Benjamin Radd
speaker
1,820 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard 4 Mar
Benjamin Radd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He was an authoritarian, but he also was one that was rapidly modernizing Iranian society.
wanted to make it more like the West, using Iran's immense oil resources and wealth to really accelerate development, building of social institutions, healthcare, literacy, modernization, all of those things.
That was his focus, make Iran more like the West.
And in that sense, he succeeded, but it came at the expense oftentimes of civil liberties for many people.
It came at the expense of freedom for those who wanted to essentially practice religion, Islam, Shia Islam in their own way.
The Shah was...
not hostile to religion, but his policies were inconsistent with where the traditional religious Iranians wanted to go.
And it sort of created a schism in society.
And you also had a wealth gap, an income disparity.
Immense wealth poured into the country, but it didn't trickle its way downward into the sort of the village and rural poor.
And so there was a lot of frustration, a lot of disenchantment with his policies.
And that led to sort of this populist backlash of wanting something that was more democratic, more accountable, more like the West, ironically.
And that sort of was the beginning of where that cycle led.
And so how did Khamenei take power of Iran?
He led a movement, a mass populist movement, not a religious one, but meant to go across multiple socioeconomic and political divides and unified the opposition,
under this idea of removing the monarchy, removing dependence on the West.
He specifically said the United States was in large part to blame for Iran being in the state that it was, for people not having the things they needed to live, the freedoms, the liberties.
He blamed the Shah's use of the secret police and torture methods on the United States and on Israel, who he claimed taught violence.
the secret police how to do these things.
There's a complicated sort of history to that.
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