Antinuclear

Betrayed: How Liberals Supported Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and Turned Against the Progressive Shah.

The Left’s Lethal Miscalculation Still Goes On!

SL Kanthan, Jan 19, 2026, https://slkanthan.substack.com/p/betrayed-how-liberals-supported-islamic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=844398&post_id=184864947&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

History repeats itself and rhymes in uncanny ways. And there are profound contradictions in political ideologies. The partnership of liberals and right-wing fundamentalist Islam is one of those phenomenon that would leave any objective thinker immensely confused.

Let’s look at the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, where liberals and communists joined forces with religious leader Khomeini to overthrow the progressive but authoritarian Shah, under whom Iran made astonishing progress in terms of economy, modernization and social justice. Of course, immediately after coming to power, Ayatollah Khomeini crushed the Marxists and anyone remotely considered liberal.

Fast forward to 2026, Western liberals are generally very pro-Iran, and many of them are staunchly supporting the current theocratic government that is putting down the nationwide protests with brute force. Khamenei has admitted that “thousands” of protesters have been killed, but he blames the victims for sedition.

The photos and videos of body bags of dead Iranian protesters left to rot on the ground have not changed the opinion of liberal social media influencers.

Western liberals now are driven by the same motive as the Iranian liberals in the 1970s — that is, anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism. Anti-Zionism is also a major factor now.

However, such blind ideology leads to a situation where the cure is much worse than the disease. Let’s dive in.

Shah, the Progressive Leader

The Shah of Iran – Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – would be considered a leftist role model these days!

He did things that would make Mao Zedong cheer — for example, the Shah ended feudalism, took lands away from the landlord, and distributed the land to 1.5 million farmers. That helped about 9 million Iranians, a third of the population.

The Shah of Iran emancipated girls and women and did admirable things. Consider these:

• By 1979, 33% of the university students in Iran were women. That’s an astonishing number in the Middle East.
• There were 22 female ministers in the Iranian parliament.
• Iranian women were doctors, judges, professors and so on.
• How did the Shah achieve it? It was not easy. Here’s how he did it:
• The Shah made education free and compulsory for all Iranian girls (and boys) — up to the age of 14. Also, poor children were provided a free meal in schools.
• Reza Pahlavi built thousands of schools all over Iran, especially in rural areas.
• He abolished child marriage and raised the age to 18.
• He gave Iranian women the right to vote in 1963 — eight years ahead of Switzerland!
• Reza Pahlavi cracked down on Sharia law that limited women’s potential. His father, the first Shah, had already banned chador, the Iranian version of burqa.
• He gave Iranian women equal rights in marriage, divorce and custody. The Islamic laws were quite misogynistic.

In 1962, the Shah of Iran came to the US with his wife and met with President JFK.

The two really clicked, and the Shah was impressed by Kennedy’s Peace Corps. So, the Shah went back home and created a Literacy Corps and Health Corps to have young well-educated Iranians volunteer as teachers and doctors in rural Iran. It was also a bit like Mao’s “barefoot doctors,” but more modern and sophisticated.

Modernization of Iran Under Pahlavi Dynasty — “White Revolution”

Under the Shah and his father (the first king of the Pahlavi Dynasty), Iran made astonishing progress.

• Iran’s GDP grew a stunning 700-fold between 1925 and 1975! The per-capita income grew 200 times!
• Between 1960 and 1976, the real GDP — adjusted for inflation — grew an astonishing 5-fold.
• Between 1948 and 1978, the constant PPP GDP-per-capita grew from $250 to nearly $10,000.

Iran used to be a poor and an illiterate country divided by ethnic and religious identities. In 1925, a quarter of the population was nomadic. Infrastructure was terrible, manufacturing was negligible (except for artisans like those making Persian rugs) and there was no real military.

Under the two visionary Shahs (1925-1941 and 1941-1978), Iran underwent massive modernization. Initially, the private sector did not have enough money or the rich Iranians were not interested in factories, since they could make easy money from imports. Thus, Reza Pahlavi’s government encouraged public-private partnerships, co-invested in numerous factories, raised tariffs on imports, and made Iran self-sufficient in many areas.

Father and the son Shahs electrified villages and built massive infrastructure to connect various parts of Iran — like the Trans-Iranian railway, which is still an engineering marvel in some regions. The Shah helped create joint ventures for auto manufacturing and Iranian cars (like “Paykan”) for the first time. Iran Air was flying (often non-stop) to global hot spots like New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo!

• Under the Shah, a vast majority (60%) of the oil revenue was spent on improving Iran’s transportation, infrastructure and industrialization.
• Iran had no military before the Pahlavi Dynasty. However, by the 1970s, Iran had the most powerful military in the Middle East.

Iran under the Shah also had smart and pragmatic foreign policy. The Shah was greatly liked by the US and the West. Yes, it was geopolitics of the Cold War, but Iranians benefited from the US-Iran relations.

In 1962, the Shah of Iran visited the US and had an amazing ticker-tape parade on Broadway Street in Manhattan, New York City.

“CIA Puppet and SAVAK”

Two of the criticisms about the Shah are that “he was installed by the CIA after the 1953 coup” and that his secret intelligence group SAVAK was brutal and cruel. Let’s explore:

• The CIA coup in 1953 did NOT install the Shah, who came to power in 1941. Yes, his father went into exile when the Brits and the Russians invaded Iran; and he was placed on the throne at the age of 21.
• Fast forward to 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh — who had become too powerful — had nationalized the oil sector two years earlier. Powerful Western oil interests and deep state (MI6/CIA) colluded to get rid of Mossadegh. The Shah had fled the country for only 3-4 days.
• This is just a matter of survival in politics and geopolitics. It was a partnership of shared values, although the US definitely and obviously was the more powerful one in the relationship. The Shah eventually became so independent that the US/West secretly supported Khomeini. Recently declassified US diplomatic cables show that the Carter administration had extensive contacts with Khomeini, and basically told the Iranian military to stand down.
• As for SAVAK, it was created in 1957 by the Shah with the help of the British and American intelligence to prevent further coups or the rise of extremists like communists and religious terrorist groups. Remember that the USSR was meddling a lot in the Iranian affairs. And SAVAK did operate outside the law, engaged in spying, arrests, torture etc.
• But guess what happened after the Islamic Revolution? SAVAK was not dismantled, but simply renamed as SAVAMA! In fact, the deputy chief of SAVAK – General Hossein Fardoust – became the head of SAVAMA. All the infrastructure, files, intelligence, torture methods, along with most intel agents continued under Khomeini.

So What Underpinned the 1979 Revolution?

If the Shah was so great, as I have argued, why did was he overthrown in the 1979 revolution?

Well, a whole slew of incompatible radicals and disgruntled groups got together in a strange alliance. The common excuse is that the Shah was authoritarian. However, if the Shah had been as tyrannical as the current government, he would have survived. But let’s take a look at the opposition:

• Islamic clergy — The mullahs were the #1 instigator, since they had lost a lot of their power and wealth in a secular society. Their hatred for the Shah and his father was intense. Some of the Shiite extremist groups like Fadayan-e Islam even assassinated Iranian Prime Ministers (four, to be precise!)

Socialists and Communists — The leftists were a small group in Iran since the 1920s. But when the USSR and the British joined to attack and defeat Iran in 1941, communism spread quickly. A communist political party known as Tudeh was founded in 1941. (Ironically, it was crushed by Khomeini! More on that later). The Soviet Union secretly funded the communists; and openly spread anti-Shah propaganda through newspapers and radio stations (operated out of Azerbaijan). Tudeh had a vast following, especially in trade unions; and quite a few military officers secretly belonged to the party. The communists kept demanding higher wages, even though the Shah passed laws for industrial workers to get 20% of corporate profits. These extremists wanted a communist Iran, and nothing else would satisfy them.

College Students — Khomeini really hated them! These spoiled kids were the clueless and idealistic group, which dreamed of democracy and freedom from imperialism, although they were very Westernized. Not much different from the current liberals, who live in the US but spend all day demonizing the US.

All these people had underestimated the religious fundamentalists. Some naively thought a religious person would never lie! And they all thought the religious poor were too harmless or incompetent to take over the leadership. In the desperation to beat the Shah, none of these groups used their brain. They missed all the red flags and projected their fantasy into Khomeini, who despised them.

How Ayatollah Khomeini Back-stabbed Communists, Liberals & Women

Consider the timeline:

Jan 16: The Shah of Iran leaves Iran, unwilling to push the country into a civil war.

Feb 1: Khomeini comes to Iran after exile. He had spent the last few weeks in France

Feb 11: Khomeini becomes the new leader of Iran.

March 7: Mandatory hijab law gets passed.

March 8: Liberal women stage a massive protest, but their new “friend” turned out to be far more totalitarian than the Shah.

What did Khomeini do to women?

• He systematically reversed much of the Shah’s contribution to women’s liberation.
• Khomeini introduced Sharia laws, made hijab mandatory, segregated public places (men v. women), reduced marriage for girls from 18 to 9 (!), banned women from being judges and other key roles, banned women from sports stadiums, banned women from singing or dancing and so on.
• Remember how the Shah raised marriage of girls to 18? The “Supreme Leader” of Iran reduced the age to 9. Nine!

Khomeini and his followers were brutal in enforcement. Women who did not wear a hijab or “dress modestly” were beaten, stoned, and sometimes attacked with acid that would disfigure their face. The Iranian parliament passed a law that women without hijab could face 72 lashes.

The obsession with hijab still goes on, although in the last 3-4 years, the government has relaxed a bit in Tehran. In 2016, Iran’s top chess player – Dorsa Derakhshani – left Iran because she was banned from the national team for not wearing a hijab or wearing “tight jeans.” There have also been many cases of men throwing acid on women’s faces for not dressing properly — like Marziyeh Ebrahimi in the photo below [on original]

Khamenei’s morality police have harassed, beaten up and arrested countless women for not dressing properly. Young Iranians are arrested for singing or dancing on Instagram or other social media. Last year, a woman (Parastoo Ahmadi) was arrested for live streaming her singing. It was a beautiful and classy performance but women cannot sing in public under Islamic laws! See below: [on original]

How did Khomeini attack the students?

Khomeini shut down the universities for nearly three years, starting from 1980! He fired or arrested all the leftist professors and student leaders. Some were even executed. All the leftist newspapers on campuses were shut down — by brute violence. The entire college curriculum was rewritten to be Islamic. Courses in music and other topics were banned. Soon, Western movies were banned and movie theaters were closed. Alcohol was banned, needless to say.

How did Khomeini attack the communists?

Tudeh, the communist party, had survived 38 years under Shah, even though he was harsh on them, since they were more pro-Soviet than pro-Iran. However, the party did not even last five years under the Islamic Republic. In 1984, the leader of the communist party – Noureddin Kianouri – was tortured and forced into confession, broadcast on TV.

Another Marxist-Leninist group was the OIPFG, a violent underground guerrilla organization that worked against the Shah and supported the Islamic revolution. These clowns were also ruthlessly crushed by Khomeini.

Khomeini eliminated all opposition groups, including the National Front, which was founded by Mossadegh, the man who nationalized the Iranian oil industry in 1951 and is still idolized by Western liberals.

The regimes of Khomeini and Khamenei have continued to be unrepentantly repressive for 47 years.

In 1988, for example, up to 30,000 political prisoners — all of whom once helped overthrow the Shah — were executed over a period of three months. These belonged to the MEK, Tudeh and Fedayeen, who were all deemed to be guilty of “crimes against Allah.”

End of the Shah

The Shah left Iran on Jan 16, 1978, partly because he was already sick with cancer, and partly because he didn’t want to plunge the nation into a bitter civil war. The US didn’t even the decency to let him at first. So, he went to Morocco, Panama, the Bahamas etc. Eventually, he was admitted into a hospital at Cornell in late 1978. A few months later, he died in exile in Egypt.

Hostile and Irrational Foreign Policy of the Islamic Republic

There is a golden mean between being a total puppet of the USA and being an uncompromising enemy of the USA. However, the rabid religious in Iran lack such a nuanced approach that arises out of geopolitical maturity.

In 1979, the Shah went to the US for cancer treatment. Rather than focusing on governance of the new nation, the Islamists wanted to kill the Shah, and demanded the US to send him back to Iran. When the US refused this barbaric demand, Khomeini’s radical students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 American civilians hostage for 444 days. During this time, the Americans were tortured and humiliated in shocking ways.

This needless and uncivilized action by Khomeini set the US and Iran on a collision path. Obviously, the country that has suffered more in this conflict is Iran.

Furthermore, the delusional Ayatollahs wanted to spread their “revolution” and expand their sphere of influence. Thus, they armed and funded Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq etc. Then, the Iranian government cries about US interference or attempts to do a regime change in Iran.

Conclusion

History is written by winners… and sometimes by losers. In Iran’s case, the US didn’t want to admit that it made a mistake, so Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah was demonized. “We let the bad guy fall, so don’t feel too bad.”

And Western liberals have a strange affinity for right-wing Islamic fundamentalism. Perhaps it comes out of guilt about imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, and endless wars in the Middle East. Not to mention political correctness, which disrupts critical thinking.

90 million Iranians are suffering because of the religious hardliners, for whom compromise is a dirty word. Even after the death of thousands of protesters over the last decade, the government has not agreed to change one policy. The people don’t have many basic political, economic, social or personal freedoms.

One of the Shah’s son hopes to be return to Iran and restore the old glory along with democracy. It really depends on the US/EU since the Iranian people themselves cannot fight back or change the status quo.

Anyways, hope you found this article useful and interesting. There are no simple truths in geopolitics, but it’s good to have different perspectives .

January 20, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized