Empire: World History - 331. The Iranian Revolution: Will The Shah Return To Iran? (Ep 2)

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

In 1979, the people of Iran took to the streets to topple the Shah. This year they are back in the streets shouting “Long Live The Shah”. How did this happen? How did a country which so volcanically threw out the Shah in 1979 want the same family back again in 2026? What are the parallels between the Iranian Revolution then and the protests today? William and Anita are joined by Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran, and Ramita Navai, documentary-maker and author of City of Lies. Disclaimer: We recorded these episodes on January 17th 2026. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has confirmed that 5,459 protestors in Iran have died, and the organisation is investigating 17,031 more. Two senior officials of Iran’s Ministry of Health have reported that as many as 30,000 people have been killed. In such a volatile situation, predictions are difficult to make and these figures are ever changing. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. In 1979, the people of Iran took to the streets to topple the Shah. This year, they're back again, but they're shouting Javid Shah, long live the Shah. How did this happen? How did a country which so volcanically throw out the Shah in 1979 want the same family back again in 2026? Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand.

And me, William Durunpool. And we continue a conversation. We sort of, I know some of you all feel like we sort of, why did they stop now? Well, we're not stopping. We're going to continue with the conversation that we are having with our two excellent guests. And this is what Empire is all about, is about whether we can learn less. from history, and boy, are there some parallel histories here that we can draw upon? It is literally one of those serendipitous moments where you just happen to be in a place of

great turmoil and the people you would most wish to talk to about it are here in the room. We have two of the greatest experts on Iran with us today. Scott Anderson, whose extraordinary book, King of Kings, was last year's book of the year, and which has been a major bestseller in almost every country in the world. And we have also Ramita Nevae, who was born in Tehran, grew up in Iran, was the Times correspondent there, and whose city of lies is a seminal read on modern revolutionary Iran. They are with us today to unpick the extraordinary parallels, but also the major differences. What is striking is that 79 was started, you know, the uprising started in the marketplace. That's right.

With those who were sort of on a hand-to-mouth existence, who suddenly didn't have. have anything in their hand to put to their mouths. And that's what has happened right now as well. That's right. Yeah. I feel everything is telescoped now. What took 14 months to happen in the 1970-79 revolution feels it's happening in a matter of, well, at most weeks, even down to days. And to go to this idea that numbers I'm hearing of the dead of the last 10 days in

Iran are more than four times in total of the entire time of the Iranian. revolution. The numbers will definitely rise, but at the moment, I've seen a human rights watch of more than 3,000 verified deaths. And the videos I've been looking at, there are piles and piles of bodies, and, you know, this is just Tehran. It's not even in the provinces where the regime kills in greater numbers. But as to, you know, the, again, the parallel, if you can describe what happened in 79 and compare it with those market uprisings that we're seeing today. Yeah, I mean, I think that what, so I think the Shah had become more. more and more removed from the people.

I mean, that was very clear. He had no sense of, he lived in his palace. He was surrounded by Sinkafants, palace toadies, who told him just what he wanted to hear. And even though he was a very smart man, really quite brilliant in a number of ways, he fell victim to that, you can call it the Michael Jackson syndrome,

of surrounding yourself with yes people. And other people's kind of standing up to you is our mooring to reality. And the one person who was telling him was his wife. And he wasn't listening to her. He wasn't listening to her. I didn't know that.

Yeah. She was on to her. She was. She was. She was. Yeah. One of the only ones. Farah had his wife, farah, much younger.

Had a. She is still alive. She is still alive. I interviewed her for the book. In Paris? Actually, I interviewed in Washington. Yeah. She goes back and forth between Washington and Paris.

But she had a, well, a charisma, certainly, but a common touch that the shot absolutely did not have. And as far back as 1974 or 75, she was telling the show, or at least one said, I think the people are getting tired of us. And he just dismissed it. And even as the revolution was going on, he just seemed kind of frozen into inaction. So, I mean, one thing, which I'm sure Remita will have, you know, the modern day view on,

is the relationship with the United States and the intelligence of the United States. Or, I mean, intelligence is such a misnomer for the fact that they were so dumb about this. Now, one of the problems was the CIA station in Tehran, was staffed with non-Farcy speaking people. Yes, so the entire American embassy, which was massive, it was one of the biggest embassies in the world, and this is America's most important ally between Western Europe and Japan,

one of the largest CIA stations in the Middle East, nobody was doing domestic intelligence. In fact, the CIA, this is really hard to believe, but all their domestic intelligence was coming from Savak, the Shah's secret police. They were handing over to the Americans. No domestic intelligence whatsoever. We should also say that there was a famous example of the CIA greatly exaggerating its reach, which was the whole Mossadegh, the episode. Right. Right. The legend has gone out that the CIA brought down Mossadegh, and that it was a British, a brilliant British and American

CIA operation, single-handedly got the whole people of Iran out onto the streets and top of this guy. Right. It's actually quite clear that the CIA guy, head of, head of state, did an incredibly self-serving report. Yes, that's right. Way exaggerated. The CIA was involved, the British were involved, but as at the moment, the people took to the streets. And it gives no agency to the Iranians.

That's right. To suggest that the whole thing was a brilliant Western spy operation. That's right. So that's interesting right now. So the CIA at the time was getting their intelligence from Savak. Savak were part of this yes-men, cadre. Nothing to see here. Everything's fine.

Right. Yeah. And the official narrative out of the, embassy, and this was not just under Carter, this goes back to LBJ, Johnson, but really accelerated under Nixon. The Shah hated when foreign diplomats talk to even his nominal political opposition. He'd call the ambassador and give them addressing down. So the Western ambassadors just told their people don't talk to any opposition. And this became an established pattern. On top of that, with the Americans in particular, and they're guilty of this wherever they go, virtually nobody spoke

Farsi. Out of an embassy of 300 people, you could probably count the Farsi speakers on one hand. Certainly two. It's a stunning. Really astonishing. Yeah. And they have, Americans... The same happened, didn't it, in 9-11? On the night of 9-11,

they were looking around Washington for Arabic speakers. Right. And they've had, again, a handful in the whole capital. And Americans bring a tremendous amount of Americana with them. They have an American club, a commissary, a PX. A lot of people live in

housing bubble. Sounds like Jim Kana's during Iraq. So you could, I make the point in my book that, you know, an American diplomat in the mid-70s could serve two years in Tehran. And the only Iranians he would ever speak to would be the foreign nationals working in the embassy and his gardener. And that's not much of an exaggeration. So they really knew virtually nothing about what was going on inside Iran.

Now, I'm desperate to know, because you're so, you know, you're so, you know, very well plugged in to some of those who have been fighting the regime before. Do they have any contact with the Americans? Do they have any feelings about the Americans? Are the Americans doing what they did in 79, which is just presuming to know what's happening without talking to the opposition? The activists I know are not in touch with the Americans. I was sent, I think I already mentioned this,

I was sent a load of videos from an activist friend of mine a few days ago, and they're really shocking. I've never seen anything like them in Iran. You know, it's piles of bodies, and this is from Tehran. And these zipper bags that they're piling them into. Oh, that was, yeah, that was one morgue. These are other videos, and I'm not sure if they've been published yet, but deeply shocking. You know, the internet is down.

There's an absolute internet shut off, which the Iranians do. They've done this before. In every single protest, the Iranians do this. But I think this is the longest that they've ever shut down the internet. but there has been some contact. Some people there have managed to get onto Starlink, have sent ministers via Starlink, and every now and again there are periods

where Iranians can phone through using their landlines. And I've got a message from an Iranian, actually. See, this is what is extraordinary about having you here right now. Yeah, this just came in. This is just coming in, right? Listen, it's really hard to tell the temperature of the country. It's really hard to say most Iranians think this or feel this. However, you know, it's all anecdotal at the moment.

Sure. And this message seems to echo what many others are saying. So I'll read you some of this text. So a significant number of Iranians are now saying that peaceful protests alone cannot topple the regime. They're increasing calls for outside assistance to level the playing field against a state willing to use unlimited violence. You know, and this marks a big shift, a big shift.

Can we also just clarify there, there were reports on Twitter and some leaks which seem to be coming from the Israelis, including Channel 14 Israeli news, the Israelis were arming the opposition. Yet on the ground, there was no sign of guns. When they say the opposition, who do they mean anyway? You know, what's extraordinary about these protests? These are ordinary Iranians. These are not Mossad, Asians.

In the streets being shot down. Right. And, you know, hearing this idea of people of Iranians today, you know, maybe asking for American aid to come in, I think one of the really important things I understand about the overthrow of the Shah was, of course, it was a religious counter-revolution. But there was also really strong elements of kind of anti-colonial uprising. The Shah was seen as a product of the Americans going back to the 1953 coup, even his supporters called him the American Shah.

And how that played out during the 1979 Revolution was if the Shah tried to make reforms, he promised parliamentary elections the following summer, he got rid of the imperial calendar, he got no credit for these reforms. Everyone was like, oh, the Americans are telling them to do that. So he was really caught in this wedge. And because of his ties to the Americans, there was kind of no escape, ultimately. Anything he did, if he ordered his troops to machine gun people in the streets, it's like the Americans are telling them to do that.

If he said he's calling for democracy, the Americans are doing that. So it's so weird to come to this moment. But it's weird because only again, and it's the speed. So again, I'll draw another parallel between 79 and now. The speed of change is dizzying here. So I know, I was speaking to some Iranian dissidents who said, you know what, when America comes out and says, we've got your back, we're coming to help. Personally, I feel terrified by US intervention because we've seen where it's gone so wrong.

every single time in the region. Yes, but you know, as an Iranian as well, as terrified as I feel, living outside Iran, I also feel that I'm not the one to have the say. And it's for, you know, my fellow Iranians living under that regime that should have the say. The souls of many of those dissidents just died because they said, hang on a minute. Please don't. I can't stand it. Apart from the fact we don't want you to bomb us, we do not want to have anything.

this is our uprising. This is not something that's being orchestrated. And it is a country with many hundreds of years of suspicion of outside. That's, oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The whole colonial period. Yes. Was the period of predatory colonial powers, whether it was Britain or France or Russia, particularly Russia actually, all wanting a chunk of that's right, of Persian, eating up all the northern Persian territory, which are now Georgia and and so on, but places we now think of as entirely different countries, which were originally under Persian rule.

Right. Sometimes, you know, when you have this sort of pattern bias, you think, oh, there are parallels, and everything you see is a parallel. Right. You guys tell me if I'm wrong or right about this. But one of the catalysts for the end of the Shah in 79 was the controversial then measures,

because of what you were saying about this sort of religious grouping in the rural areas, a powerful religious lobby, was giving Iranian women the right. to vote and agrarian reform, that that was a massive thing. Now, it is, I mean, to speak a little bit about, you know, particularly the giving the women the right to vote, how did 70s Iran chafe at that and react to that? So this was really where, so the Shah started what was called the White Revolution in 1963, and it was 19 different platforms, everything from reforestation to women's emancipation

to agrarian reform. Most arable land in Iran was in the hands of aristocratic land-owning families or of the mosques. They had huge land holdings. So when he called for agrarian reform in 1963, it directly threatened the wealth of the mosques. And so really with Khomeini. Just to clarify that, so this is the waqf. The waqt, yes. Which is land owned by the religious establishment. That's right. Which was he thought going to waste and not properly. That's right. And he wanted to break them up. He thought we could just get new amounts of land for these landless people and we can sort this all out. But it went badly wrong. It went badly wrong. And but the two things that

really brought Khomeini out and no one had heard of Khomeini until this white revolution was women's emancipation and the Hungarian reform. Those were the two things he went against the Shah with. His militancy sparked clerical riots in 1963 in which several hundred people were killed. A year later, Khomeini had become such a lightning rod that the Shah sent him into exile in 1964. And that began the Shah's, Khomeini's exile in Iraq. Weirdly enough, that is also the time that the Americans finally thought the Shah had a backbone. In the 1953 coup, he was a pilot, he got on his own private airplane with his wife, because the revolt, the coup was undecided for a couple of days. And he first flew to Iraq, and then with its thing still uncertain, he went on to Rome.

So when the word came back that this coup had actually succeeded, he was having lunch at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. And he came back, you know, with his tail between his legs, two or three days later. So from the 53 coup, this is one of the great ironies. The Americans actually saw the Shah as a coward. I mean, who leaves their own coup? And it really wasn't until this, to 63, putting down the clerical. riots, which was not the Shah, it was his prime minister ordered it, and then the exiling of Khomeini that they finally thought, oh, he actually has a backbone after all. And that's when you start seeing the embrace of the Shah hardcore by the Americans. So, I mean, Ramita, it's, I suppose,

a parallel that women are at the center of this political battlefield once again. But I mean, I feel, and I'm an outsider, so you tell me if I'm wrong, I feel that actually it is the brutal way they crack down on women asking for, you know, more freedom and to express themselves, that has actually alienated a great number of Iranians. Am I right or wrong about it? First of all, that women are a catalyst for where we are now. And second of all, that actually rather than saying, no, push them back, push them back, being the causes below back then in 79, sorry, before that even, that it is now actually a catalyst again, but pushing forward against the regime. Yes. I mean, this is a more recent development. So I would say, Scott, that what's interesting when the

revolution happened is that more women, especially from working class and religious families, ended up in universities, women from traditional families. That's right. Because of course, universities during the Shah's era were seen as kind of dens of Western influence and iniquity. So that was one of the plus points of the revolution, of the Islamic Revolution, is that it allowed many more women to be educated and to go to universities. Then what you had throughout the 2000s and when I was there, you had this growing women's movement. And I went to many women's protests

where Basij, the Islamic militia, would turn up with chains and start beating the women and any men with them. And an important point to note is that not only was the Basij, but also many, they used to fly in Hezbollah and non-Iranian supporters, particularly during the women's life and freedom movement. Yes, that's been happening more recently. That happened.

There was good evidence in 2009 that there were foreign militias who were meeting out the violence. But, yeah, so I'd say... Were willing to crack down on ordinary Iranians' feelings in a way that Persians would not. Exactly.

But certainly through the 2000s, women's activists and women's rights groups grew stronger and stronger and more prominent, and they became the thorn in the side of the Islamic regime. And what happened in 2009 with the Green Movement is that the women's groups were pretty much obliterated. The women were mass incarcerated, and there was an absolute crackdown on any women's groups. Now, they have been reforming, and as we know, they played a vital role in the Women's Life Freedom protest. So there's been this really interesting.

kind of rise and fall and rise again of women's groups. And women now at the forefront of all these disparate activist groups. Look, we're going to take a break. Can we just all agree with ourselves? It's sort of same and bit different. You know, you've got women as a catalyst, but in very, very different ways in these two years. I just want to add one small thing to that of women being catalysts.

Farah, the Chabonoo, the Queen, some of the hardcore clerics, I think, Homania among them, probably hated her even more than they hated the Shah because she represented everything she made a point of never astonishingly glamorous too yes glamorous never wore a headscarf going on construction sites and being photographed

with you know wearing a hard hat and wearing Iranian couture and wearing yes yeah that's important she didn't do the French cature thing no she did not but I just she represented everything that the ultra right clergy despised and and were afraid of

and you know she lived for a probably 25 years under a death sentence. I mean, they were trying to kill her desperately. Well, look, let's take a break now. Join us after the break, because actually one story that I'd love to know is that one of us in this room was there in 79. And I don't know how many memories we can share,

but I'm quite looking forward to asking. Join us in a moment. Welcome back. Well, we are now in the 1979 revolution, and we are finding the extraordinary parallels, sometimes inverted parallels, but parallels of some sort or other, between the revolution to oust the Shah in 1979

and the revolution now where people are shouting on the streets, Javed Shah long-lived the Shah again, unimaginable to many of us even a year ago. So, Ramita, you alone of the people in this room were at the Revolution. I got in there about five years afterwards. I still could see displays of the spectacles of the martyrs in my first day in Tabriz.

I remember in this museum, they cleared out the exhibits and put the martyrs and spectacles and it was all fresh. But you were there. You were actually there. You have got a great Khomeini speech story of why Western media was so taken by Khomeini speeches. Because there were so few people at the embassy

and journalists who spoke Farsi. Certainly by the time Khomeini got to Paris, the people right around him, who were acting as his interpreters, knew they needed to soften Khomeini. I mean, this is a man out of the 14th century. And there was this one great moment where Homanie had given the Sean Ultimator. This was probably in November, maybe even December.

He'd given the Shah an ultimative when he had to leave Iran. And the journalist asked via Ibrahim Yazdi, the translator, if the Shah doesn't leave on this day, what will you do? And Homanie's answer was, I will call for rivers of blood to flow. And the way Yazi interpreted it to the Western journalists was he'll be very upset. And this happened again and again. Just to jump ahead. Many Iranians today blame Western liberals for, in a sense, letting the hominy back.

Right. And promoting him. And leftist intellectuals. Yeah. I mean, you went as far as to say they thought he was like Gandhi. That's right. This idea, again, I think this parallel right now with the Crown Prince, this idea that you need the spiritual guide. And I mentioned these three Western-educated Islamists,

all in exile that were around Khomey in Paris and prior. I think they all thought, oh, he's an old man, he's going to go back to home, the Holy See of Home. Certainly he's not going to try to, you know, have political power. Now, he's a friendly grandpa. I mean, they were, you know, friendly. I mean, that's how he was being portrayed. That's right. I've seen articles and photos of him saying, you know, sort of like, you know, a vunk killer grandpa is speaking. No, and we were talking about this, won't me, Scott? I actually interviewed that man, Khomeini's right-hand man in Tehran. Oh, go and tell us.

Abraham Yazdi, who was an original revolutionary. That's right. And actually, the man behind the Revolutionary Guards now realized that the Islamic, new Islamic regime couldn't trust the army and needed an army that was loyal to them and answers only to them. And I think... The Revolutionary Guards? Yes. the father of the only

who got. And I sat in his his garden. He died in 2017. And we were discussing his regret. He didn't tell me that he regretted his role, but he told me that he was really angry with what the regime had become, that it had lost all its values. And that, yeah, the regime had turned on him. You know, the regime ended up eating its own children.

Right, right. And lifting its own coffers. I feel like we left a little girl in the middle of a protest riot. Can you describe for us what it felt like and how old were you and just painted a picture of what it was like? Five years old. My dad was in the Navy and my mum, unbeknownst my dad, my mom took me out to the protests. And I remember the revolution really well, especially the trace of fire and when the violence started. So we remained in the front line.

at the back or were we? No, we just, you know, there was, there was curfew. So you had to be home by a certain time. But I remember my parents describing everything that happened to me and there were lots of men with guns and there was shooting. And, you know, it's the period where it got pretty bad. My mom was a teacher and she, we stayed on after the revolution. And my mom was then teaching secretly because then you had the cultural revolution

when all schools were shut down and universities. And every single time she'd teach secret. separately somebody would snitch and she'd be busted. And so it just got more and more dangerous. And in the end, we managed to get out. But my father stayed because he was in the Navy. He didn't have Swiss bank accounts, like got some rich Iranians and Terranjali's money squirreled away.

And his whole family was in Iran. So he always wanted to be able to come back. So he didn't want to abscond. So he had to wait in order for the regime, the new regime to accept his resignation, which they did just before the Iran-Iraq war. so he got really lucky and he joined us in London. So look, I mean, we're sort of coming to the end of this and it's just so interesting.

Again, going back to the past, what to me was fascinating is that Muhammad Sharpa Levie, the father of the current Crown Prince, who is in Washington, was described at the beginning as a taught little boy, you know? He was completely dismissed and then as a coward, as you say, he goes off to dinner during a revolution. And then he sort of surprises the United States and the rest of the world by saying, you know what, that oil that's ours, we're kind of more interested in it than you might think.

So sort of the reading of the man. This is an important point that he saves Iran's oil revenues. And these are what absolutely superpower. The amazing, I mean, today we don't think of Iran as a rich country at all. We think of Saudi Arabia or Qatar or Dubai. But the 1970s Iran was that. It was the rich. oil country. And the Shaw engineered it. He was the one who engineered the quadrupling.

Well, he had a great place in OPEC to do it. I mean, an OPEC listened to each other at that time. So, you know, it was a different dive. This gets to this interesting idea of the psychology of the Shah. In some ways, I feel it's almost a kind of a personification of the average Iranians' view of the West. I think that the Shah, he was always, he could never get enough affirmation from American presence in particular. Oh, he liked the coin. mean an awful lot, didn't he? Yes, yeah. He liked Queen Elizabeth, yeah.

But he never fully trusted the Americans. And he was very aware of, and again, it's almost like Persia with the West, very aware of how they'd been taken advantage of, wanting to emulate the West, but also deeply resentful of what they'd done in the past. So the Shah, the first president he met was FDR at the Tehran Conference of 1943. The first meeting of Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt during the war. This is pre-Yalta, which we did a whole series of. Pre-Altra. Yeah.

So it's in Tehran. The Shah is not even invited to the conference. He's the official head of state of this country. It was held at the Soviet embassy in Tehran. The Shah begged to meet with Roosevelt in particular. He got a 10-minute meeting with Roosevelt. They had just made him the Shah. They had kicked over his father.

And there's a picture of the Shah sitting on this couch with Roosevelt, looking like a little schoolboy. there's not even a recording of what was said during that 10-minute meeting because the Americans in the room, they thought this meeting was so inconsequential, nobody took notes. That burned the Shaw, and it stayed in his mind. He talked about it for years later. He hated Kennedy. Nobody really gave him any time of day up until LBJ, but really then he was really anointed by Nixon.

And Nixon, finally in 1972, said, short of nuclear weapons, you have. have a blank check, you can get any weapon system you want, no questions asked. But there's a reason for that. Nixon had his hands full in Vietnam. Well, that's right. And so, like, can we just leave you to, can you be a sphere of influence and just do what we want you to do? Yeah, well, you can just take care of it. That's right. We just take care of this little local trouble for us. And this, of course, so this is what's very interesting. So now he's, he's been in 1972. He's anointed by the Americans finally, you know, after being in power for 31 years. And then two years later, it's like,

like he takes revenge by quadrupling oil prices. And he goes back to the West and says, you know what, you know, saying, oh, we have a recession. You know, people, there's gas lines. And the Shalgo goes, well, you'll get used to it. Yeah. So it's this very complicated thing. I feel it was kind of, there was an element of revenge to it. So, I mean, that sort of starts me thinking about where we are today again and what has led us here. So, you know, we've had, we've had this before where the West characterises a leader, particularly in the East, whether it be in the Arab world or Iran, you know, a taught little boy, somebody not to, you know, and then they get it so wrong,

they got it wrong with Assad, you know, they thought, this is a boy who's grown up in our universities, someone we can do businesses, someone we can control. Ophthalmology and acting. Yes, I mean, he's one of us, he's one of us. Can we talk about Reza now, the crown prince? I mean, tell me about him, because I suppose everybody wants to know, know, everyone's talking about him.

What is he like? Have you met him at the chat? I have not. I tried to interview him for my book and he wouldn't. I interviewed his mother, but he never would get in touch with him. What I always heard is that the younger son was the really smart one. He was one of the two children who committed suicide. He's a one committed suicide.

Yeah. But of course it had to go to the eldest son. But I mean, I've heard this again and again that one of the reasons why the Shah was felt a crisis coming and to the jury he did was he knew. he knew he was very ill. He knew he was not going to be around in 10 years. He had very little confidence in raising in. He had cancer, indeed. He was trying to set things up for a different sort of monarchy for the son. Not a not a constitutional monarchy like in Britain, but something less kind of a strong man than he was, he had. I just want to add one thing. Looking forward, when you look at how the, the, the,

the Iranian Revolution of 79 finally worked. It was economics. They just shut the country down. The entire country went out on strike and was paralyzed for two months. And actually, well, a little bit earlier, it was like November. And so the gears just ground to a halt. And I think if the opposition movement now is smart or has this kind of self-survival idea,

that's the path they'll take now. What do they have to lose? economically they're devastated, just do a nationwide strike and freeze the government. Be done with it. Remita, as an Iranian woman, I mean, what do you think? How is this all going to end, do you think? Well, I think we're agreed on this, Scott, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. You know, my fear is that the Revolutionary Guard are not going to let go of power easily, right? And we're talking about a criminal mafia state. They have done very well from sanctions. They control the black market, they have control of the charitable, the boniards, the charitable

foundations that are worth hundreds and hundreds of millions. You know, it is not for no reason that whenever there have been moves within the more technocratic and reformist parts of government, moves at detente, moves at sanction lifting, talks with the West that the Revolutionary Guard, at that point will grab a dual national as a pawn and imprison a dual national. and scupper any talks that happen. I mean, Nazine Zagari, Radcliffe will have a huge resonance with British audiences. And you get the impression that these guys are really digging in. They're completely ruthless.

They're happy to murder people in large numbers. And they've got nowhere else particularly to go. Exactly. And that's my big fear. And I have heard that they have been sending messages to Trump and there are back channels and they will do anything. And that's what I'm worried about. You know, Trump is, you know, he's a.

businessman. I'm also very suspicious to see in things like the Wall Street Journal articles suggesting the breakup of Iran and other options like this. Well, that's what Israel wants, right? I mean, that would be an Israel friendly Iran. There are many powers in the region that would benefit by,

that have benefited over the last 30, 40 years from a weak Iran. Iran is potentially the strongest state in the Middle East. It has brilliant people, there's high education, it has enormous oil wealth still and properly run it could be the great power again in the Middle East.

Many, many powers, not just the Israelis, but the Dubai, Qatar, Saudis, they don't want that. They do not want a strong Iran. And the idea of either a hobbled Iran, with the Mueller's damaged Mueller government still clinging on or an Iran which is broken up with maybe a sort of Kurdish enclave or something, these are, Iran's enemies have all sorts of options that they would prefer to a resurgent, democratic, free Iran

with its people liberated to rise up and take over the region. Right. So, I mean, look, in conclusion, we don't know because we're right in the middle of it at the moment. But it has been so extraordinary at this moment in history to have you both in the room. So very grateful for your time. Pleasure to be here.

And particularly, thank you for doing this so quickly. This has been turned around very, very short notice. Neither of you knew this was happening in this form a few hours ago. No, we didn't either. To be fair. We just met on a bus. We met on a bus week, Anita. I mean, that's not even a joke.

Oh, I was like, this woman is utterly fascinating. But it has been a real pleasure and an insight. Thank you both very much indeed. My pleasure. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William, Durember. We recorded these episodes on January the 17th, 2026. As of January the 30th, 2026, the US-based human rights activist news agency has confirmed that 5,459 protesters in Iran have died,

and the organisation is investigating 17,031 more. Two senior figures of Iran's Ministry of Health have reported that as many as 30,000 people have been killed. In such a volatile situation, predictions is difficult to make, and these figures are ever-changing, but relentlessly rising.