Ben Shapiro
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
We helped the Shah do the thing that he had the constitutional ability to do.
Well, under the Shah for the next two and a half decades, Iran was a staunch U.S.
ally.
The Shah pushed through the so-called White Revolution.
He modernized the country.
He expanded women's rights.
He secularized the education system.
He built up the economy.
Again, if you look at pictures of Tehran in the 1970s, it looks a lot like L.A.
in the 1970s.
People are wearing Western clothing.
They're going to the movies.
They're living relatively normal lives.
But rapid modernization bred heavy resentment among radical traditionalists, and the Shah was an autocratic leader.
He did use secret police to crush political dissent.
And of course, because he was an autocrat, this also created corruption issues.
And so you ended up with this bizarre coalition of weird bedfellows, Marxist college students and radical Islamist clerics, all united by sheer hatred of the Shah.
Which brings us to 1979, the year everything went completely off the cliff.
The Shah fell ill with cancer, and he grew isolated from the people.
Mass protests, strikes, religious processions swelled in the streets.