus evil, though many have obviously tried to paint it that way. In my opinion, the Shah was a, you know, a modernizer who was building universities and hospitals and also a dictator whose secret police tortured thousands of people. Comani was a scholar and a mystic and he inspired millions of people and also a revolutionary whose regime would execute thousands and thousands of more people. The revolution succeeded because Iranians of vastly different beliefs, communists, capitalists, liberals, Muslims, secular people and religious clerics united against a

common enemy. And ultimately, it betrayed almost all of them in the end. Now, we should also mention how the existence of Israel definitely played a role in the revolution and, of course, the aftermath of the revolution in Iran. Now, one of the big shifts after the revolution was Iran's explicit relationship with Israel. You see, under the Shah, Iran had maintained quiet but significant ties with the Israeli state. The two countries cooperated strategically as a part of Israel's periphery doctrine, which basically sought alliances with non-Arab regional powers. Iran supplied Israel with oil and Israeli intelligence cooperated with Iranian security services. These relationships were largely hidden from the Iranian public, but became a powerful symbol for critics of the Shah,

who portrayed them as evidence that the monarchy was aligned with foreign interests, like America or Israel, against the Muslim world. After the revolution, those ties were done. Iran, severed relations with Israel, expelled its diplomats, and handed the Israeli embassy in Tehran to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, also known as the PLO. The new Islamic Republic adopted strong support for the Palestinian cause as a central element of its foreign policy, and the Ayatollah basically never recognized Israel as a state. Now, what had once been a quiet strategic partnership became one of the most defining rivalries in Middle Eastern politics, and this is Again, a hostility that continues to shape regional conflicts to this very moment.

What remains to this day is a country that, you know, now 45 years later, is still living with these consequences. International isolation and sanctions and internal repression and this new younger generation that barely remembers the Shah, but increasingly questions the Ayatollahs. The revolution that promised freedom delivered just theocracy. Theocracy that promised justice. delivered its own form of injustice and the Iranian people, resilient and educated and angry, continue to struggle for something better. And to be honest with you, this story is not over. As a matter of fact, it's probably just beginning. And that is a brief overview of the revolution in Iran of 1979. I mean, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it just seems like everyone kind of sucks here.

You know, like there was a oppressive, you know, monarch that was doing bad things, but also was doing some good things. And, you know, the people took a gamble. And they said, you know what? We're going to get rid of this guy in order to put in a new person. And they were so optimistic. They believed that this new guy was going to do great things. But unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease. And I don't know.

I don't know how it could have been avoided. I mean, I guess you could have gone with another way. But, you know, you got sold a bill of goods and it sucks. I don't even know. I mean, it really goes back to 53 with America overthrowing, you know, overthrowing Mossadegh. I wonder what Iran would have looked like if Mossadegh stayed in power and this never happened at all. And just democracy was kind of put in. There were elections and it was able to operate as, you know, just a normal democracy.

Would it have been better for the people? Tough to say. It's just heartbreaking, though. You know, like you have so many people. in America today and, you know, there's an Iranian diaspora around everywhere that can't go back to this place that they feel so connected to, their own home country and, you know, see their relatives and extended family because they're kind of just locked in this regime. Now, once again, it's just, it's kind of the story of everything where it's like, okay, you have two factions that are

competing for power. They both suck. One of them sucks more. And ultimately, the people that pay the consequence are the innocent people of Iran, many of which, you know, the vast majority of which are just good, humble, hardworking kind people that, as always, are the ones that pay the consequence for the rich and the powerful jockeying for these power positions. But, yeah, I don't know. Chrystos, you learn anything? I just will say the hostage crisis, it's illustrated in the movie Argo. Oh, is that what that's about?

Yeah. Maybe I should watch that. Yeah, I probably should, right? Ben Affleck. Boy, he's in it. He directed it as well. He won Best Director at the Oscars for it. And he's one of the Islamic militants that goes in?

No, he's the guy tasked with getting them out. Oh, I would have cast myself as one of the terrorists. Were they terrorists? Is that what we call them? Insurgents. If you hold 40 people hostage for 400 days, like that's not. It's not the best look. What embassy were they in?

There was the Canadian embassy? That was the American embassy. No, they escaped at the American embassy. Oh, really? I believe so. Creasos, I'm invoking a fact check. What did you find? They were in the Canadian ambassador's residence.

Canadian ambassador's residence. What happened to those people? Did anyone die? Got to watch the movie to find out. Fine. I'll just do a camp episode about it, all right? That would be the next one. What do you guys think?

Is there anything that I missed? Are there any, any passions that listened to this episode? Is there anything that you've been told by your family or through your own research that you feel like is pertinent and relevant? For this discussion, please drop a comment. I read all of them. I really don't care if you correct me. If I said something that was wrong, I implore you to do that because I only want to know the truth. And I'm not an expert on this stuff.

So I'm just a guy trying to figure it all out. So please, drop a comment. if something I missed, anything I overlooked, I would love to know what that is. And if you're not Persian, you didn't know about this at all, this is kind of your first time hearing about it because you're seeing what's going on in the news. What did you learn? Let me know what you think. Does this have any type of proxy or, you know, facsimile to your own country or to your own people? Or is this something that you've seen in history before? How do you think it ends? What happens next? Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I have great news. Throughout this episode,

we talked a lot about different religious topics. If you like the religious beat, we got religion camp. We talk about all the religions, all right? Not just, you know, Christianity. You know, of course, we would talk about that, right, the one true faith. But we talk about all of them, you know, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Hinduism, all the isms except racism. Am I right, Christos? You big it. We also do Camp gagged on. That's where I do interviews with people way smarter than me that can actually break things down with expertise. And I also do deep dives and all the most interesting things going on at this moment. But if you just rock with history, great news. episodes every single week here at history camp. And yeah, hit that subscribe button. I'll see you

guys next time in the future to talk about the past. God bless.