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
And he basically promised them salvation from what he portrayed as a puppet tyrant of the United States.
And the masses bought into this.
both the left and the right.
Really, the right consisted of the black, the Islamists.
So you had the red, which were sort of the Marxist socialist followers.
You had the black, and then you had sort of that middle in between, and they all coalesced around this one charismatic religious figure, a very austere man, one who didn't really have a lot of luxuries himself, led a simple life, but was consistent with his opposition to what he saw, tyranny and despotism.
And people bought into it.
The Americans didn't know what to make of it.
And there was a failure, and I think Andrew can talk about this as well, a failure by the State Department and the CIA in the 70s to see where the threat was.
They saw the threat coming from the Soviet Union.
They were still afraid of Soviet encroachment in the Middle East, particularly through Iran.
Their concerns were with the Marxists, the communist parties.
They did not carefully look at the black.
They didn't look at the Islamists.
They didn't see them as a threat.
until it was too late the shah himself blocked or really didn't give the cia full access to iran there was limited information that was coming out he relied on his own intelligence which fed him information he wanted to hear which is that everything is going great the country's doing well the people love you they're all happy until the discontent and the the protest became they reached a threshold and it was too late to do anything about it
Yeah, the United States was kind of at their peak period of meddling in foreign governments at the time.
Kind of in a strange way that we've come full circle, this idea of controlling an entire country by controlling the figurehead of the country.
That's where we were in the late 70s at the kind of brink of the Cold War, right?
Nobody knew that the Berlin Wall was going to fall.
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