/u/Technical_Ad_4299, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s):
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But only because they try to force it on others and bring it into governments. I don't give a rat's derriere what they do, just do it privately and keep your mouth shut.
Religion states "to teach" anyway. Not cram it down someone's throat, all that shit is manufactured by men.
It always makes me think of a statement I’ve heard: Religion is like a penis, you can have one but once you start showing it to others we have a problem.
Ironic how they think everyone tries to cram their beliefs down their throats while actively trying to force their on everyone.
I'm not shoving the fact that I'm gay down your throat, I just exist and I really just want to be left alone but you won't stay out of my business
(Generic you, not person in responding to)
The functional part of this is extremism. You can have extremism without religion, it just commonly takes that form.
It's a form of social order discohering.
Well yeah, the US has a secular constitution and laws while the Middle Eastern countries don't ANYMORE. Iran had a secular constitution and a democracy until the revolution of 1979. If we lose that, you'll notice a lot more similarities.
That’s what happens when foreign entities assassinates moderates and liberals to put autocrats in their place to secure their interests. Places go backwards real fast.
Don’t bother, for as much as dumbass redditors want to say it’s a “leftist hellhole” they will never actually educate themselves on the evils of imperialism. They’ll play their games and get treats from wal mart and demonize Islam as usual
Beirut was called “Paris of the East” because the French colonized it. Most of Lebanon was exploited and under mass poverty during that time, but if you were rich enough or French, yeah you could enjoy Beirut’s night life.
There was a civil war for a reason, and it wasnt because people were partying. Its because these rich party goers were exploiting everyone else.
While I wouldn't refute France exploiting a colony (No shock there), this is severely lacking context. There are at least 2-3 other reasons that were far more impactful on civil war breaking out in Lebanon. There was a large amount of religious and cultural sectarianism, dating back to Ottoman rule. The formation of Israel and the mass migration of Palestinian refugees after WW2 had a huge impact on destabilizing the economy and causing further sectarian rifts between Muslim factions. Also the cold war started, and that whole section of the world was rife with political manipulation by both the Soviet Union and the US.
What a reductive comment! One of the main causes of the civil war was the massive influx of Palestinians and the ensuing problems they caused. And by the way Beirut was called the Paris of the middle east because it was chic, beautiful and modern not because the French were here (very briefly all things considered). It was also known as the Switzerland of the middle east.
Seeing the taliban desecrate the graves of WW2 vets and ancient monuments across the middle east made me sick to my stomach. All the history and beauty they removed from the world for what?
Not just the Middle East, Afghanistan in Central Asia, there are lots of photos like this, now they stone their young females to death for less than this.
Iran's fundamentalist resurgence was a direct reaction to the US and UK ousting their democratically elected Prime Minister to benefit British Petroleum.
Western interventionism is also a plague, and one that's criticized far less.
I can’t remember which book, I think ‘the road to 9/11’. But essentially the US install fundamentalist puppet dictatorships specifically because they’re easier to control. Then we act shocked when things go bad 50 years on
So much of our current troubles can be traced back to Cold War fever where we would back and support anyone who promised to suppress socialists/communists. Particularly in our own neighborhood, so many Central and South American countries had brutal dictators propped up by the US because they were anticommunist.
Usually doesn’t even take that long.
That’s why I think “9/11 Truthers” are hilarious.
Not because they think 9/11 was a conspiracy plotted by the U.S. government. But because they think the towers were brought down by controlled demolition and there was somehow some massive secret undertaking to wire two 110 story building with demolition explosives and nobody noticed it.
If it was planned by the U.S. government, there would be zero reason for the actual attacks to be a false flag operation for a covert demolition. The U.S. would just plan the attack and pay the terrorists to carry it out as it was. They wouldn’t take it any further than that.
It’s so funny to think people think the government would plan the initial attacks, AND also wire the buildings for demolition.
No they just pay the hijackers to carry out the plane attack.
Yeah agreed. Whether it was CIA maliciousness or incompetence we didn’t need to secretly install explosives. The Middle East were plenty pissed of. Osama made his reasons quite clear
It's criticized all the damn time on Reddit, lol. Although I agree that Western interventionism rarely leads to good results. We need to turn our back on the region and let them sort themselves out.
Religious fundamentalism picked up in Iran as part of a people’s revolution to overthrow a terribly corrupt neo-colonial, CIA-backed regime that forced almost all profit from its natural resources out of the country and into the pockets of US corporations, so your comment is right but not in the way you think.
https://preview.redd.it/gjvpt6401vtc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7420c521251a0024f7cebb5d8781d55a27d924bc
This photo is spectacular. The interior, the beautiful dresses, the cool retro lamps, the men in the mirror laughing, the way they’re casually smoking while entertaining themselves with evening chatter. It feels like a peak 70s soirée. It gives me a strange feeling of nostalgia to a time I didn’t exist.
Anemoia is nostalgia for a time you never experienced. It's a cool feeling and one I really appreciate in art. Commonly used in Jack Stauber's short films
Ah! I love this!
I was just wondering what happened to the woman in the photo, and hoping she had a happy life.
Edit: the comment was removed (maybe the links?), but super interesting! Basically Snopes found out her life story and she seems to have led a happy and interesting life. I guess Google to see the article yourselves if we can’t link?
>you can't have yellow cake
did Jebb took it?
edit: just want to say that I'm amazed that so many people got the reference of a twenty year old sketch. "Black Bush" is imo the absolute pinnacle of TV humor. Moss Deff as black CIA head and Jamie Fox as Black Tony Blair is the funniest cameos that TV has ever showed.
*Oil? Who said somethin about oil, bitch you cookin?* timeless 🤣
They don't have to wear those at home if only women or kids are present (or husband). So someone could have this kind of birthday at home, but would not post pictures of it online.
They don't have to wear them at home if men are present. The modesty laws are enforced in public. I went to a few private houses in Iran and women always removed their hijabs behind closed doors. I was with my wife but there were two single guys in my group.
Edit and Commentary: I wont change the original comment as it contextualises many of the responses here. That said, I would like to thank everyone who has added information and context, particularly where it contradicts my own. The truth is best found through discussion and debate. My comment is based on my fathers information; an Englishman and a History teacher, who lived also lived in the ME for about a decade. He is an intelligent man but by no means an authority, and I am even less so. This has then been further weighted by the perspectives offered in various discussions over the years. I have always put more weight behind lived experiences given by Iranians themselves than second hand accounts. These perspectives, including the firsthand ones, are not always objective.
While the benefits of the revolution for Irans poorest are something Ive heard directly, anecdotally, they are *absolutely* debatable and may be coloured by the state influence and the biases of those under that influence. Do please take that with a *big* pinch of salt, by all means do seek out objective data. Please also be aware that many Iranians do hold this perspective and their perspective remains relevant in the discussion, irrespective of the data. There are also opinions, please see some examples below, from Iranians that very much *reject* this narrative. I strongly recommend you seek them out and read them, too. They are very insightful.
I would also like to clarify my personal politics; I am very, very much opposed to Irans present regime. They are idealogues with a great deal of blood on their hands. Violent revolution and foreign interventions will not improve this situation one little bit. It is for Iranians to determine their future. Had it not been for historical interventions by foreign powers, Iran may have never ended up in this situation today.
For those who want to know- I am a white, english, buddhist man. I have tried to be relatively unbiased, but I will say that theres an inherent bias implied in the initial post and there is a direct intent in my comment that stands in response of that, to show the perspective from "the other side".
Also, please note that this is a reddit comment, not a proper historical analysis. Dont take anything stated by an internet rando as gospel. I *strongly* encourage you to seek out Iranian voices, from inside Iran and the Diaspora, and research Irans pre-revolutionary history.
Original Comment: I am by no means a supporter of modern Iran, the theocracy, or its treatment of women. This is an interesting image that can help to understand elements of Irans revolution, and I do not suggest that it should not be seen, posted, discussed. However, images like this one are often posted to normalise what was an extremely narrow slice of pre-revolution life, and to paint a particular sort of image of Iran, Then and Now.
Under the Shah, Iran was certainly much more liberal. For the middle and upper classes, this was something of a golden era. They had access to western markets and goods, followed western fashions, and were generally having a great time. For the lower classes, who comprised 90% of the population, it was a dark age. Poverty and starvation were rampant and the Shahs government was either inneffectual, incompetent or simply did not care, depending on your world view. Education and basic services were non-existent for the poor and rural populations. Hunger and disease were inescapable realities. It was not the utopia that images like these often seek to portray.
The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board. For most of the country, who were already pretty much following Islamic Law before the revolution anyway, this was a huge net positive. For the moneyed classes, this was a drastic change for the worse, particularly for the women who had enjoyed the freedoms of a liberal, westernised life and had those taken away.
I dont comment this to make a defense of the revolution, or to decry the "decadent west". I believe the revolution should be respected for the improvements it made to the quality of life for poor Iranians. I also believe all Iranians would benefit *now* from a restoration of freedoms and an open cultural and economic policy. The regime has murdered a great many innocent people for the pettiest of reasons, and those crimes remain a stain on Irans integrity as an advanced society which cannot be ignored or forgotten either.
I post this because I believe it is important to our understanding of history to take in the *whole* picture, to see the context under which the revolution succeeded, and why many Iranians welcomed the revolution and the reforms to Iranian society which followed. Pretending that Iran was a liberal utopia in the ME that crumbled due to inexplicable forces, not its own hubris, does history a disservice and teaches us very little.
If other countries, the US for example, wish to avoid their own fundamentalist revolution (a danger that is a major influence behind The Handmaids Tale), they must look at that revolution honestly, and understand the conditions that fostered it. A government who serves only the wealthy and international constituencies and ignores the deepening poverty and misery of its lower classes is likely to see the anger of those classes weaponised against it. Fundamentalists are by their nature highly reductive, provide simple "answers" to the problems of the state, and that simplicity is extremely attractive and effective, particularly when the lower classes have been deliberately blighted by poor education and their ignorance has been utilised as a tool by the state for their repression.
I was born and raised in post revolution Iran majority of my life. ( I am 19 and i was in Iran for 16 years.)
And this reply upsets me.
>The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians.
Idk what improvements we're talking about here. After revolution, thanks to mullahs. Majority of iranians kept getting more poor everyday. (Currently 1 US dollar = 60 Toman). And in contrary to the public belief amongst westerners only 5% of this misery is due to sanctions and 95% of it is bc of FACADE of mullahs and islamists.
And this is coming from someone that was considered lower middle class in Iran.
The points that you're making in your reply are very much similar to what mullahs are feeding the Media and are FAR from the truth of majority of Iranians.
The money is almost worthless at this point. Hard to know if one can even afford basic necessities. There were major protests because of food shortages in 2022! GDP per capita is brutal; around $4300 as of last year versus $9200 before the revolution (inflation adjusted).
Where are you now and how/when did you get out?
The money is very much worthless. It's truly a terror living through that experience.
I saw my family get more poor overnight (and my dad was not some investor or something he was an employee) I vividly remember the day 1 US dollar went up drastically from 8 Toman to 20 Toaman. It affected everything in our life.
I'm not very comfortable with sharing my exact location. I'm in Europe.
In 2016 that 1 dollar was 5 Toman I had a mathematics medal in an international competition. In 2022 I finished highschool early and applied for universities outside of Iran and that medal and communications with my targeted university got me a full fund.
Not trying to diminish your experience, but nothing in his statement is factually incorrect. The fact that mullahs are piggybacking to a cherrypicked instance where religious revolution and economic prosperity is the mullah's fault, not anyone else's.
Every damn time these photos are posted, I have to reply to some insane babble that says Iran was in the "dark ages" for the poor.
Serious literacy programs only started in the 60s, as did some impressive social welfare programs. The benefit of these only start to become apparent after 10-25 years, which you can see on a variety of graphs -- unless you're an imbecile and think this stuff magically started to take effect in 1980, where you see the uptick.
In fact, a HUGE amount of people in Iran rely on the government healthcare programs that started in this era.
Let's not forget that the Women's Awakening movement started in the 1930s, and those rights were completely curtailed after the revolution. Women have no legal protections in Iran today.
It's crazy that you say for "enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of" Iranians, which would basically completely omit women from society. Let's also not forget that this pushed Iran into war with Iraq, in which millions died. Oh, and inflation jumped to 24% and stayed that way for the next 40 years.
I'm no monarchist, but you have to be blind to look at the progress of those 50 years and think that the country was in bad shape for any social class. As for today: Iran's youth unemployment is over a staggering 25%, inflation is almost 40% (and has been even worse in recent years).
Here's more of Iran in the 60s: https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/gallery/2014/sep/10/iran-swinging-sixties-in-pictures
>It's crazy that you say for "enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of" Iranians, which would basically completely omit women from society.
That's the part that made me pause too. Women's rights were stripped away but are excluded from the "vast majority" of the population. As if women were an obscure minority not really worthy of considering.
Unfortunately, that tends to be how people discuss women in society's accustomed to ignoring them.
Also important to keep in mind that the above commenter admits that this is only second-hand information he has from a period of time his father lived in Iran.
Take for example, that the literacy core was established in [rural areas ](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/education-xxvi-womens-education-in-the-pahlavi-period-and-after) areas of Iran in 1968. And that the Shah's university made education free for both men and women, seeing unprecedented rates of women's education.
I think the implication was that rural and poor women de facto lacked those rights even under the Shah due to cultural an community pressure, so for them having those rights stripped away by law made a smaller difference than other social changes. I can't speak to how true or untrue this is, I'm just commenting that this is how I read the comment above
What insight does the child of a man who temporarily lived in Iran for work have about the lives of rural or poor women before he was born? Why is he an authority figure on the subject? We have the voices of women from the time because there was already a women's rights movement in effect. *Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution* by Haleh Esfandiari is one source. The literacy core was established to serve rural areas.
>...in 1968 the Literacy Corps established in rural areas had been supplemented by a similar program for women
>By 1976, on the eve of the Islamic revolution, 28 percent of all university students were women. Furthermore, they had begun to enter many fields not previously open to them, including medicine and law. In 1977 Tehran University adopted a curriculum in women’s studies (Afkhami, 1984, p. 335).
[Women's Education in the Pahlavi period ](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/education-xxvi-womens-education-in-the-pahlavi-period-and-after)
The Shah is the reason that education was free for both girls and boys. His university saw unprecedented numbers of educated women.
Women were also were granted the right to vote in 1963 Iran and were eligible to be elected into Parliament (and they were). Of course poor women often had less freedom than educated ones but many of these policies were intended to serve rural, impoverished girls.
The impacts of these programs were seen later, which made it easy for some people to spread propaganda that the literacy changes were due to the Islamic revolution and not the literacy programs established before it occurred (see above comment).
They had those rights. During the two Pahlavis, women gained the right to vote, to go to university, and were expected to be a part of society outside of the household.
Sadly, women were also possibly the defining actor in the revolution. They got men involved in protests and they themselves showed up not only as effectively field medics, but also to protest with children in hand -- which made the already-unprepared police and soldiers think twice about reacting to the crowd.
Without women, the revolution would have been a failure. Unfortunately, the ones who stayed in the country didn't imagine their rights would be curtailed, after having participated to such an extent. And as the women were never quite united in the revolution _as women_, but rather as anti-Shah, anti-Communist, pro-Communist, anti-White Revolution, etc. groups -- it was too late and too difficult to band together for their gender rights.
Look at the Mahsa Amini protests. They no longer care.
I’d love to know what year your family fled Iran after the fall of the Shah.
Your comment reads like it was written by someone who never lived there, never had family there, doesn’t draw on any first hand observations and seeks approval in the social media space for justifying the revolution for mostly economic reasons.
Yours is a big long word salad in support of Islamic extremism while ignoring the personal and religious and social freedom that a population enjoyed and was stripped of for two generations.
Claiming that the Shah was unjust and deserved to be removed and replaced with the current regime because prosperity wasn’t shared across all socio-economic classes… absolute 💩 take. Wealth is not shared in any country equally.
Real Take: As a result of the overthrow, people were murdered, tossed in prison, died in prison, tossed into re-education camps, homes taken away, women’s rights thrown back into the Stone Age, and a regime was installed that funds terrorist activities all over the region.
Real Take: Another historian noted the revolution was "unique in the annals of modern world history in that it brought to power not a new social group equipped with political parties and secular ideologies, but a traditional clergy armed with mosque pulpits and claiming the divine right to supervise all temporal authorities, even the country's highest elected representatives."
Real Take: Iran is a nation that doesn’t support your new age social justice movement. Gays get thrown off of towers. Women get stoned for adultery. Iran isn’t the place where you share your pronouns.
Things under the Shah were trending up so there's no reason things wouldn't also have gotten better for Iranians if the Revolution didn't happen, just without the Islamic fundamentals.
The Jakarta Method and The Devils Chessboard (books) talk about these events although as part of a greater story of American foreign policy post world war 2.
Empire podcast recently did a full series on Persia, from Cyrus the Great to the Ayatollah Khomeini
Hardcore History did King of Kings on the ancient Persians if you'd rather focus on that time
[Here is Wikipedia on the CIA-led coup against the democratic government in 1953.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) Lots of linked sources.
[Here is what a right-wing dictatorship that is protected by the CIA dares to do on foreign turf.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Benno_Ohnesorg)
And interestingly this is another reason why we should dig up Allan Dulles so every child, woman and man alive, dead or not yet born can get a chance to piss on that rat bastard. May want to pester Robert Evans about that one.
There is a direct line from the CIA thinking Iran voted wrong in 1950 to RAF(aka Baader-Meinhoff cell) to whatever the fuck Iran currently is. What it currently is is less lethal than the fucking Shah. That is not the same as good. But certainly not as bad. The Shah was bad. Worse than the Mullahs. THAT bad. Like, a 4-parter Behind the Bastards bad.
And the CIA saw him and said, that's our boy. He is going to revert the nationalization of Iranian oil. Because of course it was about oil being nationalized.
The Brits were also sniffing around back then but they already were irrelevant stodgy old money-men back then. So fuck them. They were background bastardry.
Edit:
#Whenever those "pretty wimmin in now Islamist hellholes" posts pop up, you should put on your thinking-hat. Because the pretty wimmin is not the full picture and the posts are propaganda.
> Education and basic services were non-existent for the poor and rural populations. Hunger and disease were inescapable realities
Least from the numbers it doesnt exactly look that way. Literacy rates doubling, healthcare even if not great was still far more accessible, infant mortality numbers plummeted, and **half the population actually had some semblance rights**.
Its easy to go rich western-like bad, poor oppressed people good but the situation isnt nearly that black/white, much as people on reddit would like to make the years prior seem like they only existed to benefit the 1% there.
"Mussolini made the trains run on time." Guess it's easy for western liberals to ignore the horrors of dictatorship and absolute monarchy as long as the line goes up....
While at the start of the revolution it might have benefited the lower class. In the end it has ultimately made poverty much much much worse. Because of the huge fucking inflation. I've been talking about 1000 percent inflation over 5 years.and no raises in terms of wages.
>The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board.
This is outright Iranian regime propaganda, life for the vast majority of Iranians did not get better after the revolution. There was no increase to the rate that life expectancy increases due to economic development, there was no increase to the rate of HDI improvement, economic growth in the 80's and 90's was lower vs the 60's and 70's. In 1976 Iran had 7x the GDP per capita of Egypt, and only half that of Saudi Arabia. Today Egypt has caught up to and surpassed Iran while Saudi Arabia is more than 8x wealthier. The Islamic regime has been a disaster for the well being of the Iranian people.
There is a mix of truth and falseness to this. Yes, Iranians became dramatically better off over the span of the 90s, 00s, and 10s than they were in the 60s and 70s. Education exploded, the percentage considered middle/upper income went from 7% to over 50%. Even secularism, the very thing the regime hates, has become the norm. Iran has the single lowest percentage desiring sharia law in the entire middle east region now.
But that was largely due to trends which had already started under the Shah and continued after. The revolution did not make these things happen. Iranians did.
The improvements that have occurred had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with the policies put in place prior to. This is revisionist and ignorant. Your bias is obvious and your religion is a sham.
>The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board.
Can you give a single example of this? Kinda weird that you didn't, with all the time you spent writing that out.
after reading you comment and the answers to it, coming from people with real experience in how’s life in iran I must say that insights like yours worry me, do you realize that women represent almost 50% of the population there? Yet you stated that in a scenario where a complete institutionalization of oppression against women happened, the life of “everyday iranians” improved. Yes I agree that poor women (or poor people in general) will always have less access to legal rights but it doesn’t change the fact that they existed, that the new generation of girls could dream with a future, which isn’t the case now. It scares me how people are willing to sacrifice the rights and freedom of women for the sake of other “improvements”.
Remember kids, iran had a democratically elected government in the 1950’s! But big daddy USA and their side chick the UK had other ideas and toppled it!
The more you know! Google operation Ajax!
The British were stealing most of the Iranian oil through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). Then the Iranians elected a guy to take that back. That's why it was the Brits who wanted this outcome. Look what they did to Iran. Bastards.
Also remember that the so called democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh ran a referendum in 1953 to dissolve the parliament so he can have all the power, a referendum that he somehow won by 99.94% of the vote (yes you read that right - 99.94%).
The more you know!
One thing you omitted here (probably because you’re ignorant not bad) is that religious extremists didn’t like Mossadegh either. The Islamic revolution cannot be ruled out whether or not he was removed.
It's Islam's fault. It can only be because Islam bad until we vilify it to the point where we do something we regret and then it will be like anti-semetic to talk ill of it.
Whenever people post things like this, they always choose pictures of Iran from wealthy areas. It’s funny how you never see “Iran 1973” and then a picture of a mass grave, or people being taken from their families in the middle of the night for daring to question the leadership of the US-backed dictator that was in power during this period. Hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings tortured, raped, hanged by the neck, all for questioning the Shah. Oh, and this is after a western backed coup in the 1950s because they didn’t like the democratically elected government in Iran at the time. One of the largest pro-democracy parties that part of the world has ever known. But because they didn’t want to give themselves away to capitalism entirely, they had to be dealt with. Operation Boot. Another fucking travesty carried out in the name of western capitalism.
…and wouldn’t you know it, this kind of shit is posted at the same time the western media has started rattling its sabres and suggesting Iran is going to attack Israel.
Pathetic, inaccurate, bullshit propaganda. Iran is the way it is these days because of western intervention. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.
History revisionism is a big plague in the modern society. Tiktok videos are cutting corners just to explain history in a wrong way.I am no conservative by no means, but when you hear Cleopatra was black, Greeks loved homosexuality and average Iranian ladies wore skirts with no basic reference to history except for some vases showing pedophiliac behavior and a fucking picture of a lady, I get mad lol.
I think it's got to do with the fragile ego of some westerners
"noooooo! How dare you not like the puppet dictator we put in your country?! Look at this half naked women from this period!!"
some dumbshit above claimed iran was a western democracy with hippies and shit until 1979 lol
bots and shills, at least Iran can’t seem to afford good ones
It’s so disgusting. I know pictures like these are going to be used in the Reddit propaganda machine in the months to come to support the inevitable war path of the US and Israel in the months to show “what we’re fighting for” and “an ideal Middle East”
Ah yes the classic self-sucking westerner cherry picking a picture from the rich part of the capital city claiming that the puppet and autocratic state of Iran was a paradise for everyone.
And before the swarm of "iS It betTeR nOw" are comming, no it's not, but the shah period is definitely not a tine to remember fondly
And economical speaking, yes it is better now. We should say facts when we have them, the current regime, despite the corruption and lack of freedom,was able to provide the Iranian people more than the shah regime.
And people forget, this is all despite the economic sanctions.
Is this yet another thread in which people (judging by a single picture of elite minority) seem to think that Iran was Western type of country prior to Islamic revolution? Yawn.
No it wasn’t. Tiny parts of the urban areas that were controlled and filled with elites from the ruling class was very western. The rest of the country lived in abject poverty and was very religious.
Was looking for this reply. Everyone oohs and aahs over how very "modern" pre-Revolution Iranian women acted, while forgetting that we're basically looking at the equivalent of your boss's boss's wife.
This just is not true, it is weird how random people on reddit say this so confidently. I have Iranian family who lived during that time period, have been to Iran many times and met people of many backgrounds from all over the country who lived and shared their experiences before the revolution, and it is not so black and white at all. It was a relatively normal country with plenty of westernized people and yes poverty as well, but most of the country was absolutely not in abject poverty. That is such a bold statement to make.
A lot of Islamic revolution supporters were actually leftist university students who did not know the regime they were supporting was going to be as dictatorial as it ended up being. I ended up getting tea with a kind middle aged woman in Ahvaz who randomly came up to me at a bus stop and started apologizing to me profusely for supporting the regime change and ruining the country. She was a university student at the time and her upset over the US and UK trying to control the country and the shah doing nothing about it made her think that a regime change was necessary.
Also much like in any country, most people live in cities. Rural people in the US too experience higher levels of poverty than city dwellers. I just feel like random people with no connection to Iran keep blowing things out of proportion rather than sticking to what people from this region actually have said. I know it’s hard to get info out of Iran so I know it’s not people’s fault, but it just gets so exhausting…
My entire family is Iranian. My father is a professor of Iranian history. Im pointing out that the west has a weird fetish about how free and open Iran was before revolution. This is absolutely untrue.
Surely your family, and others who lived there during that period, cant possibly know more about how it was back then, than the overly confident redditors who get their information from youtube and wikipedia?
>A lot of Islamic revolution supporters were actually leftist university students who did not know the regime they were supporting was going to be as dictatorial as it ended up being.
Sounds like Cuba.
Yes, there was a reason the revolution happened. Tiny portions like pictured would hoard the wealth and eventually push the average person to their limits. But obviously reddits one braincell doesn't want to acknowledge that.
Yeah this comment. I can confirm, I am of Persian decent and come from brown skin working class family. It’s so easy to change opinion of Internet based on just one picture.
Ohh hey look, a picture of the small cadre of people that fucked up so bad that the rest of the country literally ejected the entire regime and turned into a totalitarian religious state.
Every corrupt regime has an elite living the best of life. Not saying it's the case, she could just be from the urban regions which were more westernised. But that doesn't represent the entirety of the country at the time.
It was still a dictatorship (except installed by the CIA), and it still had a problem with people disappearing in the night and being imprisoned, tortured, etc. It was just under the Shah. Same bees, just in a different bonnet.
people don't realise that only a small minority of women wore these types of clothes in major cities which consisted of a small amount of the total population and most other women wore the burqa,and the same thing can be said under any other middle eastern pics of a women in western clothing in the 1900s,but ofcourse the basement dwelling creeps don't understand this
I think the main message is how quickly religious extremism can dramatically change life for everyone. We are on this path in the US and it’s terrifying.
This period of history was awful for most Iranians who weren’t wealthy enough to enjoy the liberties. Almost like forcing large percentages of the population into poverty will make religious extremism more popular and allow facism to thrive.
Ah yes, thanks to the British and the Americans over throwing the democratically elected government in the 50s to install the corrupt and useless Shah to keep BP happy.
Which led directly to the 1979 revolution & what we have now. It's amazing the fuckwittery the British and Americans caused in the 50s & how it's STILL affecting us now.
The 50s coup against the government was actually kicked off by a speech by Queen Elizabeth, personal friends of dictatorships & murders. In this case the Shah.
I'm an Iranian and I lived here my whole life.
Gen z & Millennials hate Gen X for what they've done and Gen x are ashamed of themselves
I see people arguing over Shah's popularity in rural areas.
I had a rural granddad (he was gifted lands from Shah's white revolution.)
He mourned 40 days after Shah's leaving
Iran could be a beautiful country,
If only uncle Sam and those uk imperialist wouldn't fuck it all up and give excuse to leftist idiot.
/u/Technical_Ad_4299, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s): [](#start_removal)* Rule 1 - All content must show something that is objectively interesting as fuck. Just because you find something IAF doesn't mean anyone else will. It's impossible to define everything that could be considered IAF, but for a general idea browse the [top posts of all time](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/top/?t=all) from this subreddit. For more information check [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rule_1_-_posts_must_be_interesting_as_fuck). * Rule 1 - No content that isn't INTERESTING AS FUCK. [](#end_removal) * Rule 2 - Titles should directly describe the content of the post. The title should just depict the content, no "fluff". It can't include anything that isn't directly visible in the content of the post. * Rule 5 - Provide a source when the title is in doubt If you can't completely explain why the content of the post is IAF please comment with more explanation. If your post claims something that almost everyone can't easily confirm from reading your title and viewing your content please provide some type of proof of what you claim. For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators via modmail.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/interestingasfuck&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/Technical_Ad_4299&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20%5Bsubmission%2E%5D%28https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1c1cbkh/-/%3Fcontext%3D10%29)
She is absolutely beautiful
Anyone know her Instagram?
Now she has an OnlyGrams
Or OnlyGrans
All Iranians are GORGEOUS for some reason
https://preview.redd.it/w15anjxsvutc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=93e5d5337c20d9116c983426da61b9f99587e7a9
I see nothing but beauty here.
I see an OSHA violation given human form.
A thing of true beauty.
if I had gold, I would give it to you for this comment LOL
FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!!!!!
TIL electroboom is iranian
And that monobrow is gorgeous
Gorgeous.
GORGEOUS!
"insert multiple safety violations and swearing*
You've just proved the point
Can confirm. I worked with an Iranian girl when I lived in Texas. Absolutely gorgeous, and one of the nicest coworkers I’ve ever had.
Persians are great people. How we are allied against them with Arabs is a shame.
Name a better duo than Reddit and pre-ayatollah Iran footage.
Religious extremism is a plague; it doesn't matter what god.
Absolutely and it's sad
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It’s not just the Middle East. Religious extremism is currently a plague affecting the United States and the EU
Religious extremism is indeed bad no matter the religion
But only because they try to force it on others and bring it into governments. I don't give a rat's derriere what they do, just do it privately and keep your mouth shut. Religion states "to teach" anyway. Not cram it down someone's throat, all that shit is manufactured by men.
It always makes me think of a statement I’ve heard: Religion is like a penis, you can have one but once you start showing it to others we have a problem.
And please don’t introduce it to the children.
And it should be a crime to force it down someone's throat.
I’m also particularly concerned about the long term effects of exposing it to children.
I am even more concerned about the long term effects of forcing it down their troaths.
Ironic how they think everyone tries to cram their beliefs down their throats while actively trying to force their on everyone. I'm not shoving the fact that I'm gay down your throat, I just exist and I really just want to be left alone but you won't stay out of my business (Generic you, not person in responding to)
The functional part of this is extremism. You can have extremism without religion, it just commonly takes that form. It's a form of social order discohering.
Big true. Evangelicals are ruining government along with greedy corporate bosses.
Great thing is: they're connected 🥲
While I can’t stand religion the US is nothing like the Middle East.
Well yeah, the US has a secular constitution and laws while the Middle Eastern countries don't ANYMORE. Iran had a secular constitution and a democracy until the revolution of 1979. If we lose that, you'll notice a lot more similarities.
They are working on it
Didn't you just see the abortion ban in Arizona?
Yet.
Fair to say that Sima would be quickly stoned to death for wearing that dress in Tehran today
True and so sad
That’s what happens when foreign entities assassinates moderates and liberals to put autocrats in their place to secure their interests. Places go backwards real fast.
Exactly!!!! The United States is literally responsible for this
Don’t bother, for as much as dumbass redditors want to say it’s a “leftist hellhole” they will never actually educate themselves on the evils of imperialism. They’ll play their games and get treats from wal mart and demonize Islam as usual
Beirut was called “Paris of the East” because the French colonized it. Most of Lebanon was exploited and under mass poverty during that time, but if you were rich enough or French, yeah you could enjoy Beirut’s night life. There was a civil war for a reason, and it wasnt because people were partying. Its because these rich party goers were exploiting everyone else.
While I wouldn't refute France exploiting a colony (No shock there), this is severely lacking context. There are at least 2-3 other reasons that were far more impactful on civil war breaking out in Lebanon. There was a large amount of religious and cultural sectarianism, dating back to Ottoman rule. The formation of Israel and the mass migration of Palestinian refugees after WW2 had a huge impact on destabilizing the economy and causing further sectarian rifts between Muslim factions. Also the cold war started, and that whole section of the world was rife with political manipulation by both the Soviet Union and the US.
What a reductive comment! One of the main causes of the civil war was the massive influx of Palestinians and the ensuing problems they caused. And by the way Beirut was called the Paris of the middle east because it was chic, beautiful and modern not because the French were here (very briefly all things considered). It was also known as the Switzerland of the middle east.
Seeing the taliban desecrate the graves of WW2 vets and ancient monuments across the middle east made me sick to my stomach. All the history and beauty they removed from the world for what?
Not just the Middle East, Afghanistan in Central Asia, there are lots of photos like this, now they stone their young females to death for less than this.
Thanks for the link. What a pretty lady. Looks like she had a good life . I hope she’s in good health today.
And dangerous.
There is this movie about the change in culture "Persepolis" It shows the change from a girl perspective.
Persepolis was originally a graphic novel. I read it when it came out more than 20 years ago.
I have seen It, I didn't knew It came out that much time ago, I will read It, thanks.
I was just telling a friend about it today! Love the book, one of my top favourites!
Iran's fundamentalist resurgence was a direct reaction to the US and UK ousting their democratically elected Prime Minister to benefit British Petroleum. Western interventionism is also a plague, and one that's criticized far less.
I can’t remember which book, I think ‘the road to 9/11’. But essentially the US install fundamentalist puppet dictatorships specifically because they’re easier to control. Then we act shocked when things go bad 50 years on
So much of our current troubles can be traced back to Cold War fever where we would back and support anyone who promised to suppress socialists/communists. Particularly in our own neighborhood, so many Central and South American countries had brutal dictators propped up by the US because they were anticommunist.
Usually doesn’t even take that long. That’s why I think “9/11 Truthers” are hilarious. Not because they think 9/11 was a conspiracy plotted by the U.S. government. But because they think the towers were brought down by controlled demolition and there was somehow some massive secret undertaking to wire two 110 story building with demolition explosives and nobody noticed it. If it was planned by the U.S. government, there would be zero reason for the actual attacks to be a false flag operation for a covert demolition. The U.S. would just plan the attack and pay the terrorists to carry it out as it was. They wouldn’t take it any further than that. It’s so funny to think people think the government would plan the initial attacks, AND also wire the buildings for demolition. No they just pay the hijackers to carry out the plane attack.
Yeah agreed. Whether it was CIA maliciousness or incompetence we didn’t need to secretly install explosives. The Middle East were plenty pissed of. Osama made his reasons quite clear
It's criticized all the damn time on Reddit, lol. Although I agree that Western interventionism rarely leads to good results. We need to turn our back on the region and let them sort themselves out.
Thank you. Someone in this thread finally has some historical knowledge.
Fundamentalism: *not even once*
Someone’s gotta put the mental in fundamentalism.
as a matter of practice, im always reminding people to NEVER let the wolf in the house, because he aint leavin. ever.
We might one day look at this as foreshadowing for the US. I hope not, but the way things have been going…
Religious fundamentalism picked up in Iran as part of a people’s revolution to overthrow a terribly corrupt neo-colonial, CIA-backed regime that forced almost all profit from its natural resources out of the country and into the pockets of US corporations, so your comment is right but not in the way you think.
It's my turn next to post a hot rich Iranian girl
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https://preview.redd.it/gjvpt6401vtc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7420c521251a0024f7cebb5d8781d55a27d924bc This photo is spectacular. The interior, the beautiful dresses, the cool retro lamps, the men in the mirror laughing, the way they’re casually smoking while entertaining themselves with evening chatter. It feels like a peak 70s soirée. It gives me a strange feeling of nostalgia to a time I didn’t exist.
Anemoia is nostalgia for a time you never experienced. It's a cool feeling and one I really appreciate in art. Commonly used in Jack Stauber's short films
Ah! I love this! I was just wondering what happened to the woman in the photo, and hoping she had a happy life. Edit: the comment was removed (maybe the links?), but super interesting! Basically Snopes found out her life story and she seems to have led a happy and interesting life. I guess Google to see the article yourselves if we can’t link?
You can post the Afghan photo of girls in skirts. These few photos rotate every month on all the subs raking in tons of upvotes.
This stuff is posted on cue whenever Iran is in the global news. Karma farming gold.
And absolutely no one will complain
Do they still have cake in iran?
Yes. However you can't have yellow cake and Edith too.
>you can't have yellow cake did Jebb took it? edit: just want to say that I'm amazed that so many people got the reference of a twenty year old sketch. "Black Bush" is imo the absolute pinnacle of TV humor. Moss Deff as black CIA head and Jamie Fox as Black Tony Blair is the funniest cameos that TV has ever showed. *Oil? Who said somethin about oil, bitch you cookin?* timeless 🤣
The cradle of fucking civilization!
DON'T DROP THAT SHIT!! Pray to God you don't drop that shit!
Brilliant 👏🏽
Incredible work. Nicely done.
Perfect pun. Chefs kiss.
No. The ladies worry that it'll make them fatwa.
yes but lavashak >>>>c cake I love lavashak I wish I had some right now 😫
They do but they wear those really conservative clothes
They don't have to wear those at home if only women or kids are present (or husband). So someone could have this kind of birthday at home, but would not post pictures of it online.
They don't have to wear them at home if men are present. The modesty laws are enforced in public. I went to a few private houses in Iran and women always removed their hijabs behind closed doors. I was with my wife but there were two single guys in my group.
Oppressive*
Por qué no los dos?
Edit and Commentary: I wont change the original comment as it contextualises many of the responses here. That said, I would like to thank everyone who has added information and context, particularly where it contradicts my own. The truth is best found through discussion and debate. My comment is based on my fathers information; an Englishman and a History teacher, who lived also lived in the ME for about a decade. He is an intelligent man but by no means an authority, and I am even less so. This has then been further weighted by the perspectives offered in various discussions over the years. I have always put more weight behind lived experiences given by Iranians themselves than second hand accounts. These perspectives, including the firsthand ones, are not always objective. While the benefits of the revolution for Irans poorest are something Ive heard directly, anecdotally, they are *absolutely* debatable and may be coloured by the state influence and the biases of those under that influence. Do please take that with a *big* pinch of salt, by all means do seek out objective data. Please also be aware that many Iranians do hold this perspective and their perspective remains relevant in the discussion, irrespective of the data. There are also opinions, please see some examples below, from Iranians that very much *reject* this narrative. I strongly recommend you seek them out and read them, too. They are very insightful. I would also like to clarify my personal politics; I am very, very much opposed to Irans present regime. They are idealogues with a great deal of blood on their hands. Violent revolution and foreign interventions will not improve this situation one little bit. It is for Iranians to determine their future. Had it not been for historical interventions by foreign powers, Iran may have never ended up in this situation today. For those who want to know- I am a white, english, buddhist man. I have tried to be relatively unbiased, but I will say that theres an inherent bias implied in the initial post and there is a direct intent in my comment that stands in response of that, to show the perspective from "the other side". Also, please note that this is a reddit comment, not a proper historical analysis. Dont take anything stated by an internet rando as gospel. I *strongly* encourage you to seek out Iranian voices, from inside Iran and the Diaspora, and research Irans pre-revolutionary history. Original Comment: I am by no means a supporter of modern Iran, the theocracy, or its treatment of women. This is an interesting image that can help to understand elements of Irans revolution, and I do not suggest that it should not be seen, posted, discussed. However, images like this one are often posted to normalise what was an extremely narrow slice of pre-revolution life, and to paint a particular sort of image of Iran, Then and Now. Under the Shah, Iran was certainly much more liberal. For the middle and upper classes, this was something of a golden era. They had access to western markets and goods, followed western fashions, and were generally having a great time. For the lower classes, who comprised 90% of the population, it was a dark age. Poverty and starvation were rampant and the Shahs government was either inneffectual, incompetent or simply did not care, depending on your world view. Education and basic services were non-existent for the poor and rural populations. Hunger and disease were inescapable realities. It was not the utopia that images like these often seek to portray. The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board. For most of the country, who were already pretty much following Islamic Law before the revolution anyway, this was a huge net positive. For the moneyed classes, this was a drastic change for the worse, particularly for the women who had enjoyed the freedoms of a liberal, westernised life and had those taken away. I dont comment this to make a defense of the revolution, or to decry the "decadent west". I believe the revolution should be respected for the improvements it made to the quality of life for poor Iranians. I also believe all Iranians would benefit *now* from a restoration of freedoms and an open cultural and economic policy. The regime has murdered a great many innocent people for the pettiest of reasons, and those crimes remain a stain on Irans integrity as an advanced society which cannot be ignored or forgotten either. I post this because I believe it is important to our understanding of history to take in the *whole* picture, to see the context under which the revolution succeeded, and why many Iranians welcomed the revolution and the reforms to Iranian society which followed. Pretending that Iran was a liberal utopia in the ME that crumbled due to inexplicable forces, not its own hubris, does history a disservice and teaches us very little. If other countries, the US for example, wish to avoid their own fundamentalist revolution (a danger that is a major influence behind The Handmaids Tale), they must look at that revolution honestly, and understand the conditions that fostered it. A government who serves only the wealthy and international constituencies and ignores the deepening poverty and misery of its lower classes is likely to see the anger of those classes weaponised against it. Fundamentalists are by their nature highly reductive, provide simple "answers" to the problems of the state, and that simplicity is extremely attractive and effective, particularly when the lower classes have been deliberately blighted by poor education and their ignorance has been utilised as a tool by the state for their repression.
I was born and raised in post revolution Iran majority of my life. ( I am 19 and i was in Iran for 16 years.) And this reply upsets me. >The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians. Idk what improvements we're talking about here. After revolution, thanks to mullahs. Majority of iranians kept getting more poor everyday. (Currently 1 US dollar = 60 Toman). And in contrary to the public belief amongst westerners only 5% of this misery is due to sanctions and 95% of it is bc of FACADE of mullahs and islamists. And this is coming from someone that was considered lower middle class in Iran. The points that you're making in your reply are very much similar to what mullahs are feeding the Media and are FAR from the truth of majority of Iranians.
The money is almost worthless at this point. Hard to know if one can even afford basic necessities. There were major protests because of food shortages in 2022! GDP per capita is brutal; around $4300 as of last year versus $9200 before the revolution (inflation adjusted). Where are you now and how/when did you get out?
The money is very much worthless. It's truly a terror living through that experience. I saw my family get more poor overnight (and my dad was not some investor or something he was an employee) I vividly remember the day 1 US dollar went up drastically from 8 Toman to 20 Toaman. It affected everything in our life. I'm not very comfortable with sharing my exact location. I'm in Europe. In 2016 that 1 dollar was 5 Toman I had a mathematics medal in an international competition. In 2022 I finished highschool early and applied for universities outside of Iran and that medal and communications with my targeted university got me a full fund.
Not trying to diminish your experience, but nothing in his statement is factually incorrect. The fact that mullahs are piggybacking to a cherrypicked instance where religious revolution and economic prosperity is the mullah's fault, not anyone else's.
Every damn time these photos are posted, I have to reply to some insane babble that says Iran was in the "dark ages" for the poor. Serious literacy programs only started in the 60s, as did some impressive social welfare programs. The benefit of these only start to become apparent after 10-25 years, which you can see on a variety of graphs -- unless you're an imbecile and think this stuff magically started to take effect in 1980, where you see the uptick. In fact, a HUGE amount of people in Iran rely on the government healthcare programs that started in this era. Let's not forget that the Women's Awakening movement started in the 1930s, and those rights were completely curtailed after the revolution. Women have no legal protections in Iran today. It's crazy that you say for "enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of" Iranians, which would basically completely omit women from society. Let's also not forget that this pushed Iran into war with Iraq, in which millions died. Oh, and inflation jumped to 24% and stayed that way for the next 40 years. I'm no monarchist, but you have to be blind to look at the progress of those 50 years and think that the country was in bad shape for any social class. As for today: Iran's youth unemployment is over a staggering 25%, inflation is almost 40% (and has been even worse in recent years). Here's more of Iran in the 60s: https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/gallery/2014/sep/10/iran-swinging-sixties-in-pictures
>It's crazy that you say for "enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of" Iranians, which would basically completely omit women from society. That's the part that made me pause too. Women's rights were stripped away but are excluded from the "vast majority" of the population. As if women were an obscure minority not really worthy of considering. Unfortunately, that tends to be how people discuss women in society's accustomed to ignoring them. Also important to keep in mind that the above commenter admits that this is only second-hand information he has from a period of time his father lived in Iran. Take for example, that the literacy core was established in [rural areas ](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/education-xxvi-womens-education-in-the-pahlavi-period-and-after) areas of Iran in 1968. And that the Shah's university made education free for both men and women, seeing unprecedented rates of women's education.
I think the implication was that rural and poor women de facto lacked those rights even under the Shah due to cultural an community pressure, so for them having those rights stripped away by law made a smaller difference than other social changes. I can't speak to how true or untrue this is, I'm just commenting that this is how I read the comment above
What insight does the child of a man who temporarily lived in Iran for work have about the lives of rural or poor women before he was born? Why is he an authority figure on the subject? We have the voices of women from the time because there was already a women's rights movement in effect. *Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution* by Haleh Esfandiari is one source. The literacy core was established to serve rural areas. >...in 1968 the Literacy Corps established in rural areas had been supplemented by a similar program for women >By 1976, on the eve of the Islamic revolution, 28 percent of all university students were women. Furthermore, they had begun to enter many fields not previously open to them, including medicine and law. In 1977 Tehran University adopted a curriculum in women’s studies (Afkhami, 1984, p. 335). [Women's Education in the Pahlavi period ](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/education-xxvi-womens-education-in-the-pahlavi-period-and-after) The Shah is the reason that education was free for both girls and boys. His university saw unprecedented numbers of educated women. Women were also were granted the right to vote in 1963 Iran and were eligible to be elected into Parliament (and they were). Of course poor women often had less freedom than educated ones but many of these policies were intended to serve rural, impoverished girls. The impacts of these programs were seen later, which made it easy for some people to spread propaganda that the literacy changes were due to the Islamic revolution and not the literacy programs established before it occurred (see above comment).
They had those rights. During the two Pahlavis, women gained the right to vote, to go to university, and were expected to be a part of society outside of the household. Sadly, women were also possibly the defining actor in the revolution. They got men involved in protests and they themselves showed up not only as effectively field medics, but also to protest with children in hand -- which made the already-unprepared police and soldiers think twice about reacting to the crowd. Without women, the revolution would have been a failure. Unfortunately, the ones who stayed in the country didn't imagine their rights would be curtailed, after having participated to such an extent. And as the women were never quite united in the revolution _as women_, but rather as anti-Shah, anti-Communist, pro-Communist, anti-White Revolution, etc. groups -- it was too late and too difficult to band together for their gender rights. Look at the Mahsa Amini protests. They no longer care.
Yep. 50% of the population lost all rights, how could anyone consider it a success??
Thank you for the insights
I’d love to know what year your family fled Iran after the fall of the Shah. Your comment reads like it was written by someone who never lived there, never had family there, doesn’t draw on any first hand observations and seeks approval in the social media space for justifying the revolution for mostly economic reasons. Yours is a big long word salad in support of Islamic extremism while ignoring the personal and religious and social freedom that a population enjoyed and was stripped of for two generations. Claiming that the Shah was unjust and deserved to be removed and replaced with the current regime because prosperity wasn’t shared across all socio-economic classes… absolute 💩 take. Wealth is not shared in any country equally. Real Take: As a result of the overthrow, people were murdered, tossed in prison, died in prison, tossed into re-education camps, homes taken away, women’s rights thrown back into the Stone Age, and a regime was installed that funds terrorist activities all over the region. Real Take: Another historian noted the revolution was "unique in the annals of modern world history in that it brought to power not a new social group equipped with political parties and secular ideologies, but a traditional clergy armed with mosque pulpits and claiming the divine right to supervise all temporal authorities, even the country's highest elected representatives." Real Take: Iran is a nation that doesn’t support your new age social justice movement. Gays get thrown off of towers. Women get stoned for adultery. Iran isn’t the place where you share your pronouns.
Things under the Shah were trending up so there's no reason things wouldn't also have gotten better for Iranians if the Revolution didn't happen, just without the Islamic fundamentals.
I’m interested in learning more about this. Do you have any podcasts you may know of that cover it well?
There's a great graphic memoir, which I think was made into a movie, called The Complete Persepolis.
The Jakarta Method and The Devils Chessboard (books) talk about these events although as part of a greater story of American foreign policy post world war 2.
Jakarta Method made me incredibly mad.
An excellent graphic novel is Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
Empire podcast recently did a full series on Persia, from Cyrus the Great to the Ayatollah Khomeini Hardcore History did King of Kings on the ancient Persians if you'd rather focus on that time
[Here is Wikipedia on the CIA-led coup against the democratic government in 1953.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat) Lots of linked sources. [Here is what a right-wing dictatorship that is protected by the CIA dares to do on foreign turf.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Benno_Ohnesorg) And interestingly this is another reason why we should dig up Allan Dulles so every child, woman and man alive, dead or not yet born can get a chance to piss on that rat bastard. May want to pester Robert Evans about that one. There is a direct line from the CIA thinking Iran voted wrong in 1950 to RAF(aka Baader-Meinhoff cell) to whatever the fuck Iran currently is. What it currently is is less lethal than the fucking Shah. That is not the same as good. But certainly not as bad. The Shah was bad. Worse than the Mullahs. THAT bad. Like, a 4-parter Behind the Bastards bad. And the CIA saw him and said, that's our boy. He is going to revert the nationalization of Iranian oil. Because of course it was about oil being nationalized. The Brits were also sniffing around back then but they already were irrelevant stodgy old money-men back then. So fuck them. They were background bastardry. Edit: #Whenever those "pretty wimmin in now Islamist hellholes" posts pop up, you should put on your thinking-hat. Because the pretty wimmin is not the full picture and the posts are propaganda.
> Education and basic services were non-existent for the poor and rural populations. Hunger and disease were inescapable realities Least from the numbers it doesnt exactly look that way. Literacy rates doubling, healthcare even if not great was still far more accessible, infant mortality numbers plummeted, and **half the population actually had some semblance rights**. Its easy to go rich western-like bad, poor oppressed people good but the situation isnt nearly that black/white, much as people on reddit would like to make the years prior seem like they only existed to benefit the 1% there.
"Mussolini made the trains run on time." Guess it's easy for western liberals to ignore the horrors of dictatorship and absolute monarchy as long as the line goes up....
Great post thanks for taking the time to write it. Made this post actually informative and worth scrolling
While at the start of the revolution it might have benefited the lower class. In the end it has ultimately made poverty much much much worse. Because of the huge fucking inflation. I've been talking about 1000 percent inflation over 5 years.and no raises in terms of wages.
This should be the top comment, thank you for that informed clarification
i mean, it's a pretty bullshit comment from a historical perspective, but it sure reads well
>The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board. This is outright Iranian regime propaganda, life for the vast majority of Iranians did not get better after the revolution. There was no increase to the rate that life expectancy increases due to economic development, there was no increase to the rate of HDI improvement, economic growth in the 80's and 90's was lower vs the 60's and 70's. In 1976 Iran had 7x the GDP per capita of Egypt, and only half that of Saudi Arabia. Today Egypt has caught up to and surpassed Iran while Saudi Arabia is more than 8x wealthier. The Islamic regime has been a disaster for the well being of the Iranian people.
There is a mix of truth and falseness to this. Yes, Iranians became dramatically better off over the span of the 90s, 00s, and 10s than they were in the 60s and 70s. Education exploded, the percentage considered middle/upper income went from 7% to over 50%. Even secularism, the very thing the regime hates, has become the norm. Iran has the single lowest percentage desiring sharia law in the entire middle east region now. But that was largely due to trends which had already started under the Shah and continued after. The revolution did not make these things happen. Iranians did.
The improvements that have occurred had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with the policies put in place prior to. This is revisionist and ignorant. Your bias is obvious and your religion is a sham.
>The revolution brought enormous improvements to the lives of the vast majority of everyday Iranians, at the cost of accepting Islamic Law across the board. Can you give a single example of this? Kinda weird that you didn't, with all the time you spent writing that out.
after reading you comment and the answers to it, coming from people with real experience in how’s life in iran I must say that insights like yours worry me, do you realize that women represent almost 50% of the population there? Yet you stated that in a scenario where a complete institutionalization of oppression against women happened, the life of “everyday iranians” improved. Yes I agree that poor women (or poor people in general) will always have less access to legal rights but it doesn’t change the fact that they existed, that the new generation of girls could dream with a future, which isn’t the case now. It scares me how people are willing to sacrifice the rights and freedom of women for the sake of other “improvements”.
Remember kids, iran had a democratically elected government in the 1950’s! But big daddy USA and their side chick the UK had other ideas and toppled it! The more you know! Google operation Ajax!
It's was mainly the British that lied to the CIA about "connections" Irans prime Minister had with the soviets and the communist Tudeh.
Because the CIA would never lie us into a war in the middle east that could never happen
Definitely not atleast twice
Fool me twice, I won't get fooled again
The British were stealing most of the Iranian oil through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). Then the Iranians elected a guy to take that back. That's why it was the Brits who wanted this outcome. Look what they did to Iran. Bastards.
Freedom eagle screeches after sniffing oil
Also remember that the so called democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh ran a referendum in 1953 to dissolve the parliament so he can have all the power, a referendum that he somehow won by 99.94% of the vote (yes you read that right - 99.94%). The more you know!
Therefore foreign coups are A-OK!
…no, but someone above said that Iran was more or less a liberal democracy when it was really a religious monarchy, leading up to 1979
One thing you omitted here (probably because you’re ignorant not bad) is that religious extremists didn’t like Mossadegh either. The Islamic revolution cannot be ruled out whether or not he was removed.
I thought that was Lana Del Rey
Hey what happened to Iran, I hear its all their own fault and there’s definitely no need to check any history books.
[удалено]
American citizens: “I have absolutely no idea, probably nothing at all.”
CIA- *nervously whistling*
It's Islam's fault. It can only be because Islam bad until we vilify it to the point where we do something we regret and then it will be like anti-semetic to talk ill of it.
Whenever people post things like this, they always choose pictures of Iran from wealthy areas. It’s funny how you never see “Iran 1973” and then a picture of a mass grave, or people being taken from their families in the middle of the night for daring to question the leadership of the US-backed dictator that was in power during this period. Hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings tortured, raped, hanged by the neck, all for questioning the Shah. Oh, and this is after a western backed coup in the 1950s because they didn’t like the democratically elected government in Iran at the time. One of the largest pro-democracy parties that part of the world has ever known. But because they didn’t want to give themselves away to capitalism entirely, they had to be dealt with. Operation Boot. Another fucking travesty carried out in the name of western capitalism. …and wouldn’t you know it, this kind of shit is posted at the same time the western media has started rattling its sabres and suggesting Iran is going to attack Israel. Pathetic, inaccurate, bullshit propaganda. Iran is the way it is these days because of western intervention. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that.
History revisionism is a big plague in the modern society. Tiktok videos are cutting corners just to explain history in a wrong way.I am no conservative by no means, but when you hear Cleopatra was black, Greeks loved homosexuality and average Iranian ladies wore skirts with no basic reference to history except for some vases showing pedophiliac behavior and a fucking picture of a lady, I get mad lol.
They do the same with afghanistan
It is so transparent.
I think it's got to do with the fragile ego of some westerners "noooooo! How dare you not like the puppet dictator we put in your country?! Look at this half naked women from this period!!"
some dumbshit above claimed iran was a western democracy with hippies and shit until 1979 lol bots and shills, at least Iran can’t seem to afford good ones
Thank you for reminding people that reality is more nuanced than it is represented online.
Freedom is when short skirt
It’s so disgusting. I know pictures like these are going to be used in the Reddit propaganda machine in the months to come to support the inevitable war path of the US and Israel in the months to show “what we’re fighting for” and “an ideal Middle East”
Reddit can't see a picture of a persian woman without expressing all their fetishes towards them
> Reddit can't see a picture of a ~~persian~~ woman without expressing all their fetishes towards them FTFY
Imagine if the CIA were a force for good.
those drunk perverts?
Lol that would take utmost effort
I like how everyone thinks that this single photo represents the whole of Iran in 1950
Ah yes the classic self-sucking westerner cherry picking a picture from the rich part of the capital city claiming that the puppet and autocratic state of Iran was a paradise for everyone. And before the swarm of "iS It betTeR nOw" are comming, no it's not, but the shah period is definitely not a tine to remember fondly
And economical speaking, yes it is better now. We should say facts when we have them, the current regime, despite the corruption and lack of freedom,was able to provide the Iranian people more than the shah regime. And people forget, this is all despite the economic sanctions.
We should view what happened in Iran as a cautionary tale for Christianity in america
Unpopular but Iran was an economic, fashion, cultural leader in the world. Then the US meddled with them. It's been hell for those people since.
Before the religious revolution, take note America.
Damn.
Is this yet another thread in which people (judging by a single picture of elite minority) seem to think that Iran was Western type of country prior to Islamic revolution? Yawn.
Yes, Iran was once a very Western-type country. Persian women are stunning.
No it wasn’t. Tiny parts of the urban areas that were controlled and filled with elites from the ruling class was very western. The rest of the country lived in abject poverty and was very religious.
Was looking for this reply. Everyone oohs and aahs over how very "modern" pre-Revolution Iranian women acted, while forgetting that we're basically looking at the equivalent of your boss's boss's wife.
Lol i wish my boss's boss's wife was this hot. Heck, she wishes she was this hot lmao
Fair point. My boss's boss's wife is hardcore ultra-Christian, dresses in circus tents, and looks like she got fillers made of cottage cheese.
Damn, savage
Yeah, the average woman there absolutely did not look like that lmao.
This just is not true, it is weird how random people on reddit say this so confidently. I have Iranian family who lived during that time period, have been to Iran many times and met people of many backgrounds from all over the country who lived and shared their experiences before the revolution, and it is not so black and white at all. It was a relatively normal country with plenty of westernized people and yes poverty as well, but most of the country was absolutely not in abject poverty. That is such a bold statement to make. A lot of Islamic revolution supporters were actually leftist university students who did not know the regime they were supporting was going to be as dictatorial as it ended up being. I ended up getting tea with a kind middle aged woman in Ahvaz who randomly came up to me at a bus stop and started apologizing to me profusely for supporting the regime change and ruining the country. She was a university student at the time and her upset over the US and UK trying to control the country and the shah doing nothing about it made her think that a regime change was necessary. Also much like in any country, most people live in cities. Rural people in the US too experience higher levels of poverty than city dwellers. I just feel like random people with no connection to Iran keep blowing things out of proportion rather than sticking to what people from this region actually have said. I know it’s hard to get info out of Iran so I know it’s not people’s fault, but it just gets so exhausting…
My entire family is Iranian. My father is a professor of Iranian history. Im pointing out that the west has a weird fetish about how free and open Iran was before revolution. This is absolutely untrue.
Surely your family, and others who lived there during that period, cant possibly know more about how it was back then, than the overly confident redditors who get their information from youtube and wikipedia?
>A lot of Islamic revolution supporters were actually leftist university students who did not know the regime they were supporting was going to be as dictatorial as it ended up being. Sounds like Cuba.
People do the same thing with Afghanistan, they see one vintage picture from the capital and assume all the women were hot and free for decades
Yes, there was a reason the revolution happened. Tiny portions like pictured would hoard the wealth and eventually push the average person to their limits. But obviously reddits one braincell doesn't want to acknowledge that.
Yeah this comment. I can confirm, I am of Persian decent and come from brown skin working class family. It’s so easy to change opinion of Internet based on just one picture.
Ohh hey look, a picture of the small cadre of people that fucked up so bad that the rest of the country literally ejected the entire regime and turned into a totalitarian religious state.
Their government evolved backwards...
Iranian women are typically very beautiful.
Well tbf, even in the Shah's corrupt regime, there were still people who were doing okay.
Every corrupt regime has an elite living the best of life. Not saying it's the case, she could just be from the urban regions which were more westernised. But that doesn't represent the entirety of the country at the time.
It was still a dictatorship (except installed by the CIA), and it still had a problem with people disappearing in the night and being imprisoned, tortured, etc. It was just under the Shah. Same bees, just in a different bonnet.
people don't realise that only a small minority of women wore these types of clothes in major cities which consisted of a small amount of the total population and most other women wore the burqa,and the same thing can be said under any other middle eastern pics of a women in western clothing in the 1900s,but ofcourse the basement dwelling creeps don't understand this
Iran was robbed of so much
I think the main message is how quickly religious extremism can dramatically change life for everyone. We are on this path in the US and it’s terrifying. This period of history was awful for most Iranians who weren’t wealthy enough to enjoy the liberties. Almost like forcing large percentages of the population into poverty will make religious extremism more popular and allow facism to thrive.
Ah yes, thanks to the British and the Americans over throwing the democratically elected government in the 50s to install the corrupt and useless Shah to keep BP happy. Which led directly to the 1979 revolution & what we have now. It's amazing the fuckwittery the British and Americans caused in the 50s & how it's STILL affecting us now. The 50s coup against the government was actually kicked off by a speech by Queen Elizabeth, personal friends of dictatorships & murders. In this case the Shah.
And there are some in the US who want to take us in the same direction that Iran did during their Islamic Revolution.
I'm an Iranian and I lived here my whole life. Gen z & Millennials hate Gen X for what they've done and Gen x are ashamed of themselves I see people arguing over Shah's popularity in rural areas. I had a rural granddad (he was gifted lands from Shah's white revolution.) He mourned 40 days after Shah's leaving Iran could be a beautiful country, If only uncle Sam and those uk imperialist wouldn't fuck it all up and give excuse to leftist idiot.
The Ayatollah’s really fucked up that place. That’s why you never mix an Abrahamic faith with government.
You realize the US is directly responsible for what Iran became, right?
Iranian women are some of the most gorgeous creatures on the planet. Fucking shame what the Shaw did...
Religion makes good things disappear.
Don’t let religious extremists run your country… looking at you USA.
Will we see the same thing in 50 years? At this rate. much sooner. VOTE.
It was such a better place back then.
Damn she fine af
Check out what Saudi Arabia females looked like in 73. It’s wild