Abbas Amanat

There's a word for it in Persian.

They call it khudi, one of us.

Okay?

Well, that's very fascistic.

It's like... Yes, yes.

Or for that matter, I suppose Soviet Union, if you were a member of the party and your children would have received a special kind of treatment, yourself as well.

This sense of us versus them,

for a while worked because the younger people coming from the countryside to the cities

certain sector of them would have found protection and support from the government.

They wanted to belong to something and the mosques and the mourning associations in the neighborhoods and so forth would have given them.

There's actually a term for it.

It's called basiji.

Those have been recruited

And this is the youth kind of vigilante, if you like, that you can see them also in these demonstrations.

Sometimes thugs, they're called the civil cloth.

So the people that comes to these demonstrations that start beating up

these young people, and they are not in security police uniforms, but they are just regular clothes.

And these people, yes, they still support and they still benefit because they get jobs, they get privileges, and these are very important for a state, right?

that basically monopolizes most of the resources.

You see, even during the sanction, let alone before the sanction, the oil revenue of Iran, which is the major source of the state government, was the monopoly of the state.