I feel very uncomfortable when people (particularly Westerners) white wash the atrocities of the Shah out of some twisted logic that Iran was somehow any better off. When Iranians wave the former flag of the monarchy, is there unironic support for that part of their history?
An excerpt from Robert Fisk’s chapter on the Iranian Revolution showing how hypocritical it is for Westerners to claim the Islamic Revolution wasn’t a popular movement - "(in 1979) I was stopped by a schoolboy outside the gates of Tehran University who wanted to sell me a remarkable example post-revolutionary graphic art. It was a cardboard face mask of the Shah, his jowls slack and diseased, his crown kept in place only by two massive black horns. Push out the detachable cardboard eyes, place the mask over your own face and you could peer through the Devil’s own image. Whenever a stroller purchased a mask, whenever I held it to my own face, the young men would cry Marg ba Shah - "Death to the Shah!
An account of SAVAK (the Shah’s intelligence squad) torture rooms from the same chapter - “… downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bed frames so that the people strapped to them could be brought down onto the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife, and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer, they had been shaving off people’s hands”.
Iranians have every right to be frustrated but Westerners co-opting such demonstrations with disgusting pro-Shah nonsense must be firmly opposed
A line I found got reasonable traction amongst a broad section of people was to argue “the Shah is the past, the Iranian people should look to the future”. It’s a fairly threadbare slogan, but a lot of people I speak to seemed to agree with this notion of consigning the Shah to the past and looking toward some kind of democratic republic as a solution to the Iranian situation. Once people are agreed that a republic is the path ahead, it opens the door to conversations about the nature of said republic, which lights the way towards advocating a socialist future for Iran.
Iran is already a republic and it is no less democratic than a western liberal democracy, i.e. it has elections but whichever way they go the power still remains in the hands of the same ruling class which is not the proletariat. It would obviously be better if it was a socialist republic but that is no reason to side with western regime change narratives advocating for an overthrow of its current government. There is no indication that if the Islamic Republic falls there would be any kind of socialist government put in its place. There is no revolutionary socialist movement of any significant strength present there, almost all the opposition are color revolutionist agents of the west. All the current forces operating in and on Iran are aligned such that what would replace the current government would be a neoliberal/comprador western puppet regime. If that were to happen Iran would also likely be balkanized along ethnic lines in the ensuing ethnic conflicts which the west’s intelligence agencies have already been agitating and laying the groundwork for. Like it or not - and i certainly don’t, i’m not a fan of conservative theocracies, but then again i’m also not Iranian so i don’t get to tell the Iranians what kind of government they should have - the Islamic Republic with all its downsides is the only thing standing between Iran and an imperialist takeover. And not just Iran itself, much of the region’s anti-imperialist struggles rely heavily on Iran’s backing. Luckily and despite the fact that we see and hear nothing about this in western media, and much like happened in Cuba not too long ago, the pro-government counter-protests have been an order of magnitude bigger than those that were used for the most recent color revolution attempt, which shows that whatever problems and dissatisfaction the Iranian people have with their current government they still fundamentally support it.