Fourth Reich Archaeology - #078 - Contra Iran, Side A

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

This week we dig deep into Iran. We go all the way back to the country’s entree into modernity and its role as a nominally independent nation amidst and between competing empires in The Great Game. We also go a bit deeper into the political forces that gave rise to the first Shah of Iran, which is a real Fourth Reich fairytale involving Nazis, Brits, and of course that black gold, oil. You know we dig into the rise and fall of the great lost hope for democracy, Mohammed Mossadegh. All he wanted was for Iran to get half the profits from his country’s oil, and instead he got ousted and replaced by a 26-year long dictatorship, replaced by the Islamic Republic in 1979.Basically we cover about 250 years of Iranian history and tell a story that we just have not been hearing in the news these days. In Side B, we will take it to the present day and give our analysis on the current protests and the factional formations popping up to prepare a hostile takeover of the roiling nation. It is a time for clear thinking, for historical understanding, for only through consciousness of our role in reality can we act in history. And act we must.

All right, we're recording. How you be, dog? I'm all right. How you doing? I've been better, but given everything that's going on, given everything we're about to talk about today, I think it's important to take a moment and reveal to everyone that I am an Iranian-American. I was born in the United States, but I've been to Iran. I've been to Iran for an extended stay. I have family in Iran. I have family in the United States. I have family who was killed during the Shaw's regime. I have family that was killed during the Ayatollah's regime. So this episode is very personal for me, and I feel like I owe it to all of you to have that disclaimer right here at the top, because there is no way we are going to get through two hours plus of this show without being a little divisive, without

making a few people unhappy and without inevitably resorting to some reductionism because it's such a big subject. It's such a big subject for me, but really such a big expansive topic. When you're talking about Iran, you're reckoning with thousands and thousands of years of history. And when I was thinking about this episode and how to best approach it, I think that it's really important as we go through the discussion today for everyone out there to keep three points in mind, maybe in the back of your mind as you hear our discussion because it can sometimes get lost in the modern discourse. What the sort of overarching things that are going on in the country today, it's hard to make sense of it without having this context and this history. And so I'm just going to go right

into it. So there are three points that I want everybody to keep in mind as they're listening to today's episode, at least in my view, very important. The first of which is that Iran is a country that has something like 2,000 years of monarchy, a history of having kings or shaws that were ruling with full authority over the realm. And it's also a country where the people have desired a democracy, a republic of representative democracy, easily for 120, 130 years. And they've never really gotten that through all of the regime changes that we're going to talk about today. They've come close and there's certainly been times where Iran's parliament has been more reflective of this idea of pluralism, of having everyone have a seat at the table and or

points where this has been contracted. But I don't think it's super-contracted. controversial to say that the Iranian people that have never really achieved this democratic republic that they so desperately yearned for. Now, the second point I want to talk about is that Iran is incredibly diverse. Very much overlooked, isn't it, the ethnic diversity in Iran? Yes, it's overlooked and historically and geographically, it's a country, it's a region that's on the what was called the Silk Road. So there has been for millennia, trade routes that have been going through the country.

And as a result, you have people of all ethnicities. You have people of all backgrounds. Not to mention the region itself is situated in such a way where you have part of the country is closer to Europe, closer to Russia, closer to Afghanistan. And then as you move further south, you have it more Arabis, so to speak. And so you have a country that is incredibly diverse and you have all walks of life. You have all sorts of Iranian. If you want to talk about race, you got black Iranians, you got brown Iranians, you got everyone's favorite white Iranians.

You have Iranians that present as Chinese or Mongolian. And you have this plurality of ethnicities and races. And just to break that down, Iran is 60% what you would identify as Persian. So 60% of the population, I think, would identify as Persian with their origins coming from that south central part of the country where the Persian Empire ruled for something like 1,500 years ago. Then 20% of the country identifies Turks or Turkic. And 10% are Kurdish. Then another 10% are a mix of Baluchi, Arab, Armenian, Georgia. Assyrian and Mazuruni.

So there's a mix of religions as well, and the country is, while it is majority Shia, and I'll get to that in a minute, but there's also a small population of Christians and Jewish peoples and Zoroastrians. And today it is a country of 90 million people, over 60% of whom are under the age of 30, and that's going to be critical, I think, for today's discussion as well. Now, the third point I want to talk about is that, at least historically speaking, Iran's political history and its society is deeply connected to Shia Islam. For those of you who don't know, you can think of Shias as the underdog of the Muslim-Sunni-Shi

Shia split. They're a smaller branch of the religion. And just a very high-level reason for that is that, so the Prophet Muhammad, he didn't have any sons. He didn't have a male heir. daughter Fatima married Ali who was very close to Muhammad, very close to the family, and Muhammad considered this man, Ali, as his son. And the Shias, they view Ali as the rightful, spiritual and political successor to Muhammad. And of course, when Muhammad died, his companions,

they rejected this and they appointed Abu Bakr as the rightful successor. And from that starts over a thousand years of bloodshed that we won't get into here today, but we will want you to just sort of keep these things in the back of your mind. And lastly, on this religion point, I do have a couple big caveats. And that is that even today, there are Christians in Iran, there are Jewish people in Iran, and of course, Erastrians, all of whom are recognized by the Islamic Republic. And it's critical that I also point out that there are people of the Bahahi faith who reside in Iran who are not recognized by the government and indeed are persecuted by the government as heretics and they're suffering because of this Islamic Republic regime.

The second big caveat is that while culturally and politically and historically the Iranian people are Muslim and have identified as Shia Muslim very strong roots with Shia Islam, at least as of late there appears to be an increased disillusionment with Islam, especially among that younger generation, that younger population, who make up the majority of the population. So again, it's going to be impossible to do a show today on this subject in two hours without making some pretty sweeping generalizations. So we're going to try our best. And there's going to be caveats and nuance and all of that that I'm sure we're going to encounter along the way. And we will do our best to avoid any major generalizations. And I think with that we should just start

the show. Yeah, you want to say it in Farsi? Yes, yes, yes, yes. I definitely want to do that. So here goes. Salam, dostana, aziz. Chishamadine, Islam of this banaméma as Bastan-Shenasee of Chowron. Hell yeah. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region. now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of Science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're to CIA. Now he has a model. He knows so long as it died. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor.

A lot of killers. You've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? I don't know. The CIA. This is Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. I'm done.

And we are back with another emergency dispatch. That's right, listener. We are living in one of those times where Lenin warned us that there are years where nothing happens and there are weeks where years happen. And that is 2026 so far. I don't think anybody can deny it. So this emergency dispatch, or at least as of this recording, we're recording on the night of Monday, January 12th, and of course the events are rapidly developing on the ground. But as of now, there's not yet been a toppling of the Islamic Republic of Iran. there's not yet been a U.S. decapitation strike.

And so we are getting this out and hopefully getting it out in time to get ahead of those potentially imminent events. And I think that, you know, unlike a lot of the previous panics over Iranian regime change, this one might indeed be different. but we'll get into all of that later. First, before we get started, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to our patrons, and thank you to our non-patrons. You know, if you cannot at this time give us a little bit of your hard-earned paycheck,

we still love you very much, and we ask that you pay us in kind by simply leaving a review. by rating the podcast and by spreading the word. And of course, we'd also love to hear from you, whether it be on social media, on Twitter or Instagram at Fourth Reich POD, or via email at forthrightekpod at gmail.com. And just as a little bit of a promo for our Patreon, wanted to let everybody know that we have a hotline over the there that we have indeed given a bit of a preview of some of the subject matter of this

episode on a previous hotline episode available to patrons only and very, very soon we are starting to roll out for our higher tiered patrons live Q&A sessions with ya boys. And so I think it's not going to be in January, but it will be, I'm saying it now, it will be in February. So if you want to sign up at one of those higher tiers and kick it for a couple hours, sometime in February, go ahead and do that at patreon.com slash forthrighte archaeology. Now, I think we better not waste any more time and you should just get right into this episode. So by way of an overview, a little roadmap of what is to come, let us say the following. So as we, as anybody who's not living under a rock will be aware, the Trump administration is real hot off of what they are boasting as a

big old W in Venezuela, with the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, with what they are at least asserting is their control over Venezuelan oil. Of course, the situation on the ground is by no means that clear and cut and dry, and it's not clear whether the regime has changed, so to speak, and it's not clear what is going to happen next. And I would certainly not go so far as to say that anything on the ground vindicates the illegal U.S. coup carried out last week. And of course, we did issue an episode on that subject in continuation of our Geopolitic seven episodes. So check those out if you've not already. because all of this shit is connected.

And when I say it's all connected, what I mean is that the moves going on with the administration in Iran are obviously influenced by what has recently happened in Venezuela. So, you know, Trump obviously, I found myself agreeing with a clip that I saw of the former Biden communications director or press secretary, Jen Psi, the other day. I don't know, you saw this dick, but she was talking about how Trump's addictive personality, you know, he's looking for that dopamine hit and is not necessarily thinking through things, but is really moving from one issue, one area of the world to another.

trying to generate headlines, trying to generate accolades and acclaim and accomplishments that he can put on those golden plaques that he is so fond of. And I think there is something to that, because clearly his attention is now shifted in a large part to Iran. And what he perceives as this momentum that he can continue to push forward in kind of checking off the boxes on the list of the neocon wish list that has really been circulating since the days of the project for a new American century penned in part by the original Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. So, you know, Iran obviously is a current target for regime change, but that does not mean it is a new target for regime change. It is a very, very old target for regime change.

And indeed, it has been a proving ground for regime change operations. Absolutely. And I got to think all of the ghouls that are surrounding themselves. around President Trump, not to mention the ghoul in chief himself, they are watching all of this. And if they're not actively participating in misinformation, in propaganda, in efforts to actually effectuate a regime change in the country, they are watching with glee. And especially those surrounding him, you know, I'm talking about the Marco Rubios, the Pete Higgsatsats, the Stephen Miller's.

I got to think that in their minds, they are thinking. that hey if it gets close enough it gets to the point where actually wouldn't take that much effort to go in there and switch things up well we got to present that option to President Trump because here he can be yet again take the credit for bringing democracy to a new realm and it just makes me sick all of the propaganda the machine at play today when you turn on the news and you you see the headlines and we're going to talk about CBS in their interview with Reza Pahlavi, who is the grandson of the great unifier, supposed unifier of the Iranian Empire, the modern state of Iran. We'll talk about that in a little bit, in a little bit, but when you see the news media, when you see the propaganda, when you see all of this stuff coming at you, there is an utter lack of any historical context. There is an utter lack of any sort of acknowledgement of how complex and how big the issues are. And that's really what we're going to try and fill. We're

going to try and fill that gap because you ought to know, listener, that this is forthright archaeology. And we won't just cover the headlines. We are going to try our best to give you some context, to give you some history so that you can go out there and make your own judgments and make your own assessments and decide what is the truth. Yeah. And it's a situation that, you know, provides equal opportunities to right-wingers, left-wingers, centrists, mainstream media, independent media, politicians of both parties and the commentariat at large to get very, very wrong. And they do get so much, so wrong all the fucking time. But on Fourth Reich archaeology, our goal is to educate, to clarify, and to speak a little bit of truth, even when that truth

doesn't give easy answers or easy positions to adopt that are really on offer from the mainstream take vendors out there in these electronic streets of the internet. That's right, out in these digital streets. And in this episode, this episode is really going to lend itself to all of the things that we'd love to talk about here on program. We love, of course, to talk about our boy, Gidey Board, and we love to talk about the spectacle and the integration of the spectacle that occurred in the post-world era. Well, guess what? The situation in Iran in the post-war era, that is a ripe, fertile, untrodded ground to explore how the spectacle has played out. We are also going to talk about some of the foundational truths of

our message of our project that of course being the concept of imperialism and how that really has shaped the the world today so the stuff that happened in the late 18th century in the in the late 19th century I'm sorry and in the early 20th century how that has very much shaped the world today and again what we are trying to do here is give that much needed context and we think that this is another place where we can really offer some value to all of you. Right. It won't take much for you to be the better equipped than those around you, assuming that they are getting their info from any number of these spectacular arms

of the propaganda apparatus. But I think we've said enough to set it up. and three words remain. Alex get a dig again. To all Iranian patriots, keep protesting, take over your institutions if possible and save the name of the killers and the abusers that are abusing you,

you're being very deadly abused. If the numbers are right now, I hear five different sets of numbers. I hear numbers. Look, one death is too much. but I hear much lower numbers and then I hear much higher numbers, but I say save their names because they'll pay a very big price. All right, let's start with a little bit of a history lesson. You know, when most people talk about Iran, they either start by talking about the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great, which is thousands of years ago, or they start in the mid-20th century and talk about Dr. Mohamed Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, and then of course,

the coup and then of course resa palavi the second and when they do that they usually get a lot wrong which is easy to do because there's a lot going on and i like to tell the story starting from the late 19th early 20th century the age in which all of these nations were coming up and the age of imperialism and the age of empire and the way we do that the story that we tell when we do that when it comes to Iran is we talk about Persia and we talk about the Qajar dynasty. And the Qajars came into power in the middle of the 18th century, late 18th century. So think like 1770, 1780, I think around then. At that time, Iran had been embroiled in civil wars for quite some time following the Safavid Empire.

and the region was really reduced to these loose amalgamations of chieftains and tribes and towns that didn't really have a connection with one another. Of course, they were mostly all Muslim, mostly all Shia Muslim, and they had a really strong connection with their local clerics and the clerics of the area. But there was no unifying force. And that's where the Qajars come in, starting with Oghur Muhammad Khan. Glasier is the first of his dynasty, the first of the name. And he is a northerner. He comes from the southern Caspian in a province right on the southern base of the Caspian Sea. He's got Turkic ethnicity and some connection with the Russians.

But he's just the guy. He's a chieftain. And he is able to unify the country. And he's a, he is a brutal guy. famously, the Iranian dads will tell their kids about the time. Mohamed Khan took the city of Kermon, which is a town in the south of Iran, in the south central of Iran. And he laid siege to the town. And when he finally took over, this guy took all the guys, all the soldiers that were fighting against him, all the people of the town, all the men of the town.

And either when they were dead, either with their dead bodies or even when they were alive, he plucked their eyeballs. out and created a pile of 20,000 eyeballs. Although you got to imagine there was probably some fucking plantation owner in North America doing similar body park collections. So, you know, we want to be clear. We're not an Orientalist podcast here. We're equal opportunity as always. But that's wild, though, about the eyeballs.

Yes, right, of course. We're, I don't want to, you know, at risk of making this sound like, you know, these are backwards people. I want to be clear, like, this is a story that we tell in, you know, this is a story I heard from my father. So it's not like this exoticism that I'm trying to do. And I think, to be fair, that's a whole lot of eyeballs. That's a lot of eyeballs.

And this was happening in like 1789 or 1790 or something like that. So it's like the same time as like the Judiciary Act is coming out in the United States. This is happening in Iran in Kermon. So that was how it's. started and but how it's going in the late 19th early 20th century it's not going so good by the time we get to sort of the turn of the century it's the waning years of the Qajar dynasty and at this point you know they can be described in a lot of ways they were these ruthless unifiers and they created this Qajar dynasty that had ruled now for over a hundred years um but

They were now just living in a life of opulence and excess and corruption. And they were wasting a lot of money. They were taking out loans to do these great tours of the realm and the great tours of the region. They were taking these loans from the Russians, from the Brits. They were holding auctions for high office. They would go to a town or city and basically auction off official positions. for whoever was the highest bidder. And they were largely just spending time in their court.

And, you know, they were hopped up on opium. They were strung out on opium. So I don't think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to call these gaujars towards the end of the dynasty as a bunch of strung out drug addicts that were basically just living, not even paycheck to paycheck. right classic decadent empire shit totally 100% and before we move on I just want to identify some of the

other key players in the time one of them was the religious clerics theologians the mullahs the people who were effectively the church and a way that you can think about this and honestly doesn't do it justice but think about how the you know the Catholic church sort of existed as a separate sort of arm of the state or the empire or whatever for so many for so many numbers of years in iran you have the clergy but the clergy wasn't just handling matters of religion they were very much in the political space as well they were handling matters of society of law of disputes between people and so it wasn't just that they were handling religion they were very much part of the social governance of the place. And of course, you know, I might be saying

Iran at this time, the place was still called Persia. Sometimes you hear it referred to as Qajar, Persia or the Qajar Persian Empire or the Qajar dynasty. So, you know, that's the clerics. And the other sort of key player at the time were the army, which was for the Qajars, it was effectively the Cossacks or the Persian Cossacks. And yes, it's exactly as it sounds, right? These are the cavalry that were in Tsarist Russia. Well, the Persians went over to Russia and they took a liking to them and they actually trained their own Cossacks. And they were ethnically from that same similar region of the Turkic region, the Turkic people. So the Cossacks were, in Persia, at least, sell swords for the Qajars, oftentimes serving effectively as,

their army, but then sometimes, as we'll see, were in charge of dethroning and deposing the ruler and putting in place the ruler that they wanted. And so as we move on in this discussion of the 19th, early 20th century, it's important to remember that Iranian society, it had these three major players. And it was, by and large, a developed society with a developed economy. There was a lot of poverty. There was a huge peasant class, but there were, of course, a merchant class, the bizarrest, or there was also a class of the Ulama, which are these scholars, and there were reformists, and of course, there were people that were better off than others, and of course, the Shah of the time would have certain favorites and appointees and all of that, but by and

large, the country, the populace, was very poor. So now it's time, I think it makes sense for me to introduce why it is we're talking about the Qajars, why it is we're talking about the early 1900s. And the reason is, you guessed it, it's because of oil. Well, it's sort of a perfect storm of events, but it all includes our favorite empire, the British Empire. And they love an opium-addicted, decadent ruling class. I mean, that is, to the Brits, like, You know, second only to a vulnerable child that they can assault as a tasty snack. Don, my man, I can't tell you how on the nose you were with that comment. Because with the Qajars, the Brits got both.

Because the Qajar's last Shah in power, the last of the dynasty, I think his name was Ahmad Shah. he took power when he was like 11 or 12 years old he was a but a tween when he took took the throne but let's get back to the Brits for a moment so the Brits are in the region of course they're in the region already because of their business interests in India they're doing such horrific acts to the land and the people of India extracting all of those resources extracting all of that labor. But one of the problems they're having is that when they're transporting the goods that they are stealing from the land, they are oftentimes being intercepted by pirates in the Persian Gulf in an area that is still very much a strategic position, the Strait of Hormuz, which is you'll hear it in

the news all the time because it really does serve as this strategic position. But the Brits at the time, they were constantly getting attacked. Their ships were constantly getting attacked. And so they wanted to increase their presence in the region. Another reason for their desire to increase presence was because of Tsarist Russia and the Russian Empire, which was not too far away in the north. The Brits at the time had been engaging in what was called the Great Game, vying for power in Central Asia. And so they really wanted a presence there for that. but the big reason, there's the first reason, was oil.

And the Brits knew around the turn of the 19th to 20th century that oil was really going to shape the 20th century, right? There was going to be this move from coal power to oil power. And oil was going to be the lifeblood of society, of the future. And they knew that they needed to get their own business concern when it comes to oil. because at the time you had two major oil companies. The first, not a surprise to anyone, standard oil in America. The other was the Royal Dutch Shell Company, and this was actually a merger between a British company and a Dutch company,

and the Dutch actually enjoyed a better part of the split. It was like a 60-40 split in profits, and the Dutch were enjoying the best. better part of that. They were getting that 60%. So the Brits, they weren't exactly enemies with the USA at this point, and they weren't exactly enemies with the Dutch. But they wanted their own thing in case anything ever happened to those two business concerns, if anything happened to their relations with those countries. So they were on a mission, on a mission to find oil. And, well, when it's the early 20th century, how do you do that? There's a couple ways, right? If anyone's seen,

there will be blood. It's actually pretty, pretty basic stuff, right? You just go out and walk until you find perhaps some rocks that are signifiers, some, um, geologic formations that signify that maybe there's oil around or if you're lucky, you might just step in oil. And once you do, you start digging and you start pulling it out of the earth at that time. You were doing it literally with buckets. Eventually you start, you know, seeing a development in how to extract oil and pumps and all of that. But in the early years, it was really as basic as that. And they knew that there was oil in the area. And this is one of my favorite little nuggets. One of the reasons they knew that there was oil in the areas, when they were looking for a region to

explore, to search for oil, they turned to their history books. And they, when they did that, they saw that thousands of years ago, over a thousand years ago, in the region that is now called so-called Middle East, right? We're talking about North Africa, Southern Asia. In that region, there were civilizations, there were societies that would light up their streets at night with oil lamps. So they think, aha, Eureka, there's going to be some oil there. And so what they do is They carve out what is now Kuwait from the Ottomans, and they, you know, start working in the area. And through their relation with the Qajars already, they sort of strike a deal. And they strike a deal that is a legendary deal.

So the deal is that they say, hey, Qajars, will give you 20,000 pounds sterling, which is like the equivalent of $2.6 million today, something around. that, right? They say, we'll give you this, and then we will go out and search for oil, and whatever we find, you get 16% and we get 84%. That is a deal of a lifetime. That is a deal that actually is ultimately what causes all of the trouble in the mid-20th century, as we'll see in a minute. But the Qajars are of course dopesick and strung out and they say, hell yes, we will take that deal. And there you have the beginnings of the Anglo-Persian oil company.

So the Qajar Shah that was responsible for this bunk deal, his name was Mozaffar al-Din. And he really took power at a time of financial crisis. Like I said, they were taking loans. They were taking loans to pay for loans. They owed money to the Brits, to the Russians, to the French, and the people were not happy. They were especially not happy with the extravagant lifestyle that Mosafer was living and the excesses of the royal court. And there was an increased suspicion in the foreign meddling in the government.

So among the educated, among the aristocrats, they were very concerned with how much indebted the Persian monarchy was to foreign interests. And society was not doing so great. You know, Mozafi tried to do some reforms. And part of this reform movement, and it's actually a very grassroots movement from the, you know, Iranian people to create this. representative democracy, pluralism, where every different, all walks of life would have a seat at the table. And there were protests in the streets and there were protests out in the country. And it was like a real grassroots movement, not unlike, even more so than the Young Turks Revolution, right? Because the Young Turks Revolution was very much sort of limited to reformists and educated

elites and actually this happened a year before in 1907 so now we're talking about 1907 mozapar is trying to make some concessions to his people one of those concessions is accepting the suggestion that iran should have a parliament what they'll call the majlis and it's a sort of assembly of exactly of like a pluralist society right It's an assembly where people would have representation. It wouldn't just be the king ruling. And after he establishes this majolus, I think it was in 1906 or 1907, within 40 days he dies of a heart attack.

And then his son, Muhammad Ali, he takes over. And I think he storms the maglis and shuts it down. And then I think pretty promptly after that, the constitutionalists come in, they overthrow him, and then like within two years, the parliament comes back. Ali Shah, I think, lasted maybe two years of time. And we got the Majlis again. We got the parliament again. And the people have a voice again. And this is where the last Qajar comes in in, I think it's like 1909.

And that is Ahmad Shah. And again, he was like 11 or 12 years old. And I think his uncle was serving as the, the, the, vizier or advisor or whatever hand of the king and was running the place but the the shaw of iran at the early 20th century is just the kid but this is a good time to talk about the majolus which i'm going to refer to as a parliament but it's really called the sort of the consultative assembly of iran the majolus is still around today it's taken a different form but it's this idea of pluralism again it's this idea of a representative democracy it is the thing that iranians were yearning for

120 years ago, 130 years ago, and it is really the vehicle that they use for this idea of things like universal suffrage and things like modernity and progressivism and sort of shifting the country into the 20th century so that it can be a major player in the world, in this modern world right alongside the great empires of the UK and the French and the Russians. And in the lead up to World War I, what we see is this expansion and contraction of power of the parliament. The people, the reformists, the merchant class, they very much wanted a voice, they very much wanted a seat at the table.

the clerics, they did not. They did not want the people to have such a strong voice. They wanted to keep power where it sat with them and with the Shah, at least for the most part. I mean, there were some reformist clerics, but if we're talking in broad strokes, you can think even back then the clerics didn't trust the people. And it's not unlike how, you know, the founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, didn't just trust anyone to have a voice in how, you know, the government would be run. And so the clerics, they were in that camp.

They didn't think that people could be trusted to run their own affairs. And guess who else fell into that camp? Yeah, those, let me guess, the Western imperialists. That's right. And so you guessed, right, and you can guess that they actually made some bedfellows there together. And even back then, there was a sentiment among the people that the clerics were in the pocket of foreign interests because they were. They were taking money from the Brits. They were taking money from the outside influence so that they can maintain control of the people.

So now World War I has come and let's just speed right through it. This isn't going to be a World War I podcast. We're just laying the groundwork here. But World War I is coming to an end. And a year before the Treaty of Versailles, the British and the French get together and form what's called the Sykes-Pico Treaty. And it's effectively them in private carving up the Ottoman Empire. At this point, everyone knows. full well that there is a fuck ton of oil in the region. The Qajars are very pissed off about this because

they made that deal with the Brits in 1901 and well now they know that how bad of a deal it was. But the French and the Brits, they get together and in private they just look at a map and they start carving the place up. This is where you end up with things like, you know, Syria and Lebanon going to French rule. What is now called. Jordan and of course the British mandate of Palestine that goes to the Brits but it's not just them making a deal for themselves they're like giving pieces of land to others too right they give pieces of Turkey to the Greeks and they the Brits actually wanted to strike a deal with the Russians where they would split up Persia into two separate states so the Brits would take the south

they would annex the south of Persia and the Russians would take the north and they wanted to do this to split up the Qajars, to split up the empire so that there wouldn't really be a threat there. And they were very close to making this deal, but as far as I can tell, the only reason the deal didn't happen is that neither side really could bear seeing the other side able to annex that much property that could potentially give them an edge. So this doesn't happen. It's important because it is for this reason you can say that Iran was never a country that was colonized. by any of these empires. And it's really one of only a handful of countries that came up in this time that could say that.

And it is a point of pride. It's a weird, stupid point of pride for Iranians. But it is something to sort of note about what happened here. And it's something to note about really what the norm was of the time. You know, I said it was stupid. I guess I mean it's silly. And the reason I say that is because, yes, they weren't colonized.

But don't forget, they were totally taken advantage of, right? the cajars were totally taken advantage of by all of these countries. They were able to maintain their sovereignty, but at what cost, right? They owed all this money to all these other empires, and they let these other foreign interests come in and bribe their clerics and sort of play each other against each other. And so when I say it's stupid, I don't, it's sort of tongue in cheek, but, you know, for me, it's like, what difference does it make?

If I may just on that World War I point, like, I think, that our listeners should clock on to the outsized role that is almost never taught among the causes of World War I of the discovery of oil in, I believe Mosul in southern Iraq was the first place that the Brits uncovered oil and everybody soon glommed on to the existence of these vast reserves in the region. And what the Brits and the Western imperialist powers could not abide was that the Germans had very good relations with the Ottoman Empire and were planning to build a Berlin to Baghdad railway, which would essentially establish this route for raw materials and compete in a very meaningful way with what the Brits had going on with their Eastern possessions at the time.

And I remember learning about that for the first time and really having my mind blown a bit. So we won't get into it any more than that, but just, you know, as more of this larger context, this broader picture that we're painting. here to keep that in mind that like the arrangement of alliances including the Germans getting into these alliances in the Middle East which will become important again a little bit later on in the history to just bear it in mind for now absolutely part of this a good part of this is effectively a competition for resources to see who could fuel their army, their navy, better, who could use this lifeblood of industry to create the bigger, better, better, better empire. And that brings us to the closing of World War I.

And really, the focus now is the Russian Revolution. So the Russian Revolution happening in around 1917, Iran had become a battleground. The Brits were using Iran as, as a launching off point to get into Russia and they were essentially just raising the ground, right? The Iranian landscape had become a war zone, and Russia becomes the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union now is extracting more and more humiliating and extreme concessions from the Qajars. Remember, it's Ahmad Shah, Qajars, the last. guy and he's just the wee little boy even though i think at this point he's probably in his 20s he is a bitch boy i'm sorry to say he is terrified of everything he's unable to keep control of the place

and the british have no faith in the guy the russians the soviets now are totally taking advantage of the guy the brits are taking advantage of the guy as well right and the country is just in a terrible way. It's what you would consider a failed state pretty much, right? The Shah is hold up in his Golistan palace in Tehran. He doesn't really leave Tehran. He doesn't really leave his palace. The Qajar dynasty is a laughing stock. And now we can start talking about what becomes the Pahlavi dynasty, which starts with Reza Khan, who is, is a Cossack Brigadier General and Reza Khan he's from the north of Iran he's I think Turkic ethnicity he presents as like a white guy he's from the the Caucasus mountains his

families from what will they call him in Iran is the Reza Jangali which is like you know he's of the jungle and he's not really from the jungle but he's from the north of Iran from the the wooded area of Iran and he is a Cossack and again it's the Cossack Don, I'm sure you can probably explain it better than me. I like to think of them as sell swords, but I think most of our listeners know who the Cossacks are in terms of Tsarist Russia. Yeah, exactly. The guys that did all the pogromes.

Exactly. Brutes on horseback. Famously, just you think of like the stereotypical characters in Soviet cinema that are just constantly drinking vodka out of the bottle. 100%. Yeah, 100%. rampaging, totally uncultured, you know, goons, so to speak. 100%. And to be clear, like, in Iranian cinema, you have the same of historical cinema,

you have the same sort of look instead of drinking vodka, they're drinking tea, and eating, you know, head and hoof soup. So it's the same sort of vibe, exactly. And Reza Shah is one of them. He's a Persian Cossack. Remember, the Qajars went over to Russia and they really liked. what the Cossacks were doing. And so the Russians during the Tsarist, Russia, they helped them establish a Persian Cossack

outfit. And so Reza Khan is one of these guys. And he is a, you know, a little bit of his background. He was born into a family. His dad was a soldier. But he was very poor. He's a peasant. And so he doesn't really have a education.

doesn't have like a great background other than he is a soldier he's a he's a fighter and him and his boys like maybe 2,000 3,000 of his compatriots he creates this band of kurds and armenians and other fighters resistance fighters and with some help from the british he is able to to make a run onto the capital. And with very minimal effort, he is able to take over the city and effectively take over the country pretty easily. I think the lore is that he only had like 15 or 16 machine guns and a couple thousand people.

And he was able to do it. Don't forget that the last Qadjar Ahmad Shah, he was, I think at this point he must have been in his 20, his mid-20s, but he was a bitch boy, capital B, capital B. So he didn't really put up much of a fight. So the thing that Reza Shah does is at this point, he's like in charge of the army. He puts his friend in place as the prime minister. So he goes over to the Majlis, the parliament, and he puts his friend in power.

And within a couple of years, he's like, no, actually, you got to leave. I'm going to be prime minister. but this is where the clerics step in again, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we can't have this. We can't have this modernization of Iran, so swiftly we can't have this movement of having this legislative body with all this power. And Reza Shah convinces the parliament to, through legislation, depose or dethrone Ahmad Khan and coronate him as the, Shah of Iran. And this is the start of the Palavi dynasty. And once Reza Khan becomes Reza Shah, he is able to push out the Soviets. He's able to get control of the whole country. And he does make some modernization efforts and he does bring the country towards the 20th century towards

modernity. But he is also, I mean, he's a Shah. And he's a Shah. And he does bring the country. And he does bring the country towards the 20th century towards modernity. But he is also, I mean, he's a shaw and he is a militant shaw. And so he is also ruling with, as much as he's ruling with the, sort of the, with the best intentions, even if it were the best intentions, he's doing it in a kind of a rough way. But now remember, though, he is now, the concentration of power is with him. And of course, the clerics get to keep their power too. and they've effectively rendered the parliament, the Magillus rendered it kind of weak. And this is by design because, of course, remember that the clerics, they are on the Brits' payroll. Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, you think about the British embedding with the Saudi royals and the Saudi clerics and the Arab revolts in the style of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, which has its big media and cinematic representations on screen. But the same type of shit was going on, right? In Iran, just didn't get a movie. No, the movie the Iranians got was not without my daughter with Sally Field and Alfred Molina. And maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit, but everybody should watch it because you want to talk about a movie that vilifies Iranians. That's one of them. But back to Reza Shah. And now we're going to talk about the Pahlavi dynasty. And it can get a little confusing to talk about the Palavis because they're all named Reza Palavi. So we're going to number them. This is Reza

Palavi 1. Pahlavi 1. He's ruling Iran with an iron fist. He does a bunch of great things. He brings security to the country. He kicks out a lot of the foreign influence. He gets a railroad going and we'll get to that in a bit. He actually gets really good at getting the railroads going if you get my drift. And he renames the, he names the country. So the country up until then wasn't a country. It was an empire or the Qajar empire, the Qajar Persian Empire. He is the one who decides to call it Iran. And Iran is a word it's based in, you might have guessed it, the word Aryan. And so for Reza Palavi, Iranians are the original Aryans. And so here you have Reza Palavi. He's this great unifier and it is now the 1930s and he's running the place with an iron fist

so much so that when this thing called fascism starts to take off, he starts looking at the Italians, he starts looking at the Germans and he starts thinking, is it kind of tight. And he starts co-opting and adopting their style. He starts opening up communications with them. And he starts dressing like them. He starts dressing his soldiers and jackboots. And everything gets pretty fascistic pretty quickly to the point where I think it is a bit of trivia here. But in 1938, the first international radio, the first foreign radio that takes off in Iran is the radio belonging to Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Brits aren't far behind, but unfortunately, for Reza Shaw, in the lead-up to World War II, he is taking the side of the fascists. And that just won't do, and that just won't do for the Brits. It won't do for the Soviets. It won't do for the Americans. And remember when Don, you were talking about how there was this play for getting a Baghdad to Berlin train. Well, Iran wanted a part of that, and the Brits wanted to make sure that never happened. So what do the Brits do? They go to the Soviets.

And so Churchill goes to Stalin, and he says, hey, remember way back in the early years of this century where we were trying to make a deal with the Russians to split apart Iran to, so that the Russians take the north and we take the south. Well, why don't we just do that now? And so then you have the Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran in 1941. They take Tehran no problem. They occupy Iran. And then they strike a deal with Reza Shah, with Pahlavi 1. And rather than kill him and kill his whole family, they take him and they strike a deal.

They say, hey, rather than kill you, we are going to exile you. We're going to exile you and your whole family, and they're going to go, you're all going to go someplace nice, someplace warm, some place you like. How's South Africa? Damn. And instead of you dying here and now, a quick death, will give you your life and will actually let you have some of your money. And better yet, your eldest son, Reza Palavi, never mind that he's just 22 years old. we are going to agree to let him take charge so long as he's on our side and that's exactly what happens and so in 1942 palavi two resa palavi two the sun now in nineteen forty two palavi two he signs this

tripartite treaty with the brits and the soviets and within that treaty there's this promise that the brits and the soviets they're going to leave iran alone six months after cessation of hostilities in World War II. And after that, in 1943, Iran goes from being a big fan of Germany to declaring war on Germany. Oh my God.

This is what qualifies it for that seat at the table for the UN, a seat that it has to this day. So this is now really when the rubber hits the road. And this is why I started with such a long history for this country, because it really is a beautiful thing.

Oh my God. Man, fucking time is such a flat circle. I swear to God. So let me recap this and let me see if I get this straight because it's pretty amazing what you just laid down here. So we've got Reza Shah. He is this iron-fisted Cossack ruler who comes to power 1925 lines up with the jackbooted fascist. over their shared Aryan identity, welcomes the Nazis and wants to be friend to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Yes, exactly. And then this guy, Riza Shah, he gets kind of cornered by the allied powers,

by the Brits and the Russians, who had long had sights on dividing up and conquering. Iran for the oil access. And those dudes are like, hey, Nazi dad, Riza Shah, go thy ways to South Africa and live amongst the whites. And your son, Riza Pahlavi, or is it Pahlavi, right? Palavi, they're all Pahlavi. So, you know, it's going to get confusing, but yes, Pahlavi. 22-year-old beamish boy will take the reins of state as long as he breaks your affinity with Nazi Germany and lines up with us. And Rizapalovia is like, sure, okay. And that's what you call a motherfucking fourth Reich love story because that's exactly right.

This is the Fourth Reich we're talking about after all. It is the fucking Fourth Reich. I swear, it just everywhere you look, every rock you overturn, there is that symbol. It's the fourth Reich. That's right. That's right. It is the Fourth Reich. It is a very bad thing.

It's been going on forever. All of these leaders, and no matter where you look, by and large, for the most part, they are making treaties agreements of convenience they're doing what they can to keep power in power to keep the everyday person down and to keep on making that cheta that is all it's about that's all it's ever been about that is all it is ever going to be about unless we do something and we do something first by educating ourselves and by the way it's just one of thing that Iranians old timers will say all the time about Pahlavi 1 when they're sort of saying how good he was and how great he was for the country is that they'll say well you know he did some

bad things he did some good things one of them was he got the trains running through the country he set up the train infrastructure it goes to your point don about the Germans because and this is actually maybe the Italians but what do they always say about fascists they love getting some on-time-ass trains. They do love getting them trains running on time. Getting in on that Fourth Reich train, baby. Okay, so let's come back. Now we're talking about Reza Pahlavi 2, the Sun,

and Iran is now part of the Allies. And technically, it is one of the key players in the region, because in 1943, you have what's called the Tehran, conference. It's the big three, Churchill, Stalin, FDR, their meeting in Iran, in Tehran, in the Soviet embassy. And it was during this time that through FDR and others, the USA was also giving assurances to Iran that once the war was over, well, they would respect Iran as a sovereign. And by the way, Don, you're going to love this. Our longtime Jerryheads are going to love this. Spit it

FDR travels to Iran on board Partly on board the USS Iowa Which was the largest ship in the Navy He crosses the Atlantic using the USS Iowa And our Jerry heads out there Their ears will perk up because The USS Iowa Well that was part of the fleet that was in the Pacific

And got stuck in Typhoon Cobra That typhoon that almost took the life of the accidental president, Jerry Ford. Oh, no way. Small world. Another piece of trivia that I just want to cover here. It's one that I like. It's this plot, this Nazi plot, this alleged Nazi plot called Operation Long Jump.

You see, apparently the Nazis had a plan for the big three while they were in Tehran, and that plan was to take all three of them out. Churchill, Stalin, and FDR, take them all out and win the war in 1943 as sort of a Hail Mary, right? And it was the Soviets that turned the Brits in the U.S. on this. They say, hey, guys, it looks like the Germans are trying to, they're up to something. But don't worry, we were able to diffuse that plot. And after the war, the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.S. and the U. the Brits, they sort of dismissed this. They say, well, this never happened. This is, this is all fake. The Russians made this up. The Soviets made this up. And what's funny is that the former SS officers, they also would say that this is all a bunch of bologna, famously Otto Scorsani. Heard heard that name before?

Oh, Hitler's favorite commando, of course. That's right. The SS officer turned Mossad asset. He says that it was bologna. Before he died, he was able to weigh in on this. Yeah, long-time CIA asset, Otto Scorsani. So, I mean, when you say the U.S. denies it, and then you say Scorzani denies it, there's a certain redundancy there, in fact. So I'm going to say it's true.

If it's being denied by those fuckers, I'm going to go ahead and say that's true. Well, if it's good enough for you, then it's good enough for me. But let's get back on track, because now is when really most people, when they're talking about Iran, this is the time period they're talking about. And I'm sure that the listener at this point has guessed, they usually make the error of saying that it was not until Project Ajax. It was not until after the U.S. overthrew Mossadegh that they installed the Shah.

No, that is not how it went down. The Shah, Palavi 2, he was already there. He was there since 1941, and the reason he was there was because his dad was a fascist. And in this time period, so this time period of this post-war, and even in the 40s, and even actually during the late 30s, Iran was again going towards a world of modernity. It was going towards secularization, and it was going importantly, critically, Iranians were seeking what they've always been seeking. in this idea of self-determination, this idea of having a representative government, and there was also this movement of getting foreign interests out of their pockets. There was this movement of nationalization.

One of the sectors of the Iranian economy that was just so critical, of course, was oil. And wouldn't you know it that the deal that the Qajars made back in 1901? Well, that deal was pretty much still in place between the Brits and the Iranians. They had done some negotiating. They did some negotiating under Reza Shah 1. They did some negotiating in the 40s.

And they actually did get a little bit of a better deal where it wasn't, you know, what did I say? It was like 84%, 16% in the beginning. At this point, it was something like 83% 7%. 17% or something or maybe 80, 20 or something like that. It was not by any measure a great deal. And this is where most people start talking about Dr. Muhammad Mossadegh. He was a member of the parliament. He was a socialist. He was a nationalist. And he was someone who is in this party called the National Front.

And now with all of this history, with all of this context, we can start talking about the Anglo-Iranian oil company, which was, of course, it started as the Anglo-Persian oil company. That was that company that the Brits and the Qajars got together and they made. And I think rather than continue talking, I think I'd like to just hand the mic over to you because I've been talking for way too. long. So, I mean, this is where kind of the mainstream sort of left-wing American narrative typically picks up, right, with the rise of Mossadegh in the early 50s and the real coming into action, springing into action of this combined force of the CIA and the British SIS slash MI6.

Because, of course, Mossadegh wants to repatriate some of the benefits of the oil company, which, under the deal that you described previously, 84% of the profits from Iranian oil were going straight in to the pockets of some Brits topcoat or perhaps his smoking jacket or perhaps his tuxedo. Where they weren't going was to the Iranian people. And indeed, the 14% or 16% that were going to Iran, I'm not sure, you know, at this point, how much of a control the parliament was able to exert over even that little crumbs from the oil profits. Or even if that was the true number, right?

Whatever it was, if it was like the 84, 16 or whatever the split was at the time, there was no way for the Iranians to know whether they were actually getting that 16% or 17%. They were They were not sure if the Brits were telling them the truth about what the true number was. And so this is why Mossadegh wanted to do that audit. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so Mossadegh gains power as part of a national front and starts asking about the oil company's books to do an audit precisely because he believed that the Iranian people were getting shortchanged by the Brits. And when you're talking about the Brits and the accusation is shortchanging, there's about a 99.5%

chance that the accusation is going to bear out if you analyze the facts. And so, you know, this is all part of the democratic Iranian desire to modernize the country to redistribute the wealth gleaned from its natural resources and bring the country into a more equitable, a more modern way of life. And, you know, over the early years of his reign as prime minister, there's a lot of sort of finagling. There's finagling between the Brits and the Iranians. There's finagling between the U.S. and the Brits. You know, the Brits really want to get rid of Mossadegh from day one.

And ironically, perhaps, the U.S. actually pushed back and refused to go along with the regime change that the Brits wanted to enact. And that delayed things for. a number of years until, you know, finally the CIA under the leadership in the region of Kermit Roosevelt, aka Kim Roosevelt, who believe was FDR's nephew. Yeah, FDR's nephew or I think maybe Teddy Roosevelt's grandson or great-grandson, something like that. I think the point here that you're trying to make and you are making is that all history is family history. Totally. Totally.

And I mean, if he's Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, that would mean that he is summering also with Joe Alsup, right? Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I did not think that we would be making this many connections, but hell yeah. Remember, in the Warren Commission Decided series, we talked about the great. American propagandist Joseph Alsup who was extremely connected to the CIA and the entire Georgetown set that made up the head honchos of the CIA at the time and so again like this is real family history if you look at a family tree of the Roosevelt's like every major name in American

aristocracy, Yankee aristocracy, will probably have married into the Roosevelt family at some point, and will probably have had more discrete and concrete connections with each other at these critical junctures in history, the 1950s, certainly being one of those junctures, where the consensus is. let's use some of these new tools that we've been working on developing in the CIA. Remember, the CIA, I think the first coup that it really popped off was in Syria in 1949, and that's not counting, you know, the putting the thumb on the scale in the Italian elections in 48, or getting involved in the Greek Civil War before that, or many other sort of more tangential interventions.

But in Iran, the Brits, who are always kind of the big brothers to the American intelligence agents really offer the driver's seat. to the CIA, and the CIA is not about to lose that opportunity. Remember, Alan Dulles is head of the agency, John Foster Dulles is Secretary of State, and interestingly, if you look at any of the source material about Operation Ajax, which was the name for the coup that took Mossadegh out, a lot of the files were destroyed. Surprise, surprise. But what's really interesting about it is the way in which even President Eisenhower was left out of the paper trail. And so it does appear, at least according to the records that have survived for posterity, that it's an early instance of the CIA operating as a government within a government. You know, what some have observed is akin to the way that the SS operated in Nazi Germany.

You know, it's not necessarily taking orders on everything, but it is dedicated to the Fuhrer principle and therefore faithfully enacting what would be the orders from on high. in pursuit of that world domination that we in the Fourth Reich are all too familiar with. And I just want to point out one more really interesting coincidence that is part of this. So sort of the final straw that was leading up to us, Operation Ajax in this kind of two-year period of indecision and finagling. One of the proposals that was on the table, which actually the Mossadegh government offered to the British and the Americans was the so-called Venezuela plan.

You can't make this up. Right? Like the Venezuela plan was a deal that had been struck in, I believe it was 1948, sometime pretty recently, between the then government of Venezuela and the international Western oil cartel to split profits right down the middle, 50-50. And so Mossadegh was willing to give 50% of the profits. to the Brits. And they still refused it because they wanted more. And they somehow convinced the Americans whose companies would actually have done better under that deal,

whose companies would have improved their stake vis-a-vis their British counterparts, that, you know, a full-on takeover was going to bear even more fruit was going to, to not only bear the profits of the oil extraction industry, but also much more valuable than that, the political control that comes with having that foothold. Because remember, the Americans here, their experience in imperialism up to this point is largely confined to their hemisphere, to that Monroe doctrine, you know, the Spanish-American War, albeit, of course, you know, the Philippines far away in Asia, but if you go far enough west, right, you get to the Philippines a lot more quickly

than if you arrive by going east all the way around the world. So it still is adjacent to or within the sphere of North America, except this incipient move upon the Middle East. So they get rid of Mossadegh. They take him out. Yes, they unfortunately do. And yet again, the Iranians. people are left with no representation. At first, the Shah, Palavi 2, he kept the Majlis

sort of with some powers, but eventually it just becomes him. And again, this is the common misconception that most people will say when they talk about this time period. They'll say, well, the U.S. came in, they took out Mossadegh, and then they installed the Shah. And that's just not true. As we just saw, Palavitu, he was there since 1941, 1941, I should say, when the allied powers that were Churchill and Stalin, they kicked him out of the country because he was a Nazi. And they said, no, we're going to use this 22-year-old boy as the person that's going to be the ruler of the country. So you can think, like, by the time 1953 comes along, Palavitou, he's ready to serve again, right? He's a regular Persian Jerry Ford, and he does serve. He very much is

in the pocket of the United States. He is very much a ruthless dictator like his dad in a very different way. You know, Palavitou, he's not a Cossack Brigadier. He's not a jackboot, but he is cruel. He does deploy torture methods. He does deploy sort of disqual. He does deploy sort of disappearing of people and killing dissenters and he is sort of neglectful of the impoverished Iranian people and the people of Iran who of course are very Muslim at the time, very oriented towards the Shia Muslim faith. What he does is he does this revolution of culture where he says, okay, we're going to adopt Western culture and we're going to actually turn our backs against away from Shia culture.

And actually, if you're seen in public wearing a hijab, we're going to arrest you and shit like that. So he's going towards modernity. And to be clear, he does some things that are very much progressive and modern. And they're coming late to Iran, for example, women's suffrage. So Iran, actually, the parliament in suffrage was sort of universal from the get, except for that women weren't allowed to vote. but that comes with what's called the white revolution

and this freedom movement of letting women into the ballot box. And that is something that the Shah does, but he doesn't do much for the poor. He doesn't do much for those who are devout followers of Shia Islam. And he does not do much for anyone who in his court isn't a loyal supporter. He infamously has a jack boot army of his a jack-boot enforcement arm

called the Savak, which is his, you can consider them, secret police or enforcers that would go out and kill dissenters, they would imprison dissenters, and it's a very brutal regime. To be sure, it's very good for a very

few cosmopolitan elite, the people who are in, let's call them, the 1% or the 5%, they're living pretty good lives. Everyone else, not so much Iran is a country that is plagued with poverty literacy rates are very low there is very low education and at bottom everybody knows that he's in the pockets of the west he's in the pockets of the Israelis which is really bad for an Iranian to think that okay well not only are you part of this great Satan but this little Satan that's propped up now in the

region and at the end of the day he's not viewed as an authentic leader because he has turned his back on the people of iran in favor of a lavish opulent lifestyle it sounded familiar and it's this it's this circle right it's this time as a flat circle thing is here yet again you have the people of iran being shortchanged by a ruler that does not necessarily have their best interest in mind Yeah, and Dr. Mossadegh, he died pretty soon after, right? I mean, he wasn't killed in the coup, but he died very shortly after being ousted. Yep, no, that's exactly right. So he is ousted, and then he's placed under house arrest in Iran.

I think it's in Iran, but shortly after, a few years after, maybe within the decade, he gets cancer and he dies. and this is where the rubber really hits the road for Pahlavi 2. This is where things really take off from him. He consolidates power under the crown, and he rules the country again with an iron fist, and for 26 years he did virtually nothing for the poor, virtually nothing for the Iranians who had faith in Shia Islam.

He ostracized any thing. dissenters he would kill, he would alienate the poor. And for those few that were living sort of in the cosmopolitan cultural elite, in the economic elite, they had very cush, very good positions in life. And pretty much everyone else was out fending for themselves. And at this point, I think it's good for us to turn to one of the university professors, one of the scholars that really was developing a school of thought that many Iranians started to glom onto many different factions of Iranian society from Marxists, the theologians, and anything in between. And so there's this guy, and he's largely been forgotten, I think, to the annals of history. But his name is Ali Shariati.

And Shariati, he's considered by many, I guess, to be one of the main guys that inspired the 79 revolution through his school of thought. Iranian, some of them would consider him as sort of like the Voltaire of the 79 revolution. And a lot of his philosophy becomes what is being talked about in the universities among the students and in the streets in the late mid-1970s leading up. to the revolution. So Shariati, he was a scholar of sociology of religion. And his major focus was this analysis and this application, I would say, of Marxism, but it's a form of theological Marxism. It's Marxism that is, and maybe it's not even Marxism, but it's an analysis of Marxism or critique of Marxism for not considering religion as part of the discourse. And so a large portion of Shariati's work is this response or analysis of Marxism.

And he uses Marxist concepts such as historical determinism and class struggle to reinterpret Islam, reinterpret Shia Islam, that one unifying threat among 99% of the country, whether you're rich or poor or you're in the city or in the countries. Everybody is Muslim pretty much in Iran. And so his school of thought is like we need to retool Islam. We need to have Islam that works for the people as a unifying force, something that is more a new humanity, so to speak. And it is something that a lot of,

of people climbed onto and it's not just the Marxist in Iran at the time but you know the clergy glommed onto this and I wouldn't be surprised if you know even today's you know an organization like the MEK will refer to Shariati he was just so influential in the time that it is hard to think of modern political discourse in Iran without thinking about this guy and this guy's contributions. In fact many of the activists, many of the people out in the streets, many of the revolutionaries of today, those people out there fighting for the freedom of the Iranian people, they would consider themselves neo-shariates. The person that comes to mind is Nargis Mohamedi. She's the Nobel Peace

Prize winner from a few years back. I believe Shirin Ebadi is also a neo-shariati, but it's It's an idea that works for Iranians when you think about how deeply ingrained Shia Islam is as a unifying force in the country and how there is this deep desire for self-determination, this deep desire for everyone to have a seat at the table. And most importantly, a deep desire to keep the powers that be out of there, to keep Iran for Iran, for the Iranian. people and to keep it something that is uniquely Iranian. All right, so let's fast forward to the 1970s, the mid-1970s. You have now a period of severe unrest. There is poverty throughout the country. People are food insecure.

People are very unhappy with the Shah, who is very much viewed as a puppet for the United States and the Brits and very much. disliked as this inauthentic ruler. And for the most part, the Shah, I mean, he's very cruel to his dissenters, but he lacks the power. I mean, he's not his father. He's not this brigadier general, this iron fist. And by 1978, it's very clear that he will lose control of the country.

And it's funny because, you know, if you talk to most Americans that even have some idea about what happened in Iran in 1979, they will say that it's the moment that the students took over the U.S. Embassy. That's the revolution. No. What happened was that in January of 1979, before there was even a revolution or an embassy siege or anything like that, in January of 1979, the Shah decides to take an extended trip around the world to, in his words, is to, you know, do a tour and in reality, it's he was, he was escaping. This is January 1979. Now, remember that the U.S. Embassy, when it was taken over, that's in November of 1979. And in the intervening time, it's important to note that the Magillus, the, the, the, the, the, the

parliament, they adopt a referendum to depose the Shah to dethrone the Shah and placed Rohala Khomeini in power as the supreme leader in this newly formed theocracy. So that's in March of 1979. And the way that happens is you have all of these students in these universities, you have Marxists, you have reformists, and you have the clerics, and they band together to form a coalition and mainly you had these two camps you have Marxist communists on one side and you have the clerics and the what you will call religious fundamentalists on one side and at the time before the revolution happens the Marxists and the communists they think well okay it's sort of we're making odd bedfellows here with the clerics but we need them we can't do this without

them and if we do band together we're pretty sure that we can do this so let's do it and then after the revolution, we'll sort of figure it out. And they do. And so in March, there is this referendum that's passed. They choose Khomeini as the Supreme Leader. And that's when the revolution really happens on paper. It's not in November of 1979, but in November of 1979, the student groups, they get together. And in fact, they had tried to do this a few times before, but it really goes down in November, what the university students wanted to do, they said, hey, they got together, they said, hey, why don't we go to the U.S. Embassy? It'll be a peaceful thing. It'll be nonviolent. We'll go to the U.S. Embassy. We'll sort of overtake them in our numbers. We're not going to

hurt anybody. What we are going to do is we're going to try and find some documentation, some CIA documentation that shows that the CIA was involved in the coup in 1950, 1953, and the CIA was responsible for getting rid of Mossadegh. And then once we have that paperwork, we're going to show the world so that finally the world can see exactly the type of dirty tricks the United States are up to. And during all of this, the Shah is nowhere to be found, right? He's on that extended trip since January of 1979. Now it's almost a year that he's out of the country. So the country effectively doesn't have its head of state. But he also had terminal cancer at this point, right? Yeah, yeah, he had cancer. I think actually it's not until later in the year in 79 where he

discovers the cancer because he tried to come to the United States right in January or February early on. And famously, Jimmy Carter said no. But then, when he came back and he said, actually, I have cancer. Carter said, okay, you can come and get treatment, but he didn't stay in the United States. I think ultimately the Shah went to Cairo, to Egypt, and that's where he sort of lived the rest of his days. I think here, too, it's interesting to reflect for a minute on the spectacle. Even during the Shah's reign in Iran, you know, you see today circulating on social media a lot, these pictures. of like cute college students in miniskirts or whatever.

And it says Iranian women before the Islamic Revolution and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. And then sometimes you see those and it turns out to be photos of like Latinas from the 80s in LA or some shit. Yeah. And it was kind of this retcon of via spectacle to sell an image of what life in the country was like and it is worth noting that for what you described as like that cosmopolitan educated elite there was a high standard of living relatively speaking it was kind of a modern urban sophisticated life for those beneficiaries and it was certainly in the upper upper crust the shah and

the people around him were just raking in so, so, so much cash. I think this is important to note because you see today a lot of these diaspora people, and to fast forward a little bit to what we're looking at in the news contemporarily, you know, here in 2026, like you, I find myself, all the time wondering, you know, how do they have so much fucking money? It's not just the monarchist diaspora, but even the M.E.K. Diaspora people that are able to pay off these ex-presidents of, like, major Western, quote-unquote democracies to serve as their lobbyists and shit.

they just are moving around huge, huge stacks of cash. And so all of that money, I think it's important to take note was being hoovered up into these fortunes and was really benefiting a narrow segment of the population at the expense of those who were striving. to reclaim that democratic voice who are striving to reclaim a piece of their economic pie, you know, the goal that Mossadegh had for the Iranian people did not die, did not leave with his ouster. It very much remained an objective for the people for the people. in the country who were suffering under this plutocracy that was brought about under the monarchy. And the spectacle of it all, the kind of over-hyped salesmanship of that image obscures, obviously willfully so,

that dichotomy, that class dynamic that was active at that time and which survives. to this day. Right. And those people are still working towards that goal of having some representation, having some self-determination. It's still what it's about today. But back to your point, the Shaw had loads of money. When the revolution happened, the U.S. seized something like $9 billion, $2 billion of which was just sitting in a bank in the UK just gold bullion. So it's like loads and loads of money. Is that considered liquid? I wonder.

But again, just like the moment right before the revolution, there was really two major factions in the streets. It was the Marxist communist and it was the Islamist. And the Marxists were sure that they could overthrow the regime if they got the help from the Islamist. And they were sure that once revolution happened, things would work out because the Islamists superficially at least seemed like they were down with the idea of helping these people need and the idea of like being on the good side of the class struggle

and with that coalition that's when they're able to go to the parliament the Iranian parliament and get this referendum approved to make the country of Iran the Islamic Republic of Iran And so this is another myth. I think people often think like the revolution happened the day of the embassy being taken over. No, the revolution actually happened on paper in months before, right? And there's actually like two other attempts at the embassy before this November 4th, 1979 moment. Because it wasn't until December 1979 that that referendum gets passed and Khomeini actually takes power. Yeah.

And on that dynamic between the Marxists and the Islamists, I think it's also worth noting it. I don't know if we referenced it when we were talking about Operation Ajax, but one component of that operation was to send paid agent provocateurs out into the streets disguised as communists, you know, distributing communist literature, wearing the symbols and, uniforms of the Marxist coalitions and formations of the time out into the streets to kill or beat up or otherwise intimidate, threaten, and alienate the Islamists and thereby turn the Islamists against the government because even though Mossadegh was not a communist, in fact, one of the reasons why the U.S. held off for so long on signing on to his ouster was because they saw him as a good bulwark, as a good buffer against Soviet influence, because they thought that he would not cave to the Iron Curtain countries and would do deals with American oil companies. and all the more important it became then to really reinforce an anti-communist sentiment not only for the short-term objective of garnering support against Mossadegh,

who they wanted to tar as a communist once the tide turned and once the U.S. got on board with throwing him out, they wanted to make him look like a communist, the same that they did with the non-communist democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954, Chacovo Arvins, who was not a communist, but was tarred by the U.S. propaganda as a communist. So this alienation and this sort of divide and conquer strategy between the Marxist, and the Islamists, it's interesting that, you know, on the verge of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, had somewhat been bridged. And I think, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems from what we've discussed and from what, you know, you've showed me, a lot of that owes to the

influence of intellectuals like Ali Shariati, who really spent his career bridging that gap. and kind of developing a synthesis between Islamist and Marxist ideas that would fit the context of Iran. That's exactly right. Shariathism, it's like Islam, you could think of it as like Islamic Marxism. So Marxism famously is atheistic, right? There's a rejection of religion baked in. And that just won't do, at least not in the middle of the 20th century, at least not. not, you know, for the vast majority of the history of Iran, that just won't do where you have

a populace that is deeply connected to Shia Islam. And so what happens is in the years leading up to the revolution, you have Marxists, because Marxism very much resonates with the people, because you have this situation where such a vast majority of the people are living in poverty, are living under the thumb of the powers that be. And so they make a alliance with the Islamists, and they, together, you know, with this coalition, they are able to have this revolution. But what do you think happens to the Marxists and the communists

once the revolution is over? Something tells me they're not going to fare so well. That's right. They killed them all. So the Ayatollah, the Mullahs, They, the religious clerics, they seize the power. The, you know, Khomeini becomes the supreme leader in December 1979. And he, there is this council of the clerics.

It's like the council of 18 or something. And they are the ones that are now in charge in this theocracy. And after that, they're internally, there's just a lot of wiping out of any sort of communistic and Marxist ideology from the plate, right? And for sure. That is sort of what's happening internally. And of course, I think here again, it's important to point out that Iranians, since time immemorial at this point, right?

We started with the Qajars, but they're very aware of the fact that there is global meddling in their affairs. They're very aware of the fact that there's Western meddling in their affairs. and I think this is a good point to hand it back off to you and sort of maybe you want to riff a little bit on what happens after the revolution. Yeah, I mean, you know, the rest, as they say, is history and back to the old regime change strategy. I mean, in fact, by through the lens of everything that's happened since 1979,

Operation Ajax and the violent coup that it enacted appears rather quaint and humanitarian. So the first major, major move, of course, is instigating, in large part the Iran-Iraq war. remember the U.S. was allied with Saddam Hussein in Iraq and helped the Ba'ath Party take power way back in the 1960s. And in fact, it bears noting, because this is Fourth Reich archaeology, that the head of the CIA station in Baghdad and the head of the CIA's near eastern desk, you know, that cover. this entire region at the time of the Iraqi coup was none other than a little known fella by the name of James Critchfield. And James Critchfield, 20 years before he went to the Middle East, was the handler for Reinhard Gaelin and the entire Gaelan organization. So here's a guy who spends the formative years of his career, fomenting and nurturing the Nazi government in exile

on the CIA payroll from 1948, let's say, until 1955 when the Gaelan organization breaks off from the CIA and becomes the Bundesnachtrichtendienst, the West German intelligence agency. And once that mission is accomplished and he has thoroughly incubated the Fourth Reich for West Germany, he moves over to the Middle East and helps to incubate the Saddam Hussein government, which the U.S. will operationalize as a proxy to attack the new Islamic Republic of Iran in a brutal. I mean, just it's beyond words the brutality of this war that lasts for eight entire years, fighting in the trenches, World War I style, killing well over a million people. And of course, we now know in hindsight that all the while, while the U.S. was sort of nominally favoring Iraq in that conflict, it was also through Israel providing arms to Iran in what is now known as Iran-Contra, right?

the arms for drugs for money for arms cycle that was playing out between Central America and the Middle East. I mean, all of this stuff is, you know, it's not, again, again, to quote old Billy Faulkner, right, this is not dead and buried past. It is not even past. It is with us. Today, every day, in our lives, in the geopolitics of this moment, the utter cravenness of the American empire in its conduct vis-a-vis Iran. Definitely. And, you know, among all of these we'll call Burger Reich bad guys, you got Venezuela, you got North Korea, and, of course, Iran, of the three, I shouldn't be a surprise.

but I'm going to say if you could guess which one of the three has the most, the biggest network of like American subterfuge, the biggest network of like American spies, Israeli spies in the country as things are happening. Which one of these countries is the one that has the most American tech, has the most American military tech, has the most American apparatus built in, baked in. and which one of these is going to be the one that is the easiest to sort of prop up as the bad guy because of all of that historical sort of sunk cost propaganda that's been done to vilify these people to make them seem like the backward fanatic clerics.

For sure, for sure. It's Iran. Totally. And, you know, remember, in the 80s is also when a lot of these media tropes to go back to the spectacle, these kind of neo-orientalist TV tropes with the Arab terrorist or the Middle Eastern terrorist or even, you know, if you look at some of the older films of the great Spanish director, who is now a washed up husk of his former self, Pedro Almolovar, even his early films talk about Terroristas Chitas.

you know, Shiite terrorists and he has that song, Grand Ganga, that is, you know, mocking an Iranian salesman that has emigrated in the 1980s. Grand Ganganga, Grand Ganga, I'm sorry to Terran. Brankong, go, grangkonga. Alright, folks, that does it for Side A, if you want to keep on listening, head on over the Patreon where you can listen to the rest of this episode today. But before we sign off, you know what time it is. It's that time where we give our thanks to all of our doctoral candidate and research assistant Patreon members.

Thank you so much to Stephen, Sergeant Grumbles, Cornelia, Bick, Dave, Raven, McGee, Al, Kelly, Annie, Wizard of Choice, Mike, John. Simply anchovy, UA.E. Exotic Falconry and Finance. Dolly Farton, Frank, Caleb, Fern, and last but definitely not least, David, thank you, thank you, thank you to every one of you out there. We love you all. Peace, love. We'll see you next week.