Nearly 50 years ago the Iranian Revolution that toppled the Pahlavi dynasty enjoyed mass support, but like the 1789 French Revolution or Russia after 1917, it rapidly succumbed to the Saturn-like inclination to devour its own children.
A grim exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who returned home in triumph, concentrated power among the “divinely guided” clerical caste, eliminating such secular allied forces as the Tudeh Communist Party and Iranian liberals. Because the regime regarded Iran’s armed forces (the Artesh) as politically dubious, it created the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to invigilate them.
Both the clerical establishment whose epicentre is the holy city of Qom and the IRGC created enormous economic power bases – the former originally designed to care for the many widows and orphans from the 1980-88 war with Saddam’s Iraq that left a million Iranians dead.
This war also supplied the regime with symbolic moral capital since the many casualties had been “martyred”. They included boys who walked across minefields with “plastic keys to paradise” clutched in their small hands in case they were killed. The war also spawned the Basij militia, a paramilitary force of 600,000 ultra-loyalists who, since the war, are routinely used to repress street protests from the back of their motorcycles.
In the regime’s Shia moral universe, revolutionary martyrdom accompanied intense hatred of the Great Satan, his “Little” British lackey, and of course Israel, as anti-Zionism shaded into vicious antisemitism.
Iranian protesters demonstrate against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, Iran in 1978. er shows Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Photo: AP)Flush with oil revenue, Iran subsidised armed proxies from Lebanon to Yemen, as well as Syria’s Alawite Assad regime which was kept in power by by IRGC Quds Forces and Hezbollah. It developed a mutual admiration society with the Chavez regime in Venezuela. The Iranian regime increased its own isolation by trying to assemble the capability to make nuclear weapons despite having signed non-proliferation treaties and disavowed the Bomb as “un-Islamic”. Meanwhile, many younger Iranians (half the population is under 30) wondered why the regime was so concerned with funding foreign proxies – including Hamas – and not their own economic wellbeing.
Corruption, mismanagement and western sanctions explain why the Iranian economy has been failing for years. Some of this is insidious, as in the case of water. Corrupt regime-connected construction companies – known as the Water Mafia – have built too many dams and diverted rivers, forcing farmers to over-exploit underground aquifers. Lakes and rivers turn to dust while the ground around Isfahan or Tehran subsides at an alarming rate and wells dry up in what is the fifth year of drought. It did not help that 6.5 million cubic meters of water were diverted from wetlands to cool secret nuclear installations.
Members of Iran’s Parliament chant ‘death to America’ as the Speaker discusses Iran’s response to possible US attacks, in Tehran on Sunday (Photo: IRINN/via Reuters TV)Economic mismanagement underlay the most recent explosion of popular anger which commenced on 28 December. The regime operated official and preferential foreign exchange rates, which enabled merchants (known as “he Bazaar” after the old market in Tehran) to arbitrage the difference between these rates as they bought and sold computers and mobile phones. A sudden inflationary move by the since sacked central bank boss to abolish the preferential rate led to shops closing and their owners jamming the alleyways in the market. Protests spread to dozens of smaller towns and cities especially in the west and south of the country. These were not just students or young women, but a mix of the middle class and the poor, who in the former case had seen their savings disappear and their ability to buy even a chicken, let alone a car, evaporate. But the main slogans shouted called for the death to the ailing Supreme Leader, or the restoration of the exiled Pahlavi dynasty, which most protesters are too young to remember.
This raises the important question of how the regime responds. These protest waves began in 2009 against rigged elections, continued in a more decentralised fashion in 2019 against economic hardship, and then exploded again in 2022 as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement after the “morality police” murdered Mahsa Amini in custody. These waves are more frequent and cumulative. Although on each occasion the regime reasserted its control, the protests have substituted a new symbolic universe for the official version which harks back to events in 1979 or 1980-88, which few young people can remember.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, is living in exile in the US (Photo: Abdul Saboor/ Reuters)Simply gunning down the protesters, though this does not mean that many hospitals have been overwhelmed with casualties with eye injuries from tear gas and targeted shotgun blasts. In recent decades, the regime has combined the stealthy approach of shutting off the internet and mobile phone networks with night-time arrests, beatings, torture and executions. Even this risks generating more martyrs, as with the hanging of a famous wrestler Navid Afkari in 2020 on false charges of murdering a regime supporter during a wave of unrest two years before.
But the circle of hardcore loyalists has contracted over time too, even if they can be relied on to chant angrily whenever the regime mobilises them, notably on Friday’s Orwellian day of mass hate. An estimated 8-9 per cent of Iranians are thought to actively support the clerical regime, in a population of 92 million, from either ideological-cum-religious conviction or because they are its primary economic beneficiaries – the IRGC budget has been boosted by 29 per cent this year alone.
But even this camp is a house divided since Iran’s crafty rulers simultaneously try to quell dissent by shuffling the pack at the top, to give the appearance that meaningful reform is happening. They are doing this now by distinguishing between “legitimate” economic grievances and “illegitimate” vandalism. The problem is that these levers no longer work, as in the case of the dismissal of the central bank chief responsible for tampering with exchange rates.
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After the 2022 protests about hair coverings, the morality police were temporarily taken off the streets. The current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a mathematician regarded as a moderate, duly brought back the smooth former foreign minister Javad Zarif to find some modus vivendi with Donald Trump, a gambit which also appals hardliners after he helped Israel pulverise Iran’s nuclear installations last summer.
That is the ball which is now in Trump’s court. He may be tempted to repeat Israel’s tactics of using a mounting protestor death toll to knock out more elements of the regime, gambling that some sort of stability will ensue from the aftermath should the Islamic regime finally fall.
Whether a similar resort to “moderate” collaborators would work in Iran remains moot, especially as an Iranian proverb is “different saddles, same donkey”. Any external attack would enable the regime to designate all opponents as traitors. As for 65-year-old Reza Pahlavi, the would-be Shah, he lives in the US and he has prayed alongside Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Wailing Wall. So far, Trump has merely said he is “a nice guy”. In this world, the “nice” don’t hack it.
Michael Burleigh is Senior Fellow at LSE Ideas. His books include Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World
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