Upstream - Iran Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Séamus Malekafzali [BONUS]

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

As seems to be the case with most of the countries that the United States goes to war with—much of the population here doesn’t know very much about those countries. And what they do know is usually Western propaganda, misinformation, or outright lies. This couldn’t be more true with Iran, where if it were up to our political leaders and corporate media, the story that Iran was a perfectly happy democracy that was abruptly and rudely destroyed by a rabid and power hungry group of Ayatollahs would never go unquestioned. They certainly wouldn’t want you to know about the Western backed coup of a left-leaning government in 1953, or that Iran suffered greatly during the Shah’s reign. But that’s why we’re here today—to help combat some of that propaganda, dispel some of those myths, and hopefully to provide a dose of reality to a nation whose war drums never cease to beat. And we’ve brought on a terrific guest to help us do it.  Séamus Malekafzali is a freelance journalist whose work focuses on the Middle East and Global South. In this episode, Part 1 of our new series on Iran, we give a potted history of Iran from the colonial period up to the present, introducing the Pahlavi dynasty, touching on important events like the rise of Mohammad Mosaddeq and the attempt to nationalize Iran’s oil industry which was sabotaged by Western powers. We explore the rise of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the repressive regime he led as a Western puppet. We talk about the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the role Iran now plays as a leading state in the Axis of Resistance against US hegemony. And, of course, we talk about the ongoing war being waged against Iran by the United States and its proxy, Israel and explore the regional and global implications.  Further resources: Séamus Malekafzali The Greatest Sin podcast Related episodes: Palestine Pt. 13: Al-Aqsa Flood and the Resistance Axis w/ Matteo Capasso Our ongoing series on Palestine Our ongoing series on China Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

With Muhammad Raza Pahlavi, his purchase with the public is almost exclusively cultural. The perception that he had that he was a westernized, high-flying, fashionable monarch who, in contrast to the current government, the Islamic Republic, supported women's rights, supported... I don't think they ever say this explicitly, but the idea was that, I think, left up in the Islamic Republic, supported women's rights, supported... I don't think they ever say this explicitly, but the idea was that, I think, left up in the ether was that it was somehow more democratic. It wasn't. That people were represented better. They weren't. The reality is, for the vast majority of people in Iran,

that sort of westernized existence was non-existent. It was not present in their lives. Iran enjoyed some of the worst wealth inequality in the world, up until the Islamic Revolution. It had some of the worst human rights records in the world. The secret police, the SAVAK, was deeply feared. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. As seems to be the case with most of the countries that the United States goes to war with, much of the population here doesn't know very much about those countries. And what they do know is usually western propaganda, misinformation, or outright lies.

And this couldn't be more true with Iran, where if it were up to our political leaders and corporate media, the story that Iran was a perfectly happy democracy that was abruptly and rudely destroyed by a power-hungry group of ayatollahs would never go unquestioned. They certainly wouldn't want you to know about the western-backed coup of a left-leaning government in 1953, or that Iran suffered greatly during the Shah's reign. But that's why we're here today, to help combat some of that propaganda, dispel some of those myths, and hopefully to provide a dose of reality to a nation whose war drums never ceased to beat. And we've brought on a terrific guest to help us do it. Seamus Malik Afzali is a freelance journalist whose work focuses on the Middle East and

the Global South. In this episode, which is part one of our new series on Iran, we give a potted history of Iran from the colonial period up to the present, introducing the Pahlavi dynasty, touching on important events like the rise of Muhammad Mosaddegh and the attempt to nationalize Iran's oil industry, which was sabotaged by Western powers. We explore the rise of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the repressive regime that he led as a Western puppet. We talk about the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the role that Iran now plays as a leading

state in the access of resistance against US hegemony. And of course, we talk about the ongoing war being waged against Iran by the United States and its proxy, Israel, and explore the regional and global implications. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more.

Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstreampodcast. And if Patreon's not really your thing, you can also make a tax-deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now,

here's my conversation with Seamus Malik Afzali. I'm shameless it is a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm happy to be here. Yeah under you know not the best circumstances obviously but I've been following your work for a long time. So it is actually a pleasure to be able to talk to you and have you on the show. Hopefully the first of, you know, many, or if not many, at least a couple of appearances on upstream for you.

As you know, this probably the topic that we're talking about today is going to be relevant for a very long time, unfortunately. But just to get started, so we do these ongoing sort of multi-part series. We started with Palestine and we've done a series on China. We're doing a series on the AES. And for obvious reasons, I felt like it was really, really important for us to do a series, but giving people a sense of the context and the history and the reality of both, you know, the geopolitical situation in the West Asia and also just Iran and its rich, beautiful history. So yeah, maybe before we jump into stuff, maybe you could just introduce yourself briefly for our listeners,

give them a sense of who you are and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing. Yeah, my name is Shamus Malek Afzali. I'm an Iranian-Irish American. I'm a reporter. Previously, I was based in Lebanon up until the invasion happened. And needless to say say I was very strongly cautioned by my family who I love very much to leave so now I am in New York City doing reporting from here. I had been writing about the Middle East for about seven years now ever since I became an adult this is what I've been trying to do and I'm very honored that there are people that see my expertise on this subject. Yeah, my hope is that I can impart knowledge to listeners.

I don't know. I haven't had to sell myself in this sort of way to people. Well, the fact that you are both Iranian and Irish is very sexy. Those are two great places to have ancestry. I'm very appreciative. Look, it's helped me out in the past. I'm very happy for it to help me out in the future. Also, it gives me insight, hopefully, into things. And yeah, it's fine. Absolutely. So like I mentioned, this is the beginning of a series. And there's a lot of important history in terms of the current events that we're experiencing right now in terms of US imperialism, in terms

of this ongoing obsession with Iran by the West. And just to let our listeners know too, I'm sure a lot of you know, I don't talk about this very often, but I am half Iranian and I spent many summers living in Iran in Shiraz, visiting family there. And it's just been sort of, and I'm sure you can relate to this, Seamus, like the impending invasion of Iran has been something that has been ongoing for a long time. And it's crazy that it's finally sort of potentially coming to a head now. So yeah, I thought it would be a really good idea to have you on and give us a bit of the history and stuff like that, but also definitely wanna talk

about what's going on currently in terms of the Israeli US invasion, potentially, at least the bombardment that we're seeing right now. So Iran is a very old civilization, right? It goes back thousands and thousands of years. We're not going to be able to get into any kind of serious depth, especially going back that far. But maybe I think, you know, a good place to start might be looking at the history of Iran prior to Mohammed Mosaddegh. And we'll talk about him as well, but like, what did colonialism look like in Iran?

Like what's most important for us to know about that period of the country? I think the best place to track how Iran got to where it is, is talking about how it was under the Qajar dynasty in the early 1900s. That period was a period of immense national humiliation. Treaties with foreign countries, foreign empires, I should say, like the Treaty of Turkmenchai, which is now shorthand for acquiescing to foreign powers and giving away Iranian sovereignty. Under those directives that were different directives that were signed with the Russian Empire and the British Empire, Iran had to cede

not only territory to the Russians, but also influence zones within its own country. The silver lining of that was that Iran's first experiments with democracy during the Constitutional Revolution were able to happen during that period. But that experiment, it wasn't a permanent one, obviously, as we had to see. The Russian Revolution brought a lot of different forces into Iran. The chaos that came about in the 1920s after coup d'etats and the Pahlavi dynasty that emerged out of that chaos was something that was again an expression of foreign domination by another power. I mean Reza Pahlavi, the founder of that dynasty, was someone who in many respects was hand-picked

by the British for that position to become the new absolute monarch of the country. While Reza Pahlavi engaged in a campaign of industrialization to make Iran into the modern country that it is today, his absolute rule also set the country up to become one of the most repressive countries in the world at the time of the Iranian Revolution, 1979. The most recent history of the country over the past 200 years has been this push and pull between foreign powers that are attempting to dominate this country, whether it be Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and the people inside of it who are demanding representation, and moreover, know that that representation can only be gained

if the powers that foreign empires are imposing, it needs to be removed. That is the only path forward. It is the thing that guides all of this authoritarian policymaking by the Absolut Monarchs. It is what keeps them in power. It is what extracts concessions, not by internal mechanisms, but from outside mechanisms. Yeah, no, that's like a really fascinating observation. And it's definitely like a tension, I think,

that helps us to really understand a lot of the dynamics currently in Iran. I also want to just kind of quickly go back a little bit to make sure that we get the history, this early history of Iran in terms of the first half of the 20th century. So you mentioned, so in 1925, the Pahlavi dynasty replaced the Khazar dynasty, which had ruled over Iran since like the late 18th century, right? So tell us about the Pahlavi monarchy, which began with Reza Shah Pahlavi. And just give us a sense of like whose interests he was representing,

what role the British played in Iran at that time, and maybe just lead us up to the attempts to nationalize the oil industry under Mohammed Mosaddegh, and then what happened to those attempts to gain sovereignty from the West. That's a very, that's a very wide-spanning question. If I can compress it into, I think just the major things, the Qajars at the very end of their of their dynasty were dealing with, I mean, not only the forces of outside colonialism trying to battle for influence within its borders, but it was also, I mean, Iran was, plainly speaking, not sovereign during this period. It was essentially a neutral country in the First World War, but outside powers were still

forcing its way into the country, trying to do things inside of it. And it was weak. It was at the mercy of both the Russians, the Ottomans, the British. There was famine. And also the newfound specter of communism outside in the Russian Empire, now the Soviet Union, was making headway into Persia, into Iran very quickly, through local forces that were very sympathetic to the policies that they were undertaking and among more radical individuals, the land reform in particular was very popular amongst those individuals.

The attempted land reform by certain socialists that Iran was a disaster, but that's a different discussion. It was a very, very weak time for the country. Shah Lali as a military officer was supposed to represent a new sovereign, powerful stage for the country. But of course, as I said before, he was an agent of the British, essentially. He had been handpicked by the British to go to Tehran, perform a coup d'etat, and then take power, and then eventually in 1925 become the new Shah, to initiate a new dynasty. And I mean, plainly speaking, the British wanted free reign over the oil resources of

Iran, which were immense. Through British petroleum, they could exploit the national reserve of the country and they could further cement control over a country that no longer had Ottomans jockeying for power and the Soviet Union while it would later exert influence over the country, pretty significant influence over the country, it was not in a position where it could jockey for power in the same way. It would militarily invade the country, the Soviet Union, in the 1940s alongside different powers in order to keep Iran out of Nazi hands, as they put it. But that was again an attempt to exert influence and also, again, extract oil concessions from the Iranians, just the same as the British were attempting to do.

So it's always been about oil. It has always been about oil, no matter if you are professing yourself to be a communist or a capitalist, it is about the oil that Iran has. And its attempt to stay neutral in those conflicts has been to, I don't know how to say, maybe not to its detriment, but it has been an unfortunate fact for other people to have to reckon with, that this country will not align itself with the Allies or the Axis and therefore it must be put under its heel. Yeah, I mean, because oil was the main resource being fought over and its importance was so well known. This is why

nationalization was such a major tool that when Mohammed Mossad came to power as prime minister, that is why he pursued nationalization as the major point of his of his policy as prime minister. That was why it became the thing that he was known for and he was eventually overthrown for. And so just to give a bit of a sense of what oil colonialism looked like in Iran, and I mean, of course, it's not just Iran, right? This was happening all over West Asia.

So BP, which you mentioned, British Petroleum, was one of the original Seven Sisters, this handful of large oil companies that dominated global markets in the mid-20th century. They were referred to as the Seven Sisters. And BP was actually originally named Anglo-Iranian oil. So yeah, these were essentially spheres of interest, places like Iran, which were being carved up by the Western imperial powers, essentially representing these oil interests. And I think the really crucial point for me in thinking about oil is, of course, not just these incredibly unfair and exploitative relationships when it comes to the profits generated from oil, but the aim of owning and controlling all of the oil infrastructure itself.

Not just the extraction of crude, but the refining, the transport, all of it. And this is, you know, essentially how the West actively under develops regions in the global south, right? It's no different with Iran. It's a very old story. And so basically, what they do is they make sure that all of the development is controlled by, in this case, British companies like BP, so that not only are the resources taken, but the infrastructure, the know-how, the skills, it's all firmly in control of the British. And so the Iranians are essentially meant to be dependent on the British. And on top of that, too, one of the major intentions was to control the flow of oil so that it could actually be kept out of the market, you know, to keep oil from being overproduced so that prices would remain high. And so you have someone like Mohammed Mosaddegh come in and attempt to like make some pretty

modest reforms, you know reforms to make sure that the Iranian people are not being exploited so heavily and that maybe they're even benefiting somewhat more fairly from the natural resources of their own country. Tell us about the 1953 coup that replaced Mosaddegh and ended up with the installation of the Muhammad Reza Pahlavi Reza Shah's son. So yeah, walk us through the coup, what powers were in play, what the process of overthrowing Mosaddegh was like, and just sort of what the resistance looked like as well. I mean, when we talk about, I I mean something you mentioned is that the regime of

Muhammad Rasul Pahlavi was installed after that point but it really should be made clear that Muhammad Rasul Pahlavi was the Shah beforehand and then he was reinstalled as absolute monarch afterward and his power was massively increased in the wake of that. But he brought up Marx changes that Mossadeq wanted to engage in. It really, that is very true. I do notice sometimes that Mossadeq is included alongside on the internet lists of socialist leaders who like like Nakruma or Sankara who were couped by the United States or other Western powers because the socialist system that they advocated for would have upset capitalist forces. But Mossadeq was a

liberal that really needs to be emphasized. He did not seek an overthrow of the system. He had like-minded, I don't even know if you could say allies, but people who supported him in today in the communist and socialist parties of Iran, but he himself was not a communist or a socialist. He did not see that as the way forward for the country. I mean, I'll give a personal example. My grandfather was a military officer in the Iranian army in the 1940s. He was very active in Tudeh to the extent that my father saw him as sort of a polemicist for that variety of Marxist-Leninist communism. This is someone who is absolutely an ideologue of that. But he was very supportive of Mohammed Mossaddeq.

He did not see his disagreement with Leninism as an overwhelming obstacle. He understood that nationalization was critical for the development of the nation and that Mosaddegh in that mission should be supported to the fullest extent. So, but of course, of course, even though, even though this was a very popular thing that Muhammad Mosaddegh engaged in, it was not a popular move with the British, with the Americans, primarily because oil being nationalized in this way, profits being taken away from Western corporations was an abominable idea. And in the same way that the Suez Canal was nationalized in that decade, it was an abominable idea. And in the same way that the Suez Canal

was nationalized in that decade, it was an affront to Western influence, Western power, unchecked Western power. But as well, it was ideological. The idea being that if Mossadegh continued to be empowered in this way, that the communists in Iran under Soviet influence would be able to take power in the

near future. I don't think that was true, but we have no idea of being able to see what that future would have looked like. That was stolen away. No, I mean, there are numerous different attempts to seize back these facilities in a military operation. There was a different coup d'etat attempt under Mosaddegh that Mosaddegh was able to defeat, but it succeeded in 1953 after the British had summoned and paid off and influenced. I mean, it's astonishing trying to look at how many different sectors

of power they were able to influence against Mossaddeq against the interests of the country. Shia clerics to street thugs. They were able to form this kind of quasi-coalition against Mossaddeq and to place them in an impossible political position where he would eventually be forced from power. Because the idea being, well, you see everyone in the streets, they're against this regime that is allying itself with the Soviets. This is not a popular regime. Of course, what will come afterwards will be something much more successful.

No, it was a very devastating thing. Mosaddegh afterward, I mean, his nationalization programs were obviously not successful. He was tried. He was convicted of treason. He made a very stirring speech in court, but inevitably he remained for the rest of his life under house arrest and he died in a very devastating position. One in which he got to see how bad the country was getting

and he missed by a few years the absolute worst period of the state under Mohamed Raza Pahlavi, Raza Shah's much less intelligent son, who eventually turned the country into a place that only popular revolution could come out of. So, okay, yeah, let's actually talk a little bit more about that period. So the period between 1953 and 1979 before the Islamic Revolution. So Iran at this point is like strictly under the orbit of the United States and Pahlavi, the Shah at that time, he's referred to by many as a US puppet, right? So it's during this period really which my family grew up in Iran. My mom

grew up in Iran and it's very interesting because she was always way more pro-Shah. I'm not really sure how well thought out that was on her part, whether it was more of an anti-Islamic republic kind of pro-Shah or whether she was actually pro-Shah, but I think we can get more into that sort of stuff and maybe exchange some personal experiences a bit later. But let's talk about that period first to give people a sense of the context, because the Pahlavi monarchy was extremely repressive, right? And very much in service to the West. So, yeah, maybe just give us a sense, expand a bit on what that period was like,

whose interests were being served, and kind of what Iran went through under the Shah's reign. I mean, I think the way to think about this is that in the popular Iranian consciousness, Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch, his purchase with the public is in his, what he did for the country industrially, economically, in terms of modernization. We're too far from that period of time for anybody to actually think about it in terms of what he did culturally, what he did outside of the things. What they think about, what they sympathize with, if they sympathize with them at all, are in those sectors. With Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, his purchase with the public is almost exclusively

cultural. The perception that he had that he was a westernized, high-flying, fashionable monarch who, in contrast to the current government, the Islamic Republic, supported women's rights, supported... I don't think they ever say this explicitly, but the idea was that, I think, left up in the ether was that it was somehow more democratic. It wasn't. That people were represented better. They weren't.

But at the time, I mean, the reality for many, I mean, I'm sure you've been sent these before. I've been sent them even by my own father. These videos of talking about, like showing what Iran was before either the Islamic Republic or the state before Islam, if they're really cutting to the chase. And it's exclusively videos of women with very long flowing hair. Maybe they're in swimsuits. They're existing. They're out in public. And it's, everybody's looking

very chic. There are commercials, colorful commercials for Western products or Western seeming products, sexual themes in the media that aren't able to be present anymore. It's all about that. It's exclusively about the cultural power that he wielded, that was wielded under his government. But the reality is, for the vast majority of people in Iran, that sort of westernized existence was non-existent for them. It was not present in their lives. Iran enjoyed some of the worst wealth inequality in the world up until the Slaak Revolution. It had some of the worst human rights records in the world. The secret police, the SAVAK, was deeply feared within the country for what it would do,

the horrifying torture that it would exact on the population and its political opponents. The thing is that it's a very difficult thing for people to understand, but it's important. Iran in this period overwhelmingly was a very religious country. The Islamic Republic referendum that brought about the government, that 99.9% result is maybe not a fabrication, but it's the result of boycotting from other parties. But it was still a very popular thing. Like mandatory hijab. It's no longer nearly as popular now, but at that time it was a very popular proposition

among the public. They wanted in a Zagreb public, the large majority of the nation, they found the idea that not only was Iranian wealth being stolen by foreign powers, that it was being diverted into the hands of very few, that all of the directives of the government were being essentially controlled from abroad, but that it was in service of a secularism that the public did not endorse and it seemed like an active insult against the public to be quite honest. But because there were so many different reasons why you could hate the show, that meant that when the revolution eventually came that

meant that communists, Stalinists, Leninists, Spartacists, and the most ardent Islamists found common ground and were able to use that combined power to overthrow the government. It was a government that pleased very few, and the purchase that it has right now with the Iranian diaspora is almost exclusively the result of nostalgia. Seeing what Iran has become and then you see the videos that you saw in the day, you remember how it was maybe for you, when you could enjoy being in your own country. And of course, why would you not feel nostalgically about a time in which you yourself were happy, or maybe you had different opportunities?

It's understandable to a certain extent, but to the degree that the shah and his governance was popular with the people, that was absolutely not the case. That's super interesting. I grew up hearing a lot of that same stuff that you were just talking about, how romanticized that period was

in the eyes of a lot of my family. And the story that I heard about the 79 Revolution, primarily from my mom, was one of deep, like, pessimism and regret that, like, I grew up hearing, like, revolutions never work, and that they only make situations worse. And all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, I think there's, there's many sides to that analysis and many different

perspectives, all of them probably contain some truth and And I think there's many sides to that analysis and many different perspectives. All of them probably contain some truth and some falsehood. But I'm really interested in hearing a little bit about the process of the revolution. Like you mentioned how many different sort of groups and factions and parties and movements there were against the path of the monarchy. What was the process of the revolution like? Like how did it originate? What happened? Maybe if you could tell us a little bit about the U.S. Embassy hostage experience

and the power struggle that led to eventually the Islamic Republic being formed. This had been building for a very long time, right? And by the late 1970s, Iran had become functionally a one-party state in that there were literally there were elections, but the only allowed party by the very end was a singular royalist party, which of course backed everything that the Shah said. So there was no representation for anyone inside Iran. It was purely the Shah's directive. There had been numerous, I don't know how you describe it, humiliations. I think the most prominent, at least in my father's memory, was the 2500 year celebration of the Persian Empire or some other title similar to that.

And it was this massive waste of money. It was essentially a party for foreign dignitaries that happened at Persepolis. There was a parade with all these different ages of Iranian history chariots. There was an experimental music concert. It was supposed to be this very grandiose royal party for the shah and the empress, but it was pretty thoroughly acknowledged as a narcissistic exercise. And many foreign dignitaries that were invited were not and showed up were not as high level as they were hoping so it's just kind of it's somewhere between like a royal wedding where everybody is

anticipated to go like in Britain and in the 70s or the 80s when the Central African Republic briefly became the Central African Empire and the new military leader invited everyone in the world to come by and nobody showed up. So it's somewhere in the middle, which is somewhere you should never be when you are spending tons of public money. And so it's broadly acknowledged that this is a state that is, even if literacy is improving, even if some economic conditions are improving, that the pace is not fast enough and there is increasingly an untenable situation, increasing an untenable situation with how much inequality there is in politics, in the economy and everything.

And the main instigator of this, I think is broadly acknowledged to be the cinema wrecks fire in Tehran in 1978, where it's very difficult to express how much that traumatized the population. Hundreds of people die in this fire of the path of the monarchy. That they had set up this thing to blame it on the Islamic opposition. I think they literally said Islamic communists or something along those lines. I'm unsure if they blamed it on any specific group like the MEK, but I think that was the designation they did. I'm unsure if they ever truly determined who said it, if it was actually Muslims who

opposed the government or if it was the government doing a false flag, but nevertheless the result was the same. That the government had been seen, been perceived to have killed 400 some people in a very brutal way and that this was no longer a situation that could go on. So from that point, I mean there are months of protests. People are killed and of protests. People are killed and Ruhola Khomeini, who had become at that point a very prominent opposition figure abroad living in France at the time, he can see where the tide is turning and people inside could see where the tide is turning and the Shah leaves in January.

He recognizes that this situation is no longer tenable. There is an attempt by him, there's some strange attempt to shift toward a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister who promises reforms, very briefly, near the very end of the Shah's regime. But one, when the prime minister is interviewed, he's very supportive of the idea of monarchy. So I don't think anybody really believes anything that he says. And two, there's too much momentum behind the movement. So there's no reason to stick with some sort of constitutional system which, as I will remind you, was already overthrown by the Shah himself after a few years of experimentation

in the 1950s. So, there's no trustworthy history on this matter. So he is overthrown, he leaves freely, the prime ministership essentially ceases to exist, this constitutional monarchical system. And Khomeini returns to the country, and even though there is an interim government, one that is non-Islamic, one that is proceeding towards something which does not have a particularly overwhelmingly Islamic character. Let's just put it that way. They are weak.

They are ineffectual. And the supporters of Islamic governance are massively more organized. And Khomeini goes to the point of setting up a parallel, essentially a parallel cabinet. And that is the kind of power vacuum in which the hostage crisis can occur. Things need to keep moving quicker. There's frustration with this fact. And as punishment for the Americans who have done so much for this country, all the surveillance, all of this quasi-colonialist control, these Islamist students break in and they hold personnel employees of the embassy for over a year.

And because the interim government of Iran is unable to do this, they won't do anything about this. The only person they listen to is Khomeini, that interim government falls apart very quickly, falls apart, and they give that power to Khomeini and his new government, which after referenda becomes the Islamic Republic. There was really no chance, I think, any real chance of a different kind of government coming in. When we have these discussions amongst the diaspora, particularly among leftists, I notice that the revolution was hijacked. It was never going to go a different way, right? Just because of like the degree of organizational disparity, right, between the left groups

and the Islamic groups? No, I mean, I mean, here's the thing, I should mention this. I mean, there were there were people inside the Azarca public when it first emerged, again this interim government that I'm talking about, who were liberal, who were ostensibly supposed to be the sort of Czech, all the Azarca public's power when it first emerged, and they did not represent the majority opinion. Plain and simple, they didn not represent the majority opinion Plain and simple they didn't represent the majority opinion there were not enough Spartacists there were not enough Leninists I would read like newspaper articles from just after the revolution when left-wing students were talking about like

How a leftist government was possible in the country? and I'm just bewildered at that bubble within a bubble, right? Where you truly think that this government, where it's going, who holds all these cards in the form of of Ruhollah Khomeini. I mean, again, like I said, it couldn't have gone any other way. There was no revolution to hijack because that was their revolution. The people who wanted to maintain women's rights to continue along a secular path, they were not the majority. They were not the predominant percentage of Iranians. It's an unfortunate fact that's left us, but this is how

it was. So tell me a little bit before we get into the post-1979 period. Like this was the period where we saw, for example, like my family, my mom left Iran, I think actually in 1978 to Canada to study to go to get her master's degree in Canada and she never went back, right? And so like I mentioned earlier, my family and the sort of the narratives that I grew up hearing were very much in line to what you were just describing in terms of a revolution hijacked, in terms of looking back on the pre-Islamic republic period with a degree of romanticization and really lamenting what has become of the country. My uncle would always just rail against the current regime and talk about how amazing this ancient Persian civilization has just been taken to shit basically by these people.

That's kind of the context that I grew up in and I know it sounds like you have a much more left-leaning family and potentially socialist communist leading family so i'm wondering like. Yeah what did you kind of grow up experiencing and hearing and like what was your experience of that somebody who shares a history in that region. I mean my my father always hated the Shah. He never spoke about the Shah with any sort of nostalgia. Like he spoke about that period with nostalgia because of course he was young. That's when he'd go back to Iran. It was a time in which at least he probably personally felt the things were improving. But when it comes to Pahnavi himself, and especially his son, his current son who lives

in Maryland, the Shah's son, he has no respect for him whatsoever. He's very much against thinking about those leaders in particular with any sort of nostalgia. The time you can think about it, the person though. I was never spoken to about civilization or the idea that like 2000 years of history, 2000 years of history was destroyed in that moment. My dad never thinks about it in those terms. Whatever nationalism he has is pretty cemented in the modern day. Even if you may have certain attitudes that are informed by that perception of 2,500 years of history, he doesn't speak about it explicitly in that way. And I never heard that from any of my relatives in that way either, who were all pretty committed leftists in that way. The frustration was more that my father left the country in the 70s,

not because of the revolution, but because he did not want to be drafted into the army of the Shah when that order came up. And after 78, I mean, that immediate period after the revolution was a very frightening time for a lot of people who were secular and left-wing. My great aunt was forced out of her job as an archaeologist because she was a woman. And there was a lot of restrictions placed on women in that immediate period that were relaxed, obviously, in the following years. But if that was what you had seen was happening in that immediate aftermath, of course you wouldn't want to touch this with a 10 foot pole. And then years go on and you no longer have a strong connection with this place that you

grew up in and you speak the language of. Even if you're no longer in danger of being drafted, I mean, what would the process be? Would you be able to recognize where you came from? Would you be able to understand that or process it? I think a difficulty that a lot of diaspora Iranians have is understanding what the general Iranian population believed at the time, and I think it caused an irreparable tear in their relationship with the country. There is still a very broad perception that Iran at its core, it runs the gamut of a lot of different things, but I just heard the other day on an Israeli

news channel, someone saying that the Iranians, look, they didn't vote for a nuclear program. They didn't vote to give all their money to Hamas. Or this elevation of the idea that the entirety of the Iranian nation actually loves Israel or all of them hate the Palestinians or all of them want democracy and The only people that you see who support the government are like paid off and they they're not really running They're occupying the country and then eventually it falls into their their occupiers because they're really Arabs and this religion Islam isn't native to our country and then it devolves from there

They never understood What people outside their orbit the working class the working poor of the country actually believed and Those people taking power Was a national trauma to them. It wasn't a, as I said before, this didn't result in benefits for everybody. There were definite rollbacks in people's rights that they enjoyed under the Pahlavi regime. But it fundamentally was Iranians doing the revolution. It wasn't an outside force. It wasn't Arabs pulling the strings. Islam had been part of the national fabric for a thousand years, more than a thousand years. This was coming.

One of the things that I'm noticing a theme so far in our conversation and something that I personally have a lot of trouble sort of grappling with is this sort of dual nature of the Islamic Republic in terms of, of course, a lot of the Western liberal values, a lot of those things are, to say the very least, not a part of Iran's political system now. You have this very conservative, very repressive Islamic regime in place, and you have – and this is fast-forwarding us a little bit into maybe start talking about current events a little bit more, but like you have a bulwark against US imperialism. You have a country that is supporting the resistance financially. You have a country that is standing up to US hegemony. And it's an interesting thing as somebody on the left to navigate, right? Because you're thinking about the internal dynamics of the country, and then you're also thinking about its global position.

So I think about it in terms of the national question too, right? Like that there may not have been the appetite for a socialist revolution in Iran in 1978. And there certainly isn't one now, right? But the closest that Iran came to that was, like we mentioned, with Mosaddegh in the early 50s. And it was the West that undid that, right? And if Iran does stand a chance of even surviving, let alone laying the foundations for an actual socialist state, it's certainly not going to be able to do so under the boot of the world-leading enemy of communism, the world's most bloodthirsty tyrant, the United States. So not even a socialist state. If Iran is going to avoid collapsing entirely and going in the direction of libya or in iraq it has to first more than anything maintain its independence from the west.

If you could sort of talk about that tension a little bit from your perspective in terms of Iran's internal dynamics and its position in the world, it's part of, of course, the axis of resistance, right? So yeah, maybe I'm just gonna throw that all at you and just would love to hear your thoughts. I mean, when the Iranian revolution happened, one of the primary reasons why so many different disparate political groups came together was not only because they all had grievances with

the Shah internally because of internal politics, but also because of his relationships abroad and what he was also doing abroad. I mean, one of the forgotten things, I mean, this wasn't a big part of it, but for example, one of the forgotten things about the Shah's foreign policy was that he was also engaged in foreign intervention, the kind of vaulted foreign intervention that people criticize Iran for now, but his was to put down a left-wing rebellion in Oman, in Duffa, which was a crime that I don't think anyone should forgive him for. The fact that they didn't get what they wanted, that there couldn't be a seed of left-wing

governance in the Gulf, in the Persian Gulf, among Arab states, Gulf Arab states, and that we are stuck with these systems now. It's an abominable crime. But I mean, part of that relationship that a lot of protesters had problem with was that was Neshaw's relationship with Israel, with the United States. Now Neshaw himself was personally anti-Semitic. I think people are very surprised by that and also that he personally had very regressive views toward women.

That is something that they don't want to acknowledge. But with Israel, I mean, even if he believed that the Jews control all the banks, that the Jews control the media, and he does like this, there's one interview that he does with Mike Wallace, where he does like a Kanye West thing, where he's like, you know, I'm gonna stop there,

but like, we all know what I'm saying. It didn't matter. He had a very close relationship with the state of Israel. And because of what the state of Israel was doing at the time in the Six Day War with its occupations of all of historic Palestine, with what it was doing to other Arab states, I mean, this was a point of Islamic solidarity that was being invoked by these protesters, of international solidarity, more largely. There were currents of Iranian socialists

who were pro-Israel because they saw it as a bulwark of socialism against Arab imperialism. But these people were not driving policy and they were eventually forgotten and only really seem to exist now in the form of like Ad-al-Shazizi, a completely irrelevant political stance. The main changers were people who were pro-Palestine on either side of the political spectrum. So that was always something that could bring these disparate movements together. And inevitably into the 2000s, into the 1990s and 2000s, there became these opportunities for allyship between left-wing states, which were also opposed to imperialism from the United States, in places like Latin America and Iran now find themselves,

even if they're very ideologically opposed, they're facing a much greater enemy. Even if they have problems with the Soviet Union, fundamentally these things can be worked out with these other states. So there's allyship there. And even if there is frustration among certain currents within the Iranian populace, who in a reactionary sort of way, they hate the Palestinians, they want a better relationship with the West, they may fly American flags or British flags or whatever. So, the majority of the country is sympathetic to the Palestinians, and an overwhelming majority of the country does not trust the United States after the multitude of things that it has done to this country over the past several decades. So even when the Islamic Republic itself as a system is not as popular as it used to be, it still can find solidarity in its opposition to the West because it is known that whatever

the West brings is going to be far worse than the system that exists now. I think it's very telling, you're seeing a real life example, but I think it's very telling that this war against Iran, when it started, there was an attempt by Benjamin Netanyahu to initiate, to instigate a rebellion of some kind among the Iranian population. He said, zan zindagi ozo adi, women life freedom. He invoked the protest slogan from 2022, the Masa Amini protests. That's a phrase that would have a lot of purchase with the public because the mandatory job is no longer a popular policy. There's polling to this effect.

But the idea that Iranian people were going to come out into the streets on Netanyahu's orders with him the ultimate butcher of Gaza, invoking sovereignty, independence, freedom, that lives should be respected and that we don't seek your extermination. It was not going to be believed. It resulted in zero protests up until this point. And even though Iranian figures abroad keep trying to egg it on, it doesn't

happen. It still has not happened in any significant way or even minor way. That has something that the Iranian government has always been able to rely upon, that opposition to the West. And so even though its ideology, its Islamic ideology can be unpopular, as long as it maintains that opposition, it can reinvent itself, it can refocus, and it can continue to exist even if there are lots of internal contradictions within that. Tell us a little bit more concretely and materially what role Iran plays in supporting resistance movements across the region, like Hezbollah, for example, or Hamas. What involvement is there?

And then also just more broadly too, if you feel like you have anything to say about the role that Iran plays in the sort of access of resistance with Russia, the relationship that it has sort of internationally with countries that are attempting to sort of break the chains of US imperialism, not just regionally, but also globally. Again, I know I'm asking you like gigantic asked questions, but just take them in whatever direction you kind of want to. Yeah, I mean, Iran, I think in the past, in the 1980s, it tried to support parties and

organizations and military groups that want to export that revolution into different states, into Lebanon, into Saudi Arabia, into whatever. I think people forget that there were groups like Hezbollah al-Hijaz, like Shia Islamist groups inside Saudi Arabia that were committing attacks. That was, I think, a greater part of the Iranian foreign policy for a very long time. But then it became more pragmatic, slightly more pragmatic in that it didn't demand that level of ideological rigidity. And it began supporting movements that had different systems they envisioned different relationships to the states in which

they were in which they were housed and weren't even Shia you know I mean even though Iran at some point or another in the late 2000s supported a like a Shia alternative to Hamas because they were jockeying for influence between each other. Iran is the reason why Hamas became as powerful as it did, that it was able to commit the October 7th attacks and that it has been able to sustain itself for as long as it has under this gigantic siege. There are I mean there are weapons coming in from other places like North Korea but Iran is the primary reason why it was able to do

these things and Yahya Sinwar's relationship with Iran in particular, that close relationship that it tried to reforge. I mean, one of the, I want to say one of the first things that Sinwar did after release, within a couple years of his release, was that he went to Iran and they met with Khamenei. So yeah, I mean they supported Hezbollah significantly, giving them huge gigantic weapons that they could use against Israel. They smuggled weapons in for Hamas and other groups instead of the Gaza Strip like Palestinian

Islamic Jihad. They gave some amount of support to the Houthi movement in Yemen, though Yemen by this point Hamas and other groups inside the Gaza Strip, like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they gave some amount of support to the Houthi movement in Yemen, though Yemen by this point essentially functions independently and does not take directives from the Iranian state at this point. By the best Hamas to a certain extent, even if it is supported by Iran financially. I mean, ideologically, Iran does this to support the Palestinian cause, to have a bulwark against Western imperialism.

I don't doubt that it is ideological and that it is an honest belief. The people who led the Iranian military were people who grew up in, they took the initial reins of leadership after the Iranian revolution. These are people who have been active in the revolution. They got into it because they believed in it. They're not cynical in that fashion. But functionally, that network is there because it protects Iran from military invasion, or at the very least it did.

Whenever there were previous conflicts that were sparked, the idea was that, okay, for one, invading Iran would be a disaster on its own. But if we do that, then we're going to potentially spark all of these different regional conflicts in Lebanon and Yemen and Iraq and wherever. All of these networks will activate and it's going to be impossible to do with all of them. They're all going to fire on America and it'll be impossible to fight all these different fronts. We're going to be sitting ducks out there. We'll figure out different ways.

But now that that is starting to crumble, where the overwhelming force of Israel and the United States has picked off these groups one by one, because Iran's outlook on world policy has become more pragmatic, has become more hesitant to engage in conflicts to protect those proxies. That whole strategy has really fallen apart. And it's become incumbent on other groups in that network, like Hamas, like the Houthis, to try and rebuild that, but they can't rebuild that on their own. So it's not a successful endeavor for them, at least not now. But in terms of

what they were trying to focus on, were countries in Latin America that they were trying to send support to, maybe not military arms in the same way, but support those countries against Western countries that were trying to influence them. Something that I think a lot of people don't know is that Iran's government runs a Spanish language television station that broadcasts along Latin America to the point in which a very prominent official in Podemos in Spain used to host a program on the network

for a very long time. It had that level of influence. But more importantly, Iran was trying to expand its investments in Russia and China, looking east, not west. That was part of the policy of President Raisi, the late Ibrahim Raisi. It's unclear about the exact details of those investments, but obviously Iran exported a lot of its drones to Russia, which then utilized in Ukraine to great military success on its part. And China,

China is, I mean, those details are even more cagey, but ostensibly it's for increased investment, increased, a vastly increased relationship with that country, because those are seen as the future. The resistance axis, even though it's ideologically spoken of as a great project, that's not the path forward that is spoken about by most Iranian politicians and officials. They're mostly concerned with larger countries trying to forge stable relationships with different states, like Saudi Arabia, like the UAE, making sure that there is a form of regional peace rather than a constant simmering tension. But obviously that didn't work.

That didn't work. Yeah, it's not a very happy answer, but it is the answer. Yeah, yeah. So something that I came across recently actually, which I think is kind of interesting and relevant, is that the vast majority of Iran's oil actually goes to China, especially since the 2018 round of sanctions was imposed.

And I actually think it might be worthwhile to talk a little bit about the sanctions, just because I don't think most people really understand that they are really a form of warfare. Yes, of course, they're crippling Iran's economy, but they're also immiserating the lives of everyday Iranians and killing them too, actually, because, for example, people can't access the medication that they need to. So, yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about the sanctions that are imposed on Iran. And actually, that might also help bring us into the conversation about the nuclear program. I mean, Iran has been under some form of sanctions since 79, when Hoth trance started. There was really never a period in which it was

not under some form of economic warfare by the United States. And there have been periods in which it has been eased and then when it's been further restricted, but it has never been able to function as a truly free economy in the way other countries have been able to engage with the world. Those sanctions have been imposed for a variety of different reasons over the years, but fundamentally it's about their foreign policy direction and their support for the Palestinians primarily. Support for the Palestinians primarily and also then the nuclear program, which I'll get into in a moment.

Whenever these sanctions, or at least when they cared about this, when these sanctions were imposed, like the Obama administration in particular, the idea was to point out that, well, no, these are sanctions meant to cripple the Ayatollah regime, but critical things like medicine and humanitarian items, those aren't restricted. We're not affecting the actual people of Iran, we're only affecting government. We're only affecting government-related industries. But if I impose sanctions, sweeping sanctions, crippling sanctions on vast sectors of the Iranian state. I would ask you, and you can use your head about this, if there is a larger country than

America theoretically, and they decide that they're going to not punish the American people, but they're going to punish the American government, and by doing so, they're going to not punish the American people, but they're going to punish the American government. And by doing so, they're going to impose sanctions on every single government institution, everything that interacts with the government, essentially, then what inevitably happens? Do you live your life never interacting with anything related to the government? No, of course not. Yeah, no, no, of course not.

You can say it's a terrorist regime all you want that is hiding behind whatever the fuck, but fundamentally you interact with the government of the state that you live in. That means that banking becomes radioactive to deal with. Most industries become radioactive to deal with because the amount of sanctions placed on the country means that at one point or another, you may be violating something and violating U.S. sanctions is a death sentence for your business and may involve jail for you in particular.

So that results in very bad economic times for Iran for much of its modern history. And the thing is, is that there used to theoretically be a way out of it, in that Iran could have acceded to American wants on its nuclear program. When that happened under Obama, sanctions were eased. There was more opportunity for Western investment in Iran, which was very welcome. The economy improved and there was an understanding that negotiations with America were possible, that things had changed. And then Trump comes in, decides Iran is no longer complying with

nuclear debt, even though it was, and the sanctions come back under maximum pressure and Iran can't do anything about it. There's no way they can stop this process. So they are under sanctions out of no fault of their own. It is pure and simple economic warfare in order to overthrow the government. That was always its intention. Because the only way theoretically out of that sanctions regime was to have an American allied government come in.

We saw this with Syria, which has happened with Syria. The sanctions under the Caesar Act were implemented against Syria under Bashar al-Assad and the same argument was put forward that these things don't affect medicine, they don't affect regular people, they only affect things related to Assad and his government and his regime and the people allied with him. But then when Assad was overthrown and these sanctions still in place, it suddenly shifted. Now there was a wide acknowledgement that these sanctions would prevent the reconstruction of the country and that

they were crippling Syrian society and they need to be removed immediately. So Ahmed Al-Sharaa, Abu Mohammed Al-Julani, shakes hands with Trump and then makes it clear that even when Israel is invading his country, he'll be completely obsequious toward the West. He'll agree to anything they say and the sanctions get lifted. That's what they need to do. If they allow their sovereignty to be literally impeded on militarily, then they're trustworthy. They can be trusted as an ally of the United States. The idea that Iran would agree to that, I think, is a fanciful thing. So because I won't agree to have all of its affairs controlled by America and Israel, then it has to suffer under this kind of regime.

then it has to suffer under this kind of regime. Obviously, the sanctions have been extremely crippling and have caused immeasurable harm and immiseration to everyday Iranian people. It's also, in a way, forced Iran to, and this kind of reminds me a little bit of some of the conversations that we've had on China, find alternative forms of trade and partnerships. And I think that's, when we talk about sort of Iran's relationship to countries like China

and Russia, in a way, kind of, again, ends up biting the US in its ass because now you have these parallel relationships that are beginning to strengthen and make the United States begin to become obsolete in terms of a partner that is like required to be on good relations with and if you're going to function in the world economy. Of course, we're not there yet, but it seems to be heading in that direction. Let's talk a little bit more about, so we've been hearing that Iran is just a few weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon for like 30 years now, right? Yeah. We've heard a lot of things like you mentioned earlier that, you know, some of the propaganda out there is trying to claim that the Iranian population is not really in favor of a nuclear

program. Also, there needs to be the distinction made between Iran's attempts to build a civilian energy program versus building nuclear weapons. There's a lot going on there. So if you can dispel any myths for us and set the table for us in terms of like what Iran's nuclear ambitions have been and where they're at now in terms of this imminent threat of the same propaganda about like Saddam's WMDs, Is that a reality? Is that something that is completely made up as an excuse to invade Iran? Yeah, give us a sense of what's real and what's not in that sense. For one thing, I should say that the Iran nuclear program began under Mohammed Azzapath. It began under the monarchy under not only Western supervision, but also it was touted as a massive achievement because this plucky Middle Eastern nation is building a nuclear program with women scientists as well. That was supposed to be a big thing.

But obviously when the Islamic authorities came to power, they were eager to continue this program. They were also pre-addament that Iraq should not have a similar program. So it's suspected that they gave intelligence to the Israelis who then were able to bomb an Iraqi nuclear reactor during the war with Iraq. I would argue that that was a very short-sighted decision, but it was war. That was what decided it was expedient. But I think there are similarities between nuclear programs of both countries, but I think there are similarities similarity I think in perception, but there couldn't, there's many more differences here.

Before the Iraq war, with Iraq, the whole thing was that they had these stock, there was no active nuclear reactors, there was no active nuclear program. The idea was that they had all these chemical weapons. Maybe they were building something in clandestine facilities, but they didn't have anything close to that anymore. Not since the 1980s. But the idea was that, okay, they're hiding something somewhere, right? We'll send in Hans Blix, we'll send in the UN inspectors, they'll go house to house, they'll find something. Something is hiding under the floorboard somewhere.

This massive program that runs the entire world and the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. The point was that you couldn't see it. And fundamentally, because you couldn't see it then, I think Donald Rumsfeld says something to the, if I'm paraphrasing, like, the absence of evidence does not mean

the absence of something or something. The unknown known. There are no knowns and there are no knowns like this very post-structuralist understanding of it. It meant fucking nothing. But you were so far into this ambiguity, this miasma that anything could theoretically be possible.

Meanwhile, Iran's nuclear program has been very out in the open for, I mean, decades at this point. It's a point of national pride. The locations of the Zoukria facilities are very well established. And they've continuously led it in specters. There was a famous piece on the fucking Daily Show with John Stewart back in like 2010 or something where they have Ali Akbar Solehi who was an MIT trained nuclear physicist. This is the level of not only the public knowledge about who controls sorts of things but also their level of expertise. He's being interviewed by I want to say Jason Jones and he's's like, he asks a joke, like, can we see those facilities?

And so he says, yeah, sure. And then they go save them. Like this was not a secret what they were doing. But the, but it's still these accusations from Israel and the United States continued that somewhere in these facilities, there is 10 or 5 or 15 nukes worth of enriched uranium that can be used for nuclear bomb. Everything was scrutinized. There were accusations the IAEA things are not being properly handled and then there were further accusations to be run that the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Association was being biased against them. But fundamentally,

fundamentally, you can find out, I think, the truth of the matter from what the Supreme Leader Khamenei, Adi Khamenei, says about this matter. And then after the War with Iraq, after the chemical attacks that happened against the Iranian people by the Iraqi government under Saddam, there was a moral stand to be made that Iran would not develop weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons were not going to be part of its doctrine. And that became as well a point of pride for the Iranian state that it would never do this thing. And that continued even as it developed its nuclear

technology, it did research, it got advanced to the point where the fact that it did not pursue nuclear weapons became a point of frustration for some nuclear scientists. I brought this up a couple of times before, but people should go watch on memory TV the interview with Fede Dunabosi, which is a nuclear scientist who was killed by Israeli opening sample of the war. Not just the interview that I brought up that he says they were never given the order to build nuclear weapons, but also other interviews that he's done where he's just talking about like other things that he wishes Iran could make but they they won't enrich uranium to that position. Like he was talking

about we should have built like nuclear submarines. We should have been able to go out to the high seas and become like a world power. And that sort of was never given. The primary obstacle to that program is not Iran, is not Israeli Mossad operations or sabotage or American whatever. It is the Supreme leader who has made it a point of ideology that Iran will not pursue this, even if it would be an effective deterrent. So the idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, I don't think has any real basis in verifiable reality.

There's a reason why they're bringing out these exact same tropes from Iraq back here in highly compressed fashion. They know what works. They know just like with Iraq, protests won't work against it. And they could just, they could play the hits and the outcome will be, will be the same. will be the same. So I want to shift the focus now to the war that's been brought to Iran by Israel and the US. And you know, of course, though the US hasn't itself like bombed Iran yet, it is, you know, for all intents and purposes, this is a US-Israeli joint war with Israel.

You know, it's enjoying US funding and US arms and logistics and intelligence and political support, etc. So, you know, if and when the United States does officially enter the war, I think it's important to keep that in mind. Although it's also really important to think about the implications of the US formally entering the war. We will talk about that a little bit later. For now, I just want to parse through all of the different analysis that's floating around and get your take on it. Is this war generally intended to destabilize a region of resistance like in the same way they did Libya or Syria is this

More of a war about access to strategic resources. Is this about a nuclear program? Is this just Netanyahu trying to you know cover his own corrupt ass from getting locked up like yeah What what's your take and what is going on here? I mean, it's a lot of different reasons, but I think with Israel, primarily, it is. They want not only destabilization, but they want failed states and not just failed states, but states that functionally don't exist. Constant chaos, fighting off opponents left and right, exist, constant chaos, fighting off opponents left and right, not able to do anything that a sovereign state could do, much less threaten Israel with anything. With Gaza, the intent is to ethically cleanse the territory because they want to have that

territory from the south. But with Lebanon, you might recall that when the invasion happened, the war goal that was established by the Defense Minister, Israel Katz, was that Hezbollah would be completely destroyed. And there was also a plan, apparently by Netanyahu, to eventually occupy Beirut, if they were to get to that point. But they didn't do that. They were forced into a ceasefire by Hezbollah, even if their military leadership had been killed and they were very severely hit by that war,

their combat abilities remained and they were able to force them into that position. But Israel was then further able to take advantage of that in making the south of the country into a closed military zone, a buffer zone for many months, demolishing almost every village in the south. And it has put Lebanon's government on a path to conflict with Hezbollah itself. So now both institutions can't really confront Israel. I mean, Iran right now is being attacked by Israel. And in previous times, Hassan Nasrallah was saying that if Iran is attacked, the whole region is going to erupt and Hezbollah will be part of that effort.

But now Naam Qasem, he delivers a very impassioned statement about it, but his only prescription is for the world to raise their voices against the war. Because now there is an understanding that Hezbollah can't actually intervene in this conflict until it is forced to by another war. In Syria, I mean, I'm sure they would like to get rid of Ahmed al-Shar'a, but it is also good that even if he is pro-west, even if he was friendly to Israel and the United States, that if he is fighting off Druze rebels constantly or other people,

then he is even less of a threat to Israel if they decide they don't actually like this arrangement anymore. And in Iran, Netanyahu does that message to the Iranian people, but regime change, I don't think is possible or even desirable. Because let's think about this. I'll ask you this, Director, like, when you think about who would take power in the country if Khamenei was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was forced to go the way of the Iraqi Ba'ath party, who would take power?

I mean, I would assume that there is just a whole multiple tiers of people beneath that have been trained and are prepared to sort of take leadership positions. Like I don't think that simply assassinating the leader would crush that entire administration, that would be my take. Yeah, no, no. I mean, for one thing, yeah, Khomeini wouldn't do that. But even if they, let's say everything goes their way, the entire system is obliterated. Who is prepared to take power afterward

from this Ank Republic? Like Reza Pahlavi, who from my understanding, lives in Maryland and goes to like kebab shops and sweatpants. No, he has no ability to take power in this respect. There he isn't even at the level of Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq, because Ahmed Chalabi at the very least had institutions built up around him that could contribute to taking power within the coalition provisional authority inside Iraq when that was set up.

Whenever Reza Pahlavi attempts to build institutions around himself, his own want for power disintegrates those relationships. When the Mahsa Aminah protests happened, there was this big fucking show in Washington that all these different people could come together and even though they didn't agree on everything, they could agree on this kind of unity. So there was Mahsi Ali Najad, there was a Kurdish separatist leader, there is a Kurdish separatist leader, there is Ismail Iyon, who was a very prominent opposition advocate, and it became non-existent very quickly. Reza Pahlavi was too narcissistic for any of this to continue on.

So he's not going to do anything. The MEK has become increasingly irrelevant, the Mojahedin at Chalk, the cult that lives out in that military compound in Albania, which is even less popular than the Shahis within Iran at this point. You got those two? You got, I mean, who else? There's no one. Those are the two organizations, those groups, those personas that people largely have surrounded themselves, but they don't have any sort of institutions around them that are remotely popular or coherent or liked or anything. The only alternative would be would be a chaos and that's I think what Israel wants. In terms

of national resources, I don't think Trump is thinking about this right now, but I'm sure he will inevitably say like we should have taken the oil and he'll go back to those very common things he said with Iraq and with Syria and with Venezuela. That's his main thing. And I'm sure if they were to gain control of the country, they'd do something similar with that. But I think the main thing is just making sure that Iran can no longer be a major power, one that can't oppose America in any sort of way, one that can't impede its desires.

And it can do that without removing the Zan Republic. It can do that with an overwhelming show of military force. That's something that's within its power. CB So one of the things that I think is important to address and potentially dispel is like this idea, and we've talked about this, we've touched on it already several times, but the small but very vocal group of people who are trying to make this about the Iranian people versus the Iranian government. And I'm not talking necessarily about Netanyahu or like, you know, public figures, but the sentiment that comes from a lot of diaspora Iranians and that kind of thing. Like, I want to get a sense of like, and I've heard reports on this, but I'm not following this as deeply as you, how popular is the Iranian government right now? How much like has the country come together in order to sort of support one another and support their country and the government that runs their country against the West? Are there people who want the Iranian government to be

overthrown by an US-Israeli joint military campaign? Does that even exist? You know what I'm trying to say? There's a lot of people out there who are talking about this a lot and I just want to get your perspective on it. I would say this may be splitting hairs, but I think there's a difference between standing with the state. Like. I see a lot of people who are standing with Iran, who are standing with the state, they don't want foreign intervention, but they're not going to the extent where they're, you know, posting Instagram stories of Khomeini or going towards those explicit symbols. They're mostly focusing on national symbols. So to that extent, I haven't seen very much of that from people who otherwise wouldn't have been doing it before. So I can't really speak to that. But I will give

an example of this that I think illustrates how people, I imagine, generally speaking feel. I have a journalist friend who lives in Tehran. He had been in jail for two years in Iran for actions that he undertook during the Massamini protests. He was convicted of propaganda against the Iranian state. Got out maybe a month or two ago. And he has been very loud and public about the fact that this war is not against the

Iranian government, it's against the entirety of the Iranian people. You know, hashtag fuck Israel, all of that. And Iran International, which is a Saudi funded opposition channel which interviewed Netanyahu several days ago about this. They have been attempting, like in many instances in the past, to try and say that there's this large curve within the population that is going to support this effort.

And the most that they have been able to finagle are cell phone videos of people inside their own houses saying that I support Israel or I hope Israel wins. That isn't anything. That is not anything. Meanwhile, there are continuous public protests in the streets calling for more retaliation against Israel, calling for the Iran government to go further than it is to build an atomic bomb to do an even more violent retaliation. The people are standing with their country, regardless of government that actually exists in it. They don't want a foreign imposed government. It's not about supporting Khomeini, it's not

about supporting Islam, it's not about anything. This war has already targeted hospitals, apartment buildings, residential blocks. It's killed infants. It's killed fathers. It's killed mothers. There is no planet in which after what has happened in Gaza that anybody in a large amount will believe what Israel is selling, that it is not a war against the Iranian people. So, yeah, simply put, I've seen more Iranian quotes about how, well, I don't support civilian killing anywhere, I don't, maybe Iran's government is taking advantage of it, like they need each other, very common liberal refrains, but it never goes to the extent, almost never goes to the extent, of supporting this war

against the country. Many different reasons for whatever, but that conclusion very rarely straights. The only times in which I've ever seen something very pro-war are from like the Washington Post. There was an article the other day where this woman who... the reporter had been on Iran International before. I shouldn't say that much. That shows her perspective. And she had been interviewing people inside Iran and she didn't interview a single person

that was really opposed to the war. Didn't interview a single person, even though these people are very readily available. And there was even a part in that where somebody insisted that, actually, everybody who was celebrating Eid al-Ghadir was actually, maybe they were celebrating the Israeli attack on their country. What was that based on? Absolutely fucking nothing. It was only her opinion. Only her opinion. Meanwhile, there are interviews of people at AIDLK there where they say they actually want more attacks in Israel. There's more public evidence against this than in support of that. And it's just lazy.

Uh, not even trying, but it continues and it continues and we have to have these, these discussions about whether or not people actually like when they get bombed. What do you think, man? Like, yeah. Well, thank you for setting the record straight. All right. Well, so I think the final question that I have for you is a pretty large one again. large one again. So it really does seem like the war with Iran could be the beginning of something huge, right? We're going to know a lot more in the next, as Trump says, two weeks. Stay tuned, right? It's like a TV show to him. Season finale type stuff. Loves that stuff.

Insane. But there's a lot of analysis out there. People are talking about World War III, the implications for a nuclear war of some kind. Yeah, there's just, there's a lot unknown still, but it seems like this could potentially unravel into something really, really huge with like global implications. So I'm wondering if you can just maybe talk about what your thoughts are on this.

What are the stakes both regionally and globally? I mean the implications I think at we can take this piece by piece. The implications of if they assassinate Khamenei, that is going to unravel even more restrictions that the world has placed on itself in order to stop it from destroying itself. If a national leader of a sovereign state, a UN member state, can be killed unilaterally in an assassination strike, then there's going to be an attempt on Zelensky's life, there's going to be an attempt on many other leaders'. There's gonna be a depth on many other leaders lives That's gonna be a major component and that's not something you could put back in the box but I think

more critically to me is The considerations that Trump is right now making that a bunker buster bomb dropped by a b2 Isn't gonna be enough. It might have to be attacked the nuclear weapon And if they attacked the nuclear weapon is used on Fordo, like they are, they are suggesting, some people are suggesting. And just to give context to people that might not be familiar with that, that is the underground, it's like under a big mountain with this nuclear facility that Iran has, right? Fordo. Yeah. The point is that nobody can destroy it except for the largest weapon known to man.

nobody can destroy it except for the largest weapon known to man. So if that happens... I try not to be hysterical because I got criticized for this when I went out to Chappo, but if you have broken that nuclear precedent, the kind that became an iron wall after Hiroshima, then the floodgates have opened onto a very dark world, one that's going to have ramifications across the earth. Mass death has already been normalized to a truly disturbing degree after Gaza. The idea that you can be able to do anything to anyone that attacks you. Torture, murder, maim, kill infants, starve them to death as long as it's for a supposedly righteous cause. If this is the case, then you have opened the door for any other country to do that

against anyone else. And that pushes you into World War III territory, more so than anything else. Because the strongest country in the world has decided that it can do it. That means that other countries need to start pursuing their own nuclear programs. And that means that smaller countries have understood

that it is maybe within their purview to use nuclear weapons and that it's allowed now, more so than it might have been before. It would be the single most disastrous decision that any American president in my memory could undertake if he does that. No, it's just, I don't like thinking about it. I don't like thinking about it at all. And let's take a scenario that doesn't involve that kind of nuclear holocaust situation, just in terms of more conventional warfare.

Like what globally are the implications when we talk about, you know, we have the United States, which is a decaying empire. We have Israel, which is barely holding on by the skin of its teeth. And then we have Iran, which represents one of the most powerful parts of the axis of resistance to US hegemony. Do you see this war being representative

of a much larger implications in terms of what direction the world heads in? Do you think this is, again, taking the potential of nuclear stuff off the table, do you see this as something that has huge global implications or would you say that this is going to really just be something that is regional and it just mostly has to do with Iran and what what direction it takes moving forward? When Chancellor Mertz says that Israel is doing its dirty work for Europe with Iran, that should speak for the entire thing. This is a global shaking off of any sort of illusions that the world had about the West and also the West feeling like it has any sort of social obligations to the global South, or that it needs to portray itself as some sort of benevolent power in any sort of way.

This alone is responsible for it, but what has happened in the post October 7th landscape, that level of murder and killing and lack of care responsibility, that's going to be applied to migrants, that's going to be applied to any future conflict, war is going to absolutely become more brutal wherever it pops up. The dehumanization of enemy populations is going to ramp up and it is going to be... it's simply put, it's a feedback loop that can never be stopped, I fear. The United States and Western countries have been able to use humanitarian purposes for interventions abroad for many years now, under the guise that they were morally upright and that they had a responsibility to protect these people. But now the whole thing is exposed, and now they're talking about ethnic cleansing as if it was a humanitarian project. This is the end. It's the end of the liberal order. Period.

That's dead. That's buried. And in the aftermath of this war, however it turns out, it is still going to be dead and buried. I don't think there's going to be any situation where any shred of it survives this. No. I think if I can give one positive note, one positive note before we go away from this is that I think Gramsci talked about having pessimism of the intellect and optimism Out of this very destructive situation, there have been opportunities created out of this. Opportunities that would have never existed in the world prior to October 7th. And the public consciousness has shifted. People are much more conscious of how the West works and how Israel works and how these relationships function.

And these regional relationships are very malleable now. much more conscious of how the West works and how Israel works and how these relationships function. And these regional relationships are very malleable now. And there is opportunity for new things to come out of this very, very horrible situation, things that we can't even conceive of. So to completely consign oneself to depression is understandable. I also feel these things very deeply. But there were feelings like this in the 1950s, in the 60s, in the 70s, and things went in very, very strange and interesting and dare I say positive directions in all these decades. Things that would lay the groundwork for future successes. So while

it is a dark path ahead, it is not completely closed. There are things that we can't even think of at the moment. There are things that we can't even think of at the moment. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Seamus Malek Afsali, a freelance journalist whose work focuses on the Middle East and the Global South. You can follow him and his work at his website, which is listed in the show notes. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

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