Lex Fridman Podcast
#334 – Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons
02 Nov 2022
Abbas Amanat is a historian at Yale specializing in the modern history of Iran. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Henson Shaving: https://hensonshaving.com/lex and use code LEX to get 100 free blades with your razor - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Abbas's Website: https://history.yale.edu/people/abbas-amanat Abbas's Books: 1. Iran: https://amzn.to/3zzLWVA 2. Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism: https://amzn.to/3h66fU0 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:18) - Mahsa Amini protests in Iran (24:35) - Propaganda (42:13) - Iranian culture (59:02) - Violent suppression of protests (1:20:31) - Islamic Revolution (1:38:14) - CIA in Iran (1:54:30) - Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini (2:25:26) - Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (2:33:21) - Nuclear weapons (2:41:38) - Israel (2:56:18) - Putin (3:03:50) - Future of Iran
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Abbas Aminat, a historian at Yale University specializing in the modern history of Iran. My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people in their current struggle for freedom. I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen understand the nature and the importance of this struggle. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Henson Shaving for a great razor and shave, Insight Tracker for biomonitoring, Onnit for supplements, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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Chapter 2: What sparked the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran?
So... And Kurdish, for instance. Or even more marginal regions, such as Sistan province in the southeast of Iran, which has been the subject of this recent massacre when they actually attacked the population when demonstrating and killed a fair number, at least 60 people. So this movement of the population...
this creation of a larger middle class, the better educated middle class, much better educated. Iran has 86% literacy, which I think probably, I haven't checked that, but probably is better than Turkey even, is probably better than anywhere else in the Middle East.
And it sounds like that's quickly increasing. Because of the movement, because of the growth of the education system. Precisely.
Iran has one million school teachers, which may not seem as much if you're in the United States, but it's a fairly big number, I Can you linger on the massacre? What happened there? Well, the Sistan province is a Baluch ethnicity, of Baluch ethnicity. Baluch is a... particular ethnic group in southern Iran, which is Sunni rather than Shi'i, majority.
And we should say that most of Iran is Shi'i, and that's a branch of Islam. Shi'ism, yes. Let's maybe just briefly linger Shi'ism and Sunni. What... Let's not get into it. Let's do a one-sentence summary and that maybe which is what most of Iran is.
Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis. Hmm. These are mainstream, if you like to call it. Actually, sunnah means that kind of a mainstream. Can you actually linger on the Sunni sunnah shia? Shia means party. Party. means those that belongs to a party of Ali, which was, goes back to the early Islamic history of seventh century.
I mean, I'm almost lingering to the silly notion of pronunciation and stuff like that. So ah, ah means part, like what, what does the extra ah at the end do?
Shi'i means belonging to the Shi'i community. Shi'a means a person of a Shi'a. That belongs to that community. If you say, are you a Shi'a? Yes, I'm a Shia. Yeah, and Shia is the community. Community. And in English, when it was anglicized, it becomes Shiite. So if you say Shiite in today, it's perfectly acceptable. And of course, I myself, in my writings, I always...
a switch between one and the other. One of my books is always Shiite, the other book's always Shi. And that hasn't been settled. But the Shi population is the smaller compared to the Sunni population in the world. In the world. In the world. But in Iran, it's the opposite. The Iran and Iraq, and possibly now Lebanon,
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Chapter 3: What are the main slogans and messages of the protest movement?
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.
It was monopoly of the state during the Pahlavi era, from the start, basically. So what does that mean? That means that the regime in power no longer is particularly accountable to the majority population because it extracts wealth from underground. and it uses it for its own purposes in order to make it more powerful, in order to make it more repressive than what it is the regime today.
So it feeds a small, or I wouldn't say, but a fair number of its own supporters. I mean, the Revolutionary Guard in Iran is probably about 350,000 or something like that. It's a very big force. And this is not the regular army. The Revolutionary Guards are independent from the army.
Revolutionary Guard is armed forces controlled by the state.
Yes, the same as the army. But these are more ideologically tied up with the state.
And they're also in-facing, internal facing? What's the stated purpose of the Revolutionary Guard?
Well, from day one, when the revolution succeeded, the regime in power, the Islamic regime in power, was vulnerable to all kinds of forces of opposition within Iran itself.
Prevent further revolution.
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Chapter 4: What role did oil play in the evolution of Iran's political power?
by way of royalties, came to Iran. Much of it went to the Anglo-Persian oil company, which they actually discovered the oil in the province, Khuzestan province in the southwest of Iran, where the major oil industry is today, right now. And this was an extremely profitable enterprise for that company and for the British government. It actually purchased by the British government.
Churchill purchased Anglo-Iranian oil company for the British government. So it was not anymore a private company. It was a British interest as a matter of fact. And in the course of the 20th century, although it helped the modernization in Iran, but it also helped the creation of a more authoritarian, more strong state, if you like to call it.
That 19th century Iran never had that kind of a power, never had that kind of resources. Is it 20th century? Even that one-fifth of the income that reached the Iranian state gave it a greater power.
That's another coincidence. So yes, yes, you could say the oil was one of the catalysts for absolute power, but the 20th century saw quite a few countries have dictators with power unlike anything else in human history. That's weird too.
Precisely. And you know, you can name them from the beginning of the century with people like I don't know, Lenin, Stalin, of course, Hitler. Even Mao, of course, you can name them. And probably, as I would say, the last of them is Khomeini in that century, that you would see this strong man with a sense of either artificial or real, or a sense of so-called charisma. Mm-hmm.
and with this total power over the regime that they create. In the, some of them do, Nasser, he didn't have much of an oil resources in Egypt, but he was also one of these strong men, okay, in the 20th century. Loved by some, hated by others. So it necessarily does not tie up to economic resources underground. But in the Iranian case, unfortunately, it did.
And it created more than one issue for Iran. It's created a strong state, which is the Pahlavi State from 1921 onward. Because in 1921, at the end of the First World War, Iran was in almost a state of total bankruptcy.
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Chapter 5: How did the Islamic Revolution reshape Iran's political landscape?
And the British... had a desire to try to bring Iran to the system that they created in the Middle East in the post-war era, the mandate system. Palestine, Iraq, and then, of course, French mandate of Lebanon and Syria, all of this. And Iran was separate because Iran was an independent country. It wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire that collapsed. So they had to somehow handle it.
And what they tried to do didn't work. As a result, partly domestic, partly international issues brought about a regime which is headed by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah. Okay, the first military officer called Reza Khan, actually a military officer of the Cossack forces. And the Cossack forces was the force that was created in the 19th century model of the Russian Cossacks.
When the ruler in the 19th century visited as in a royal tour, and the Tazar showed the great Cossack forces. He said, I like this. And he created one for himself with Russian officers, actually. So the Russian officers served in Iran from Iran 1880s up to the revolution of 1917, the collapse of the Zarist regime. So many revolutions. So many revolutions.
And Reza Shah was an officer in that, Reza Khan was an officer in that force. And he created a new monarchy for reasons that we need not to go through. And it's called the Pahlavi regime. Pahlavi regime was a modernizing regime. okay, that brought, in effect, fulfilled many of the ambitions of the Constitution, many of the aspirations of the constitutional revolution.
Better communication, secular education, centralized states, centralized army, better contact with the outside world, greater urbanization, that's what a modern state is all about. And in that regard, in a sense, for the first 20 years up to the Second World War, was successful.
Despite, and more significant of all, it managed to keep the European powers, which was always interfering in the local affairs of Iran, in an arm length. So they were there. in an arm length, but they were also respecting the power of the state, power of the Pahlavi state.
During the Second World War, the same phenomenon as earlier interference led to the occupation of Iran by the allied forces, the British from the south, the Russians from the north.
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Chapter 6: What were the implications of the 1953 coup on Iran's political future?
the Red Army. They took over Iran. And of course, they said- The New World War. Yes, from 1941 up to 1945. And of course, when the Red Army refused to withdraw from Iranian Azerbaijan, and with some thought of possible annexation of that province. There was a big issue in the post-war Iran. So after 1945. Yes, 1945 to 1946, there was a big- Soviet Union getting greedy.
Yes, but eventually they agreed. Eventually Stalin agreed to leave Iran the Azerbaijan province in the hope that it would get some concessions from Iran, which in the oil of the Caspian area, which didn't work. And it's a different story altogether. But what happened is that in the post-war era, between 1944-45 and 1953 is a period of greater...
democratization, was that Reza Shah's dictatorship basically disappeared. And this is where you would see political parties, free press, a lot of chaotic, really, as democracies often are. So something like, was it officially a democracy? Yes, it was a democracy. Was there elections? There were elections, yes, of course. Yes, of course. And there were very diverse political tendencies
came to the picture, including the To The Party of Iran, which is Communist Party of Iran. This Communist Party of Iran is probably the biggest Communist Party of the whole of the Middle East, and one of the biggest in the world, actually. At that time. Did the Soviet Union have a significant influence on the... Of course. They were basically following orders from the Soviets.
Although they denied it, but in reality, that's the case. But what happened, they were seen by the Americans during the Cold War as if...
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Chapter 7: How does Khomeini's leadership reflect Iran's historical struggle?
as a threat and Iran was going through a period of demanding nationalization of its oil resources. That's a very important episode with Mossadegh, whom you might have heard about his name. Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was the prime minister and the national charismatic leader from 1951 to 1953. Prior to that, he was a famous parliamentarian. But this period, he was the prime minister of Iran.
And he nationalized the Iranian oil industry. And the British didn't like it at all. And eventually resulted in a famous coup which at least partly was supported by the funding and by the moral support of the British and the Americans, particularly by the Americans. It was always seen as one of the earliest and the most successful CIA operations during the Cold War.
So CIA had something to do with it? Yes, of course.
That's one of the earliest operations of the CIA. Wait a minute. What was, yes, of course. What was the CIA doing?
CIA, this is the time at the post-war era. In the 50s. In the 50s, 40s and 50s. The British Empire, which was really the major superpower of the region after the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. gradually took the second seat to the Americans, who were the newcomers and the great power and the victors of the Second World War.
And the Americans viewed Iran as an important country, since it has the largest common borders with the Soviet Union. And it did the South was the Persian Gulf, which at the time was the greatest supplier of oil to the outside world. And therefore, the Americans had a particular interest in Iran.
And in the earlier stages, their interest was in the interest of the Iranian government, because they wanted to get rid of both the Soviet Union, which made a return in the post-war era, and of course the British that were gradually withdrawing from Iran. But they had a full control over the Anglo-Iranian oil company. They changed the name to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
When the name of the country officially changed from Persia to Iran in the West, the name of the company changed. And they got into a huge dispute with the Mossadegh government that eventually led to the coup of 1953, which eventually created a very, very distressful memory in the minds of many of the Iranian nationalists.
that this was the betrayal of the great powers, the British and Americans. Yes, CIA played a part because CIA feared, contrary to the British, that they were afraid of their own oil in Iran, the CIA was afraid of the Soviet penetration in the South, and particularly because there was a very powerful communist party to the party of Iran. So they...
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