Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #334 – Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons About this episode Abbas Amanat is a historian at Yale specializing in the modern history of Iran. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Abbas’s Website: https://history.yale.edu/people/abbas-amanat
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1. Iran: https://amzn.to/3zzLWVA
2. Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism: https://amzn.to/3h66fU0
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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
Transcript 23,935 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Abbas Amanat, 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, InsideTracker for biomonitoring, Onnit for supplements, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads.
0:45 Lex Fridman? As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Henson Shaving, a family-owned aerospace manufacturer bringing precision engineering to your shaving experience. This thing is a minimalist razor that just reminds me of great design and of great engineering. They use aerospace-grade CNC machines to achieve extreme precision. The razors extend just .0013 inches, which is less than the thickness of a human hair. It makes me feel good to know
1:29 Lex Fridman? that you can mass manufacture consumer product with that level of precision. Obviously, there's precision electronics. So, you know, your smartphone is manufactured at scale with a tiny, tiny, tiny little electronics inside there that work incredibly well for months and years. But to have that in a razor is especially nice because you don't see it that often. The thing is, the razor works with standard double-edged blades you can buy anywhere. It's all about building the best razor, not razor business. So, no subscriptions, no plastics, and no planned obsolescence. Check out hensonshaving.com/lex to pick your razor and also use code LEX.
2:12 Lex Fridman? You'll get 100 free blades with your razor. Just make sure to add them to your cart.
2:19 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data as I lean back in comfort in my chair and scream from a distance into the microphone. It's obvious to me that the future is all about using data that comes from your own body to make lifestyle decisions, diet decisions, career decisions, all kinds of decisions. Another term for this is personalization. I think I've heard somebody use the term like deep personalization. So personalization based not just on a few manually set preferences, but that comes from the entirety of the rich amount of signal that comes from the human body. It's obvious that this is what the future is about.
3:03 Lex Fridman? So it's great that companies like InsideTracker are doing this kind of thing. You can use all kinds of data that comes from your body, blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data to make good decisions about your life. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I just saw Duncan Trussell pop up on the Joe Rogan Experience. I need to listen to that episode. He's probably my favorite guest. And both of them I associate with Onnit.
3:43 Lex Fridman? Duncan, in particular, I associate with extreme level of high mental performance. No, well, actually, yes. In a, in a very non-standard definition of what high levels of performance is, he's just an incredible human being. Kind, brilliant, with thoughts that are sometimes filled with humor, non sequitur humor, but also deep, profound insights of the like I haven't heard from anybody else. He must be using AlphaBrain. Well, I don't know that, but for me, I use AlphaBrain when I need to really focus. When I know it's going to be a deep work session, when I have to solve a particularly challenging problem, I'll use AlphaBrain to give me a boost.
4:28 Lex Fridman? Anyway, you can get a special discount on AlphaBrain at lexfridman.com/onnit.
4:36 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I'm actually having a great conversation with somebody about Tor coming up. And Tor is like an extra layer of protecting your privacy when you're browsing the internet. But for most of us, we should be using the sort of the low hanging fruit, the technology that works for everybody, for everything, not just browsing. That's a VPN. And my favorite VPN, and that ones I've used for many, many, many years is ExpressVPN. Big sexy button you press and it just works. You set the location that you want your computer to emulate and bam. And the connection is super fast.
5:21 Lex Fridman? Plus it's stable. Everything's very intuitive, works on any operating system, including my favorite one, which is Linux, but obviously on mobile devices too. iPhone, all the Android devices. I have so many Android devices now that I feel like I'm like a sheep herder and those are my sheep. But instead of being sheep, they're actually supercomputers. Although you can argue that a sheep too is a supercomputer. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Abbas Aminat.
6:18 Lex Fridman? Let's start with the current situation in Iran. On September 16th, protests broke out in Tehran and quickly spread over the death of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death by the morality police. This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic. What, can you explain what happened?
6:41 Speaker 01 The protests are now in their sixth week.
6:45 Speaker 01 The death of that young woman occurred, who was visiting Tehran as a tourist, sparked something very deep that particularly concerned the younger generations. That is what you would call the equivalent of the Z generation in this country.
7:07 Lex Fridman? Yes.
7:08 Speaker 01 They called themselves Dahey Hashtadi in Persian, because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own. It's an ancient solar calendar. And the time that they were born, they were in the 1380s. That's what they called themselves, Hashtadi. Eighties, Hashtadi for the eighties. And, well, the circumstances that surrounds the unfortunate death of this young, beautiful Kurdish woman is really tragic. She was arrested by the, what is referred to as the morality police, morality patrol called the Ghasthe Ershad,
7:54 Speaker 01 a guidance police, that is. Presumably, there were two women, fully clad, that is, officers serving on that force, and two men. And nobody exactly knows what had happened. She had been beaten up. And apparently, there was no sign of any wrongdoing on her side. She was fully covered. It seems that there was some altercation in the process. And the outcome was that she was unconscious,
8:36 Speaker 01 not necessarily when she was arrested, but in the course of the detention, when they take them to a center, presumably to re-educate them.
8:47 Lex Fridman? Yes.
8:47 Speaker 01 And she apparently collapsed. And maybe my sense is that she must have had some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken or something had happened. And she died in the hospital the next day. And that, through the social media, was widely spread throughout Iran. And almost the next day, surprisingly, you could see this outburst of sympathy for her. People are in the streets weeping because she was seen as such an innocent young woman, 22 years old.
9:30 Speaker 01 And the family, the mother and the father, also mourning for her. And being a Kurd visiting Tehran, this all added up to really turn her into some kind of a martyr of this cause. And that's what it is. Her picture, graphics that were artistically produced based on her portrait has now dominated basically as the symbol of this protest movement. And the protest movement goes on. Everybody was thinking, or at least the authorities were thinking, that it's going to die out in a matter of a few days.
10:13 Speaker 01 But it became more intense. First in the streets of Tehran by young women, mostly probably between, I would say, 17, 18 teenagers to 22, 23, or thereabout. And then to university campuses all around the country. And then even to high schools. And that also made it a very remarkable protest movement because, first of all, it involves the youth and not necessarily the older generations. You see them around, but not as many. Also, you see men and women together, young girls and boys.
10:57 Speaker 01 And they are adamant, they are desperate in the sense of the tone of their protest. And they are extremely courageous because they stand against the security forces that were immediately...
11:16 Speaker 01 Were sent off to the streets. So, and in full gear, that is.
11:21 Lex Fridman? So what are the currents of pain, emotion?
11:26 Lex Fridman? What is this turmoil that rose to the surface that resulted in these big protests? What are the different feelings, ideas that came to the surface here? That resulted in such quick scaling of this protest?
11:41 Speaker 01 Well, if you listen to the main slogan, which is the message of this movement. It's called Women, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zende, Azadi. Which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent, which is close to Persian being in the European language. And it's apparently initiated first in the Syrian Kurdistan, where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces.
12:22 Speaker 01 Because they were attacking the Yazidis there and the women being enslaved. But the message, as it moved, historians are interested in this kind of trends. So it has moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan now being the message of this movement, reflects pretty much, sums up what this movement is all about. Women in the forefront because of all the, one might say, discriminations, the treatment, the humiliation that this younger generation feels, well, not only the younger generations, but most of the Iranian secular middle classes since 1979, basically.
13:06 Speaker 01 For the past 43 years. And they would think that...
13:13 Speaker 01 These all basically symbolized or represented by the wearing, the mandatory wearing of the hijab, which is at the core of this protest. You see the young women, if you look at many of these clips that comes through in the past six weeks, women in streets take off their mandatory scarves, which is a young shawl or some kind of a head covering, that's all. And they throw it into the bonfire in the middle of the street and they dance around it. And slogans.
13:57 Speaker 01 So there is a sense of complete rejection of what this regime for forty-three years, forty-three years, have been imposing on women. It's not, as it's sometimes been portrayed, a movement against hijab through and through. But it basically says, you know, there has to be a choice for those who want to wear hijab and those who want to remain without hijab. Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper. Much deeper. And actually, before we get into that, it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations you see in the university campuses or in the streets, you see women with hijab,
14:41 Speaker 01 young women with hijab, or next to those have to remove their hijab and they're together, basically protesting. That's the most interesting feature of these demonstrations. And then men and women together against the segregation that the regime has imposed upon them for all these years. Now, in terms of what it represents, as I pointed out, one is the question of the whole series of, one might say, civil and legal discriminations against women. You are considered as a kind of a second-class citizen. You depend on your men. It's a kind of a...
15:24 Speaker 01 Patriarchy that has been institutionalized in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion. And that means that probably in matters of divorce, marriage and divorce, in matters of custody of your children, in matter of inheritance, in matter of freedom of movement, you depend on your husband, your father, your brother, a male member of your family, your child even, your son, could be the case.
16:01 Speaker 01 And because of that, obviously, a younger generation who is so well informed through social media, knows about the world as much as an American does, American kid does, probably sometimes more. They're very, very curious. It's from what I hear or sometimes that I met a few of them outside Iran. You'll see that how this new generation is completely different from what the Islamic Republic wanted to create in its social engineering. It's basically the failure of forty-three years of the Islamic Republic's act of imposition of a certain so-called Islamic values on women.
16:46 Speaker 01 Then it's matter of education. You would see that there is segregation in the schools.
16:53 Speaker 01 One of the issues that now, right now, is at the heart of this demonstration is that self-services in many of the campuses of Iranian universities are segregated, male and female, two different rooms, two different halls. Now they're breaking through the walls virtually everywhere and sit together.
17:16 Speaker 01 In order to basically resist the authorities who wants to impose segregation. In matters of appearance in the public, of course, it may seem to us as a kind of trivial and secondary, but appearance is important. Clothing is important. How you would imagine yourself is important. They don't want to be seen in the way that the authorities would like to impose upon them. As this kind of an idea of a chaste Islamic woman who is fully covered and is fully protected. The idea of a male member of the family protects the female.
18:01 Speaker 01 That is what you would see at the heart of this rebellion. And of course, that goes with everything else. The second part of this message, the idea of life, basically means, if you like to use the American equivalent of this, the pursuit of the happiness. That's what they want. They want fun. They want music. They want dancing. They want to be free in the street. They want to have girlfriends, boyfriends, and live freely and don't be constantly looked by the big brother to tell them what to do and not to do or not to do.
18:43 Speaker 01 So that is, that they share virtually with the entire, with the entire Iranian society as a whole. Although the older generations, that's a big puzzle. What you would see, the older generation don't, so far at least, don't take part as extensively as one might imagine. And this is a variety of reasons. Perhaps we can get to that later on, if you like. But as far as this younger generation, they don't care. They don't listen even as much to their parents as the older generations did. So or one might say even the nature of the relationship between the parents and the youth has changed.
19:27 Speaker 01 It's not the concept of again a patriarchy, that a father or even a mother.
19:35 Speaker 01 Would tell the daughter or son what to do. That's basically they have to negotiate.
19:42 Lex Fridman? It's fundamentally a rejection of the power of authority. Parents, government.
19:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:49 Lex Fridman? It's that every person can decide their own fate. And there's no lessening of value of the wisdom of old age and old institutions.
19:59 Speaker 01 Precisely, that's what it is.
20:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
20:01 Speaker 01 And they are surprisingly aware that where they are as a generation. So it's a sense of pride as we are different from the older generation. From your parents who compromised and lived with the restrictions that the Islamic regime put on you. Your grandfather, your grandparents was the generation that actually involved in the revolution of seventy nine. The parents, which were the middle generation. And these are the third generation of the revolution of nineteen seventy nine. And therefore, they differentiate themselves in terms of their identity from the older generation. So that's the life part of it.
20:44 Speaker 01 And one can go more and more, they want to access. And they see on social media what happens in the rest of the world. They're well aware. They're much better digitally skilled than my generation, for instance. And and they know about all the personalities. They know about all the celebrities. They know about all the trends that goes out outside Iran. So that's a second part of this message. And then, of course, the third part is the word Azadi, meaning freedom or liberty, which is this longstanding demand of the Iranians, I would say, for the whole century,
21:28 Speaker 01 ever since the constitutional revolution of nineteen oh six. Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities that usually emerged at the end of a revolution to basically impose its own image on the population, on the youth, and create authoritarian regimes of which, over the course of time, I would say that the Islamic Republic is the worst, in the sense that it's. Its intrusion is not only in the political sense, in the, for instance, banning the freedom of speech, you know, meddling with the elections,
22:13 Speaker 01 banning political parties, all kinds of that things, which are the political or civil freedoms, but it's intrusion into the personal life of the individual, which is the worst kind in a sense, as you would see that there is always that authority that basically dominates their life or monitors their life. So, and they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion, which makes this idea of freedom so important as part of the message of this new movement. You would see that in today's Iran, there are no independent political parties.
22:53 Speaker 01 There is very little, probably, freedom of the press. I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone, but it's fairly limited. There's enormous amount of propaganda machine, which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran. It's completely in the hands of the government. And of course, you would see this variety of other tools for trying to indoctrinate Iranian population across the board. So that's another sign of this kind of a sense of,
23:37 Speaker 01 sense of being totally left out. You're not belonging to what's going on in terms of power, empowerment and disempowerment. So that's, that's the situation as far as the idea of a freedom is concerned. And this free, somewhat miraculously, and perhaps unintentionally,
24:03 Speaker 01 The three parts of this message uh, complements each other. Because perhaps for the first time, we see that women are in the forefront of a, of a movement. I hesitate to say revolution because I'm not particularly happy with revolutions. Revolutions worldwide in Iran have always been so miserable in terms of their outcome that we have to be careful not to use the word
24:30 Lex Fridman? Yes.
24:31 Speaker 01 the revolution again. So that's where, where it stands now. And the regime was thinking that, well, these are kids. Uh, they're going to go away. And then, of course, they're completely conspiratorial in their thinking. They constantly think that these are all the uh, instigations and provocations of foreign powers. These are the great Satan, the United States, this is Israel. Or these are the, actually the Supreme Leader says that in so many words. His only response so far that he had in past six weeks with regard to these demonstrations is that
25:13 Speaker 01 these are the children of the Savak, Savak being the security forces of the Shah's time. That's forty-three years later. He claims that the children seven, sixteen, seventeen years, twenty years old kids in the street are the grandchildren or children of some imaginary survival of the Shah's security force.
25:39 Lex Fridman? So there's, uh, the idea is that these protests are internal and external saboteurs. So people trying to sabotage the government.
25:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
25:52 Lex Fridman? And
25:52 Speaker 01 And they are misled.
25:54 Lex Fridman? Misled.
25:54 Speaker 01 As far as they can go.
25:55 Lex Fridman? And then there's the great Satan, the United States and other places are uh, controlling, sort of, uh, either controlling the narrative, feeding propaganda or literally, uh, sending people to
26:11 Speaker 01 I don't think that they have, I don't think even they have that kind of imagination. Precisely say what you have said. Yeah. That they would say that they are controlling the narrative. They basically say, no, these are agents. Yeah. Of of the foreign powers. And their families are all sold out and they are basically lost their loyalties to the great Islamic Republic. And therefore, they can be treated so brutally, they can be suppressed so brutally. Which I haven't actually said what they are doing, because I thought perhaps first we should talk about who these kids are in the streets. Before we move on about the response of the government.
26:53 Speaker 01 But one major factor which seems to add to the anxiety of, well, the regime is extremely anxious now. Because they are in a position, this shows that they don't have, the lack of confidence in a sense. That they would see them reacting in a very forceful way. Because basically, they don't seem to have that kind of a confidence to allow this
27:21 Speaker 01 this message or the movement to air, to be aired. But the one element which corresponds to that is that there is an expatriate population of Iranians worldwide. There are probably now, according to some estimates, close to four million, even more Iranians abroad. And they are all over the world, from Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Western Europe,
27:50 Speaker 01 Turkey and United States and Canada. So, just to give you one example, last, last Saturday, there was a mass demonstrations in Berlin by the Iranians from Germany and all over Europe, Western Europe. And it was at least, I think probably the conservative estimate was about hundred thousand. So hundred thousand Iranians showed up in Berlin demonstrating against the treatment of the women in Iran or the movement in Iran.
28:28 Speaker 01 The government thinks, obviously, this must have been some instigation by foreign powers and they want to destroy the Islamic Republic. And not only that, but their propaganda is kind of ridiculous. Because I listened actually to how they portrayed it in the newspapers. I listened to the Iranian news, that is officially controlled, government-controlled news. And in the papers, much of the papers that are in the control of the government. One of them, or actually, the major news program portrayed the demonstrations
29:08 Speaker 01 that 10,000 people showed up in Berlin and protested against the rising prices, rising rates for gas and oil in Germany. So that's how they mislead, in a very rather stupid fashion. Because probably 95%, if not 100% of the Iranians are listening to Persian-speaking media outside Iran. So it's a BBC Persian, there is Iran International, there are at least five or six of them.
29:46 Lex Fridman? That's probably really important to highlight, that Iran is a very modern and tech-savvy nation. Not just the young people.
29:57 Speaker 01 Probably more than, more than I feel sometimes when I compare myself to what they are doing. Since 1979, the earlier years, for a decade or two, they tried in a very crude fashion to restrict access to media outside Iran. Because this is all through dishes, okay? And satellite dishes are everywhere, you know, if you look at the, you know, buildings of, you know, small houses, small towns and villages in Iran, there's always a dish. And they watch all kinds of things through this.
30:38 Speaker 01 And particularly because of what's happening now, they listen to all the news
30:46 Speaker 01 broadcasts from all this media and they're extremely active. They are probably, some of them even twenty four hours or close, very extensive coverage of every clip that comes through. So what the government is doing now, the Islamic Republic, is that they restrict the entire internet.
31:10 Lex Fridman? They shut down the internet.
31:11 Speaker 01 They shut down the internet, but they cannot afford shutting that internet because much of the business, much of the everyday life, much of the government affairs depends on the internet, like everywhere else. And Iran is extremely, if you, if I hear from many of the colleagues and friends, you know, it's like in certain respects like Sweden, where you go there, there is no more currency and for very good reason, because there's so much inflation that the, that the, that the banknotes are worthless in a sense. So everything is through, you know, sweeping your card.
31:53 Speaker 01 And that, the entire system is in a standstill because people cannot buy food. They can, you, you go to the supermarket, that's how you would do it. You, you order food to come to your house, which Iranians, at least the middle classes, the more prosperous middle classes, doing all the time. So they deliver everything and because of the Covid, it became even more. And they have to pay all through this system. So what happens is that now they're estimating that every day fifty million dollars, the Iranian government or the Iranian economy is losing because of slowing the internet.
32:32 Lex Fridman? Plus the frustration is growing because you can't order food.
32:38 Speaker 01 Among other things.
32:39 Lex Fridman? Right.
32:40 Speaker 01 I mean, they are, they are in touch with, I mean WhatsApp.
32:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
32:46 Speaker 01 Every Iranian, virtually every Iranian.
32:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
32:51 Speaker 01 That has education and education in the sense that has gone through the high schools and universities knows how to use the WhatsApp.
33:01 Lex Fridman? So there's a big middle class, like you said, secular middle class in Iran. And there, there's a lot of at least capacity for, if not revolution, then
33:14 Lex Fridman? political ideological turmoil.
33:19 Speaker 01 And a huge amount of hatred.
33:21 Lex Fridman? So the hatred has grown.
33:23 Speaker 01 Yes, hatred of the, of the policies of the regime of isolation. That's a huge point that you hear a great deal about. That we don't want to be isolated, we don't want to be humiliated. Iran is not about this miserable regime that is ruling over us. We have a great culture, so there's a sense of a pride in their own culture. Some of it, you know, Islamic, some of it pre-Islamic. So there's a huge sense of a pride in that. And they see that they cannot communicate with the outside world.
34:07 Speaker 01 They, they want to travel abroad, which they do. I mean, for one thing, the Iranian regime never actually, for majority of the population, never puts restrictions. It's not like Soviet Union where you have to have a, you used to have a permission to move from one place to another.
34:31 Speaker 01 And then, of course, the Islamic regime since 1979 basically chased away or destroyed the old middle class. That's my generation, basically, my parents' generation. These are the secular middle class of the Pahlavi era. In the hope that they can do this social engineering and create this Islamic. Society of their own. The bad news for them was that that didn't happen. And that memory persisted. And the middle class that was created since past forty years is much larger in size than what it was. Because there was, of course, the demographic revolution.
35:15 Speaker 01 That's the very, that's the very foundation of it is the demographic revolution. Population in Iran, I've written an article about it, actually. Population in Iran since the turn of the century, last century, the twentieth century. Population of Iran was about nine million or so. Is now eighty-three million. And that is since nineteen seventy-nine, the population was thirty-five million. Between the past forty years, it's basically doubled. So it's eighty-three million. Although, one of the great successes, I don't want to bore you with the details about the demography,
36:00 Speaker 01 but it's important.
36:01 Lex Fridman? Please, demographics is not boring.
36:05 Speaker 01 Well, you can see that the birth rate was very high. Otherwise, you wouldn't have doubled your population in a matter of four decades. But Iranians, because of the urban shift to an urban population, because of the growth of the middle class, because of the education, they, basically, the pattern of the, of growth, population growth changed. Iran used to be two point eight or three percent birth rate in around nineteen eighties. I would say nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties. Now, it is one point one.
36:50 Speaker 01 And it's probably the most successful country in the Middle East in terms of the population control. Despite the government's consistent attempt to try to encourage people to have more kids, middle class refuses to do that. And this is middle class not only anymore in the capital, but this is very smaller towns and cities, places that used to be villages. Now you look at them, they have a decent population, fifty thousand, hundred thousand, and they live an urban life, and they don't want to be subjected to that old pattern
37:33 Speaker 01 of agrarian society when you had ten children or eight children. And of course, it's a much more advanced in terms of health and medicine. So you don't lose children as they used to. The antibiotics, there's always of kids to survive. And therefore, if you have ten kids, you stick with ten kids. You don't end up with four as it used to be in the past. Six of them would have died in the, up to the age of five, actually. But now, because of that, you see that this urban population in the cities have completely different demands.
38:17 Speaker 01 And of course, the education is important. That's another area of how the social engineering of the Islamic Republic went away. Because they were thinking that, you know, the growth of the population, the growth of the educated, higher educated, middle classes in their benefit, or they could not even control it, in a sense. Now, Iran, in my time, probably had...
38:46 Speaker 01 In the 1970s, probably by the time of the revolution, it had 10, 12 universities. Now it has 56 universities all across the country. And there is something referred to as the Free University, Azzad, which has campuses all over the country. It has 324 campuses all around Iran. What does that mean? In many respects, this youth that are brought up in these families, even in small towns, in very traditional families, in families that belong to that kind of a more religious, loyal to the clergy or to the clerical classes,
39:32 Speaker 01 their children can now move on, particularly women. Because in my times, it would have been unheard of that you would have a young woman of 18 or 17, 18, 19
39:49 Speaker 01 from a traditional city such as, for instance, Yazd or in south-east of Iran
39:59 Speaker 01 to move on elsewhere for education, as you do in this country. Now, it's completely accepted that a woman wears hijab, because she is forced to wear hijab, to go to a university completely on the other side of the country. And this movement of the population, not only because of the universities, but in general. If you now visit Iran, you hear accents, local accents, provincial accents, all over the country. That is an Azerbaijani Turkish accent from the north-west of the country.
40:44 Speaker 01 You can hear it in the farest provinces in the south and vice versa. So, and Kurdish, for instance, or even more marginal regions such as Sistan province in the south-east 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 eighty-six percent literacy,
41:27 Speaker 01 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.
41:36 Lex Fridman? And it sounds like there's a, that's quickly increasing. So because, because of the movement, because of the growth, the education system, that's.
41:44 Speaker 01 Precisely. Iran has one million schoolteachers, which may not seem as much if you're in the United States, but it's a fairly big number, actually.
41:56 Lex Fridman? Can you linger on the massacre? What happened there?
41:58 Speaker 01 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 Shia majority.
42:13 Lex Fridman? And we should say that most of Iran.
42:16 Speaker 01 Is she.
42:17 Lex Fridman? Is she, and those are, that's a branch of Islam.
42:21 Speaker 01 Shiism, yes.
42:22 Lex Fridman? Let's maybe just briefly linger Shiism and Sunni. What?
42:27 Speaker 01 What?
42:27 Lex Fridman? Just, let's not get into it.
42:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't want to.
42:31 Lex Fridman? Let's do a one sentence summary, and that maybe which, which is what most of Iran is.
42:38 Speaker 01 Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis. That are, these are main stream, if you like to call it. Actually, Sunnah means that kind of a main stream.
42:50 Lex Fridman? Can you actually linger on the Sunni Sunnah Shia?
42:56 Speaker 01 Shia means a party, means those that belongs to a party of Ali, which was, goes back to the early Islamic history of seventh century.
43:06 Lex Fridman? I mean, I'm almost lingering to the silly notion of pronunciation and stuff like that. So ah, ah, ah means part, like what, what does the extra ah at the end do?
43:17 Speaker 01 Shi means. Belonging to the Shia community.
43:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
43:22 Speaker 01 Shia means a person, a Shia.
43:25 Lex Fridman? That belongs to that community.
43:26 Speaker 01 Are you a Shia? Yes, I'm a Shia.
43:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and she is the community.
43:31 Speaker 01 Community, and in English, when it was anglicized, it becomes Shiite. So if you say Shiite in today.
43:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
43:38 Speaker 01 It's perfectly acceptable. And of course, I myself, in my writings, I always switch between one and the other. One of my books is always Shiite, the other books always she. And that hasn't been settled. But the Shia population is the smaller compared to the Sunni population in the world.
43:59 Lex Fridman? In the world.
43:59 Speaker 01 In the world.
44:00 Lex Fridman? But in Iran, it's the opposite.
44:02 Speaker 01 Iran and Iraq, and possibly not Lebanon, are the three countries who barely, Iraq and Lebanon have barely majority Shia population. Whereas Iran is a large Shia population due to its history of conversion to Shias, and that by itself is another story. But in the sense that the way that historically it evolved, the center became more Shia and the peripheries remained Sunni. So you have communities of the Baluch in the southeast.
44:46 Speaker 01 You have the Kurds, a large portion of the Kurds are Sunnis. They have Shias as well. Then they have the indigenous religion of their own, Ali, it was called Ahl Haq, which is the religion of indigenous to Kurdistan. There are Turkmen's in the northeast of Iran, who are also Sunnis. There are other communities, the Khurasan region, in the peripheries of Afghanistan. They are also Sunnis. And you have some Arab population, Arab-speaking population in the Khuzestan province, in the southwest of Iran, which is also all across the Persian Gulf.
45:24 Lex Fridman? Is there a lot of conflict between these regions? And also. Like if I uh blindfolded you and dropped you off in one of the regions, would you quickly recognize the region? Like by the food, by the music, by the
45:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:37 Lex Fridman? accents, by so on?
45:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, the answer to your lovely question, which I think, I hope it would have happened to me, is that yes, you would see different cultures.
45:48 Lex Fridman? Yes.
45:49 Speaker 01 There are, but different food, most important, different accents.
45:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
45:55 Speaker 01 Or different languages. So there are dialects, there's Baluch is a different language altogether. But, or so for that matter Kurdish, which is closer to Persian, because they are Indo-European languages. But Turkish, Azeri Turkish, which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey, Republic of Turkey, or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north. They're the same, basically. Actually, if you would have looked, that's a fascinating picture. If you have looked at the, let's say even 19th century or early 20th century, linguistic map of Iran, you would have been amazed
46:37 Speaker 01 in the number of dialects, in the number of languages that have survived. And this is an ancient country, it's an ancient land. And it's a lot of mountains all around it, or big deserts. So there's a sense of isolation. So you would say, here and there, you see a different community that speaks differently.
46:56 Lex Fridman? All ancient traditions and languages.
46:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, and because of the great number of invasions that Iran witnessed over more than two and a half millennia, of course, there are all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran. There are all ethnicities were introduced to Iran, mostly coming from the northeast of Iran, from, from the lowlands of Central Asia and beyond, and, and continued into Iran proper. So, but now, what has happened, that's what my point that I wanted to make, uh, century of modernity or modernization has produced
47:42 Speaker 01 A national culture of great length, great strength, in a sense, I would say. I ended my book, the book on Iran, Iran, the Modern History. Basically saying that despite everything else that has created so much trouble for today's Iran, there is a sense of a cultural identity that is very strong. And I think I can say with with some confidence that despite this, despite this regional identities that are still there and are great and they should be celebrated.
48:24 Speaker 01 This, today, if you go to Kurdistan or if you go to Sistan, they all can speak Persian, they all have an education in Persian. So they all basically are becoming part of, whether they like it, whether they like the regime in power or not, they have a sense of belonging to a culture and an identity with the center. And of course, the idea of a center versus periphery in Iran is very old. It goes back to ancient times because even the name of the country was the guarded domains of Iran. This is the, this is the official name of Mammalik Mahramse Iran.
49:09 Speaker 01 Namely that it was recognized that this is not just one entity, but it's a, it's a collection of entities. Like the United States of America. Exactly, exactly. But the United States of America, in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful, well, it remains to be seen how successful. To be continued. To be, to, that was basically invented, created, that you would have this sense of it. In, in the case of an old nation, which has been on the map of the world for 3,000 years, 2,500 years, there's, this is not an exaggeration.
49:51 Speaker 01 I'm not a nationalist per se, but, I mean, if you look Persian, the map of the world in ancient times, it is still there as it is today. Very few countries in the world are like that. That they would have that kind of a continuity over a course of time. And that's not without a reason, because there was this sense of a a center versus periphery that had found some, there is a huge amount of tension, but there is also a sense of belonging to something, and state is very much at the center of it. I mean, that's why the concept of a state matters for the creation, for the shaping of of this culture.
50:35 Speaker 01 What happened is therefore, you can see that today in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded, is that you would be surprised to see how much
50:49 Speaker 01 people share.
50:52 Speaker 01 And in terms of, I just give you one anecdote. In nineteen sixty eight, I believe, must have been, I traveled to Azerbaijan. I I used to travel and actually photograph.
51:07 Lex Fridman? Not blindfolded.
51:08 Speaker 01 No.
51:09 Lex Fridman? Mostly.
51:10 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, not blindfolded, no, no, not blindfolded.
51:13 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
51:13 Speaker 01 So I went to a bazaar in the city of Khoy, which is in the northwestern Iran, on the border with what is today the Republic of Turkey.
51:28 Speaker 01 And I went to the bazaar and I was interested in the kind of a leatherwork that they produce. So I tried to buy some stuff and they were surprised to see that, how few people knew Persian. So they could not communicate in Persian with you. Either they have to ask somebody from some other store to come and translate for you. This is nineteen sixty eight.
51:53 Lex Fridman? Nineteen sixty, so even though it's the official language.
51:58 Speaker 01 Was Persian.
51:59 Lex Fridman? Of of the country, there's still.
52:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:02 Lex Fridman? So what do they teach in school? So it doesn't matter.
52:04 Speaker 01 It was Persian. But this guy.
52:06 Lex Fridman? He doesn't go to school.
52:07 Speaker 01 He hasn't been to the school or he was not fully exposed to it. And basars usually are very conservative places. So it stuck in my mind. Now, in recently, in two thousand and four, I was traveling to the same area, not to the same city, but to the same area. And I was amazed to see how the youth.
52:31 Speaker 01 As soon as they would know that you're coming from somewhere else. So it's an opening conversation with you talking about the latest movies. That was produced in the West and it's not only Hollywood. Of course, there's a huge amount of fascination with Hollywood and Western cinema. Cinema is a major thing. Filmmaking is a major thing.
52:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
52:51 Speaker 01 So these kids in the city of Ahar were asking me, we're having lunch. They're asking me, okay, then what do you think about this producer? Not producer, this director or that actor?
53:04 Lex Fridman? American.
53:05 Speaker 01 American, European as well, but mostly American.
53:08 Lex Fridman? Were they speaking Persian?
53:10 Speaker 01 It's a complete Persian that I would converse with them.
53:14 Lex Fridman? Do they speak English too? Interesting.
53:16 Speaker 01 Yes, actually, you would be surprised to see what percentage of the Iranian youth, at least in big cities, are fascinated with learning language. And for a reason, because they think that's the way to get access either on social media or eventually leave Iran.
53:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
53:33 Speaker 01 Unfortunately. And, and because they don't see a future for themselves in the country. Either you have to be part of this, part of this regime. Or if you hate them and you don't like the way of their life, you look up outside, you know? I was having drivers to drive me around the country in the cities around Tehran. And the guy was a young, extremely well-educated, well-dressed. We would have looked at him, we could have found him in any street in any country in the Western world. And his major concern, knowing that I'm from outside. Major concern is, well, tell me which would be a better place for me to go.
54:17 Speaker 01 So what's wrong with the place that you're in right now? You are in your own country, you speak your own language, oh, this is no good. I have to have a better future. This has no future for me.
54:29 Lex Fridman? Well, it's, it's really interesting because the thing I feel about the protests right now is there's a large number of people that instead of giving in to cynicism about, you know, this government is no good.
54:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:45 Lex Fridman? They're actually getting this like, uh, energy, this desire to, for revolution.
54:54 Lex Fridman? In the sort of non-violence, in the democratic sense of that. Let's actually find the ideas. Let's build a great nation here. This is a great nation. This is my nation. Let's build something great here.
55:06 Speaker 01 Well.
55:08 Lex Fridman? That's my hope.
55:08 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, yeah.
55:11 Lex Fridman? That's what I'm hoping for.
55:12 Speaker 01 I share your aspiration, but I'm fearing that, I hope it's not a wishful thinking. Certainly, that's what they want. Certainly, that's what they want to create. But a historian always tells you, from where they start to where they finish, there is going to be a huge kind of a change. And in this particular case, I wouldn't be, I would very much hope that it's not going to be a revolution like 1979 Islamic Revolution. And I have my hopes in that. For one, I think this is a revolution that doesn't have a leader. Okay.
55:58 Speaker 01 And it seems that they're comfortable with that. At least so far, because we are, well, the sixth week of this movement. And I hope it's not going to be actually a revolution, as I pointed out before. I hope it's going to be more of a sense of trying to come to some compromise and gradually move toward change rather than a collapse of this regime and replacement with what.
56:27 Lex Fridman? So the anxiety of the regime, you hope, will turn into a kind of realization that you have to, you have to modernize, you have to make progress, you actually have to make certain compromises.
56:39 Speaker 01 Yes.
56:40 Lex Fridman? Or constitutional changes, all those kind of stuff. So the basic
56:43 Speaker 01 Yes.
56:44 Lex Fridman? process of government and lawmaking.
56:48 Speaker 01 The problem is that they say we have it all, you know? We have our parliament, we have our constitution, we have our elections, which has all been, of course, fake. But they claim they have all of that. But the problem for them is that they
57:10 Speaker 01 Try to superimpose a certain ideology,
57:17 Speaker 01 like all other ideological autocracies or autarchies, as in this case, that tend to dominate all these institution buildings that they have. They constantly claim, we have this, we have that. And of course, it's a generational thing. The upper echelons of this regime are mostly older people, turbaned, they are the clergy,
57:51 Speaker 01 that are afraid of the fact that they may lose their control over their whole system. That this is sophisticated, huge system of government. And they rely on certain tools of control, which is the revolutionary guards and other institutions that are loyal to the state. And they spend enormous amount of funds that is available to them, at least before the sanctions. But even during the sanctions, they still have enough funds to do so. And in order to remain in power. And they are extremely ruthless in that regard.
58:36 Speaker 01 This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime. This is a regime that I would see easily in it. Clear signs of fascism, clear signs of the state's control and pay any price to stay in power.
58:58 Lex Fridman? So even violence?
58:59 Speaker 01 Extreme violence.
59:01 Lex Fridman? To return to the massacre, what were the uses of violence to suppress protests?
59:07 Speaker 01 Well, yes, it was actually quite remarkable to see that from the first or the second day of the protest, you see out in the streets, this riot police, okay?
59:19 Speaker 01 Which comes out in large numbers.
59:21 Lex Fridman? Uh huh.
59:23 Speaker 01 Fully geared up. Their appearance are rather terrifying, like any other riot police, probably more than any other riot police. They're violent.
59:36 Speaker 01 And they stand in the streets when the students are demonstrating, even in smaller number. Because before I go to that, I should point this point, this out to you as well. That that these demonstrations are not large ones in one place. You see, you don't see a hundred thousand people in in one place. But you see in every neighborhood, couple of thousand of kids are demonstrating.
1:00:05 Lex Fridman? All over Iran.
1:00:06 Speaker 01 All over Iran.
1:00:07 Lex Fridman? Now, all over the world in different parts.
1:00:09 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes. Actually, during the demonstrations three weeks ago, they, as I said, they had people in Sydney, Australia, New Zealand, Tokyo, all over the world.
1:00:24 Lex Fridman? All protesting high gas prices. It's funny. Everywhere.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 Everywhere.
1:00:31 Speaker 01 To the extent that they could be ignored.
1:00:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:00:34 Speaker 01 Nothing but if they could not be ignored. And it's actually it's quite remarkable that this is very embarrassing to them. But somehow they think that this propaganda machine of them is working.
1:00:45 Lex Fridman? So you think they don't have a good even sense. I mean, it's so there's an incompetence within the propaganda machine.
1:00:51 Speaker 01 Yes, it is. There is an incompetence across the board.
1:00:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:00:55 Speaker 01 I mean, despite all of this massive government administration, or whatever you would call it, all these various components of it, there is a sense of there is a sense of inefficiency and incompetence that is associated within every action that you see, even in their suppression of this street movement. But in answer to that question, you would see that they're this riot police.
1:01:25 Speaker 01 Uh, very, it's quite obvious that they were trained for the purpose. So this, their appearance, everything, these are not just regular army forces or soldiers, conscripts, they are professional forces. And they come not only in on foot in number, but they come on motorbikes. So there are, you would see in any of these demonstrations, there are ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty motorbikes with two passengers, one in front riding, the one in the back, fully equipped with the baton, with paint guns, with pellet guns and with bullets.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 Uh, so they are very fully equipped and they are terrifying. They go through the demonstrations and hits and beat people. Uh, and then the arrests. And then you see behind the first line of these riot police, you would see all these latest models of these special armored trucks for moving to the demonstrations and arresting people, throwing them into this. And then behind that, water, uh, water cannons, you see.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 And I was looking at that, I was like, okay, this is Tehran probably, they have this. But then you look at the smaller cities, they still have the same thing. So all over the country, one thing that they had managed to produce extensively, irrespective of the fact that whether they are effective or not, but you see them everywhere. So this just shows that how afraid this regime is.
1:03:15 Lex Fridman? But that also shows that there's an infrastructure. That can implement violence at scale.
1:03:22 Speaker 01 Yes, very much so. And it's probably part and parcel of this regime. From day one, the number of prisons that they have, according to perhaps an exaggerated version, they said that about 12,000 or so arrested, that are in jails today, since past six weeks. There were 230 or 40 people were killed, including children under 18. They are, they beat up women in the streets,
1:04:04 Speaker 01 which is extremely, actually disturbing when you see these scenes of.
1:04:11 Lex Fridman? So there's a lot of this is on video too, right?
1:04:13 Speaker 01 Everything is on video. Everybody has a camera. And everybody sends to major news outlets outside Iran. And they immediately showed every night, if you look at BBC Persian or Iran International, or a few, I think it is six of them actually. All over there, in England, they are in Deutsche Welle in Germany, which has a particular interest in the Iranian. BBC World Service and so forth in London. And Voice of America Persian here in this country. There is another one, Radio Fado, which is also funded by the American government,
1:04:58 Speaker 01 also fully covers all of these events. So there is no way that these people can, that Iran can miss what's going on in the streets of these demonstrations and the scenes of beating up women, which in Iranian culture, as I presume in most cultures in the world, there is a certain sanctity that you don't attack women. But they do. And this is an Islamic regime that supposedly have to have a certain sense of concern and protection.
1:05:36 Lex Fridman? Protection, like a deep respect for women.
1:05:41 Lex Fridman? Grounded in a tradition of protecting them, but instead this kind of idea that was instilled in law has turned into a deep disrespect of women.
1:05:51 Speaker 01 Exactly, or fear that these women are not any longer the girls that we thought we are bringing up in this society.
1:06:03 Lex Fridman? The source of you losing your power will be these, these women. That's the fear.
1:06:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you see, of course, this government do have a support base. I mean, it would be totally wrong to think that Islamic Republic has not created its own power base. It does, but it's probably if there's no way, there are no statistics that we can, or I'm not aware of, any statistics that I can give you in numbers, what's the percentage of support for the regime in Iran? But quite frankly, I don't think it's more than probably 10% of the population. United Generals.
1:06:43 Lex Fridman? I, I would be surprised if it's that low. I, I would say, so if my understanding, because I've been very deeply paying attention to the war in Ukraine, in to Ukraine, to Russia, and to support in Russia for Putin.
1:07:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:07:01 Lex Fridman? I think without knowing the details, without even considering the effects of propaganda and stuff like that, is there's probably a large number of people in Iran that don't see this as a battle of human rights, but sees it as a battle of conservatism, like tradition versus modernization, and they value tradition. That, that what they fear from the throwing away of the hijab is not the loss of power and like the women getting human rights. What they fear is, is the same stuff you fear when you're sitting on a porch and saying kids these days have no respect. Basically, that they, there's a large number of Iranians that probably value tradition
1:07:47 Lex Fridman? and the beauty of the culture. And like they're, they fear that kids with their internet and their videos and their revolution will throw away everything that made this country hold together for millennia, right?
1:08:03 Speaker 01 Yes, I know, I would agree with you in the sense that probably like everywhere else in the world, this is a generational thing, you know. Every generation thinks differently about the younger generation, no doubt. And in Iran is the same. But there is another factor here is involved. Those that we would consider them as traditional, no longer seem to have their loyalties to this regime.
1:08:30 Lex Fridman? That's powerful.
1:08:31 Speaker 01 Meaning that they consider it as a brutal regime that is prepared to kill children in the streets.
1:08:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:08:42 Speaker 01 And does a lot of things wrong. Of course, it tries to take care of its own power base. There's a very strong sense, if you start here, there's a very strong sense in this regime that there are people that is theirs and there are others which are not theirs. There's a word for it, if any person, they call it khodi, one of us, okay?
1:09:09 Lex Fridman? Oh, so it's a, well, it's very, that's very fascistic, it's like...
1:09:13 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, it's all for that matter, I suppose Soviet Union, if you were a member of the party and, you know, your children would have received a special kind of treatment, yourself as well. This sense of us versus them, for a while worked, because the younger people coming from the countryside to the cities, certain fact, certain sector of them would have found, would have found protection and support from the government.
1:09:51 Speaker 01 They, they wanted to belong to something and the mosques and the morning, morning associations in the neighborhoods and so forth would have given them. There is actually a term for it, it's called basij, those, those have been recruited by the state. And this is the youth kind of vigilante, if you like, that, that you can see them also in these demonstrations. Sometimes thugs, they're called the civil cloth. So the people that, that comes to these demonstrations that start beating up...
1:10:32 Speaker 01 This young people and they they are not in uh in uh security police uniforms, but they 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 for a for a state that basically monopolizes most of the resources. You see, even be even during the sanction, let alone before the sanction.
1:11:12 Speaker 01 The oil revenue of Iran, which is the major source of the state government, was the monopoly of the state. It was monopoly of state during the Palavi era from the start, basically. So what does that mean? That mean that the regime in power is not 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. That's what it is the regime today. So it feeds a small, or I wouldn't say, but a fair number of its own supporters.
1:11:55 Speaker 01 I mean, the Revolutionary Guards in Iran is probably about three hundred and fifty thousand or something like that, is a very big force. And this is not the regular army. The Revolutionary Guards are independent from the from the.
1:12:10 Lex Fridman? Revolutionary Guard is armed forces controlled by the state.
1:12:15 Speaker 01 Yes, the same as the army, but these are more ideologically tied up with the state.
1:12:23 Lex Fridman? And they're also in facing, internal facing? What's their purpose, what's their stated, what's the stated purpose of the Revolutionary Guard?
1:12:31 Speaker 01 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.
1:12:43 Lex Fridman? Prevents further revolution.
1:12:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the Revolutionary Guards and their job was to try to make sure that the regime stays in power. And of course, over the force of, over the course of forty years, they became more powerful, more organized, better funded. Better trained, well, at least we think they are better trained, but we don't know because the level of incompetence perhaps can be seen through the rank and file as well. Right. But, you know, they developed their own military industry. I mean, those drones that you see now Putin's regime are throwing on Ukrainians, poor Ukrainians.
1:13:30 Speaker 01 Those are all built by the Revolutionary Guards, by the military industry under the control of the Revolutionary Guards. And like similar regimes in the Middle East at least, these are military industrial complexes. You can find them in Egypt, of course, which is very powerful, very traditionally, has been in power and still is in power. You find them in Pakistan, which is extremely powerful, and they can change the prime ministers as they did in the case of the last one. You can find them probably in Myanmar, is the same phenomenon.
1:14:14 Speaker 01 And I can, if you look around, you can find quite a number of them. And the Revolutionary Guards is equivalent of that. This is a powerful establishment force, which militarily is powerful, industrially is powerful, and since the start of the revolution, they have been given projects. So you want to build dams, which they did a major disaster, environmental disaster. They built a hundred and something dams all across the country. This is the Revolutionary Guard who does it.
1:14:53 Speaker 01 So they have all kinds of tentacles all around the country controlling various things.
1:15:00 Lex Fridman? And because it's their job and they have power, their prestige, there's a huge incentive to.
1:15:07 Speaker 01 Join them.
1:15:07 Lex Fridman? Yeah, to join them and to stay. So like they, you know, when they're having dinner at home with their families, there's not an incentive to uh to join the protests, sort of.
1:15:19 Speaker 01 Well, that is the point. I think, I'm revolutionary guys, maybe an extreme, but many of the people who depend on this state for their support. Now the younger generation are telling their parents, you were wrong. You don't provide for us. This society, this state does not provide what we want. So there is a dissent within the family, it seems to me. I hope it's not a wishful thinking. You know, there is a kind of a joke going around. You see this a tabbed guy is the clergy bearded
1:15:59 Speaker 01 and traditional cleric or appearance. When you see them uh talking about women, they are very, of course, politically incorrect. They are very looking down towards women. As as I said, you know, they have to be inside, they have to be protected, they have not to be seen and so forth. But if they have a young person, a young daughter in their family, you see that their discourse changes. They no longer seem to be referring to women as second-class citizens.
1:16:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:16:41 Speaker 01 So that's very important. That's precisely that point, that when you have this younger generation, no matter how privileged they are, and many of them are privileged, you know. And there is also, the regime has created its own uh privileged class that are not necessarily.
1:17:05 Speaker 01 Directly paid by the regime, but they benefit from contractors, certain professions that benefit from what the state provides for them. And Iran is a, I mean, the past forty years, you can see Iran has developed in terms of material culture remarkably. Iran has good communication, has roads all over the place. It's not like, it's more like, I don't know whether you have ever visited Turkey, for instance. In certain respects, even more advanced than Turkey, but it's closer to that.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 Rather than if you travel, I don't want to bring particular names, in North Africa or parts of the Middle East or other parts of the Islamic world, it's much, much different. So in this respect, you would see certain contrast or paradoxes here. On the certain respect, there is the growth, there is urbanization, there is modern economy. On the other hand, you see this superimposed ideological doctrinal aspect that has driven the regime over all these years, and they cannot get rid of it.
1:18:30 Speaker 01 They cannot, in this respect, they cannot modernize themselves. They think that they are already perfect in ideological sense. This is the best solution for the world, not for only for Iran, but for the Muslim world and for the world as a whole. We are anti-imperialist, we have managed to survive either under sanctions. This is all part of their rhetoric, but of course, at the huge expense, the huge expense for their own population. And the point that you have raised is the fact that we now witness there is a, not only a generation gap between the youth and their parents.
1:19:15 Speaker 01 But there is a break, in a sense, from the older generations. And they are very distinct, the youth that has a different view of the world. And it does not want to compromise. Whether they would be able to succeed or not remains to be seen. Whether this regime is going to suppress it, maybe. But it actually brought to surface many of aspects of the weaknesses of this regime in power.
1:19:52 Lex Fridman? Well, I hear from a lot of people that are in these protests now. And so my love goes to them and stay strong. Because it's inspiring to see people fighting for those things. The women's life and freedom, especially freedom.
1:20:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:20:11 Lex Fridman? Because that can only lead to a good thing in the long term at least. And if possible, to avoid a violent revolution. Of course, that is something that we all want to see. Before we return to the present, let's jump around. Let's go to the past. We mentioned 1979. What happened in 1979 in Iran?
1:20:34 Speaker 01 Well, in 1979, there was a revolution that eventually came to be known as the Islamic Revolution. And even up to this day, many of the observers or those who have strong views that would not like to refer to it as Islamic Revolution or even a revolution. Because the nature of it, in the earlier stages of it, started really probably around 1977. It took two years. Was much more all-embracing. It was not Islamic in a particular fashion or at all, in a sense. It started with a kind of a very liberal Democrat agenda.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 Which required, which demanded mostly by people who were the veterans of the older generations of Iranian liberal nationalists that were left out in the Pahlavi period, is the period of the Shah, became increasingly authoritarian, increasingly suppressive, and therefore, basically, leaving no space, no political space, open for any kind of a give and take, any kind of a conversation or participation.
1:22:05 Lex Fridman? That was in the seventies.
1:22:06 Speaker 01 Seventies, seventies, particularly in the seventies.
1:22:09 Lex Fridman? Can we actually even like, just do a whirlwind review from nineteen oh six to nineteen seventy nine?
1:22:17 Speaker 01 Okay, sure. In nineteen oh six, there was a period, actually, as you might know, the first decade or so of the twentieth century witnessed numerous, what referred to as constitutional revolutions, including Russia in nineteen oh five, the first revolution, including the Chinese revolution in nineteen, constitutional revolution in nineteen ten, the Young Turks revolution in nineteen oh eight, and the Iranian revolution in nineteen oh six.
1:22:47 Lex Fridman? Do you understand why the synchronicity of all of it, why in so many different places, very different cultures, very different governments?
1:22:54 Speaker 01 Very different cultures, but all of them, in a sense, were coming out of regimes that became progressively powerful, without having any kind of a legal system that would protect the individual vis a vis the state. So the idea of law. And the constitution according to which there should be a certain protection, a certain civil society, became very common.
1:23:26 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but I wonder where that, because that's been that way for for a very, very long time. And so I wonder, you know, it's funny, certain ideas, just their time comes.
1:23:40 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's like eighteen forty eight, when you would see that there's a whole range of revolutions across Europe.
1:23:47 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:23:48 Speaker 01 Or you would see, for instance, the Arab Spring, you see all these revolutions in the Arab world, which unfortunately, nearly all of them failed. So, yes, these are very contagious ideas that moves across frontiers from one culture to another. And I presume we can add to that, there are two elements, which one can say there is was a greater communication, there is a greater sense of a world economy. And the third of the century witnessed, the first decade of the century witnessed a period of volatility, particularly in in currency.
1:24:29 Speaker 01 So many of the countries of the world, particularly non-West, suffered in and particularly the businesses suffered. And not surprisingly, the business class were in the forefront of many of these constitutional movements, requiring the state to give the kind of a, create the right kind of institutions to listen to their voices, to their concerns, and the creation of a democratic system, parliamentary and system in which there would be a representation. Popular representation, proper elections and so forth, and constitutions.
1:25:14 Speaker 01 And this very much is a kind of a French idea of the constitution going back all the way, perhaps to seventeen eighty nine revolution, Montesquieu, all this kind of philosoph were greatly appreciated, particularly the French system. So what were the ideas in the nineteen oh six Iranian constitution? They precisely the same. They were demanding a creation of a legal system with division of power between the three, executive, legislative, and the judiciary, not unlike the American system.
1:25:53 Speaker 01 And they requested basically a certain public space to be created between the two sources of power. The state, which had this kind of a control over the, if you like, the secular aspect of life in the society, and the religious establishment that had a full control over the religious aspects. And both of them, from the perspective of the constitution, are this considered as repressive, and therefore there has to be a new space open between these two. And that was the idea of a constitutional revolution.
1:26:36 Speaker 01 By, by its very nature, it was an idea of modernity. They wanted a modern society. They wanted a better material life. They, they wanted a more representation and so forth. The constitutional revolution, as I always would say, is a much more of a innocent revolution. It's a revolution that did not particularly have much violence in it, contrary to many other revolutions. I did not have a centralized leadership per se. That's why actually I'm getting, I mean, besides the practices, I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews to compare
1:27:17 Speaker 01 what's happening now with the revolution of nineteen oh six, nineteen, nineteen oh nine.
1:27:22 Lex Fridman? Are there any echoes?
1:27:23 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, there are, there are. Because that was a movement that started without a, without a centralized leadership. What actually various voices that emerged in various, among the merchants or the businessmen in the economic community, among the representatives who came to the first parliament, the press, the new generation of the privileged aristocracy, who were educated and believed in the constitutional values. All of these voices emerged at the same time.
1:28:03 Speaker 01 And somehow, they managed to, to coexist in the first and the second parliaments that were created between nineteen oh six and nineteen ten or nineteen eleven. But they all faced huge problems. In the sense that Iran was in a dire economic situation. This is before the days of the discovery of oil. But actually coincided, they discovered, there are two important coincidences. One is that the oil was discovered in the south in nineteen oh nine, during the course of the constitutional revolution.
1:28:48 Speaker 01 The second is that in nineteen oh seven, the two great powers of the time, the Russian Empire and the British Empire, who always honored Iran as being a buffer state between them, because they didn't want to get too close to one another. Basically came to an agreement facing the fear of the rise of the German Empire. So this is the period of Antant, as you might know in European history, whereby the French, the British and the Russians all create an alliance that ultimately leads to the First World War against Germany.
1:29:29 Lex Fridman? And at the same time, the discovery of oil, that the oil industry being a very powerful defining factor of the 20th century for Iran.
1:29:38 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:29:39 Lex Fridman? Source of a lot of money.
1:29:41 Speaker 01 Lot of money, but not all of it in the hands of the Iranians. Only one fifth of it, 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, Khoristan province in the southwest of Iran, where the major oil industry is today, right now. And this is an extremely profitable enterprise for that company and for the British government. It's 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.
1:30:27 Speaker 01 And in the course of the 20th century, although it helped the modernization in Iran, but it also helped the creation of a more authoritative, more strong state, if you like to call it. That it does, that 19th century Iran never had that kind of a power, never had that kind of resources. It's the 20th century, even that one fifth of the income that reached the Iranian state gave it a greater power.
1:30:55 Lex Fridman? 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.
1:31:10 Lex Fridman? Have dictators with power unlike anything else in human history.
1:31:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:31:15 Lex Fridman? That's weird, too.
1:31:17 Speaker 01 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.
1:31:29 Lex Fridman? Wow.
1:31:30 Speaker 01 Mao, of course. You can name them and probably, as I would say, is the last of them is Khomeini in that century. That you would see this strong man with a sense of either
1:31:43 Speaker 01 artificial or real or a sense of so-called charisma. 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 to resource, economic resources underground. But in the Iranian case, unfortunately, it did.
1:32:23 Speaker 01 And it was a, it was more than, 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 a, almost a state of total bankruptcy. 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.
1:33:09 Speaker 01 So they had to somehow handle it. And what they tried to do didn't work. As a result, partly domestic, partly international issues, wrote about a regime which is headed by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah. Okay, first, a military officer called Reza Khan, actually a military officer of the Kazakh forces. And the Kazakh forces was the force that was created in the nineteenth century model of the Russian Kazakhs. When the ruler in the nineteenth century visited Russia as in a royal tour.
1:33:51 Speaker 01 And the Tsar showed the great Kazakh forces, he said, "I like this." And he created one for himself with Russian officers, actually. So Russian officers served in Iran from around eighteen eighties up to the revolution of nineteen seventeen. The collapse of the Tsarist regime.
1:34:11 Lex Fridman? Yes, so many revolutions.
1:34:12 Speaker 01 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 to. And this called the Pahlavi regime. Pahlavi regime was a modernizing regime, okay? That brought a complete, that in effect fulfilled many of the ambitions of the constitution, many of the aspirations of the constitutional revolution. Better communication, better secular education, centralized states, centralized army,
1:34:52 Speaker 01 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 twenty 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.
1:35:33 Speaker 01 Part of the Palavie 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. The Red Army, they took over Iran. And of course, they said. During World War. Yes, from nineteen forty one up to nineteen forty five. And of course, when the when the Red Army refused to
1:36:07 Speaker 01 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 nineteen forty five. Yes, nineteen forty five to nineteen forty six, there was a big. Soviet Union getting greedy. Yes, but eventually they agreed. Eventually Stalin agreed to leave the Azerbaijan province in the hope that it would get some concessions from Iran, which in the oil of the Caspian era, area, which didn't work and it's a different story altogether.
1:36:49 Speaker 01 But what happened is that in the post-war era, between nineteen forty four, forty five and nineteen fifty three is a period of greater democratization. Was that Raza 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.
1:37:32 Speaker 01 And there were very diverse political tendencies came to the picture, including 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 deny it, but in reality, that's the case. Yeah. But what happened, they were seen by the Americans during the Cold War as a as a threat.
1:38:13 Speaker 01 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. Mohammed Mossadegh was the prime minister and the national charismatic leader. From nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty three, prior to that, he was a famous parliamentarian. But this period, he was the prime minister of Iran and he nationalized 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.
1:38:56 Speaker 01 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, what was the CIA doing? CIA, this is the time at the post-war era. In the fifties? In the fifties, forties and fifties. The British Empire, which was really the major superpower of the region after the collapse of the Tsarist Empire.
1:39:40 Speaker 01 Gradually took the second seat to the Americans, who were the newcomers and the great powers and the victors of the Second World War. And the Americans viewed Iran as an important, as an important country. Since it has the largest common borders with the Soviet Union.
1:40:06 Speaker 01 And it was, I 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, they had a full control over the Anglo Iranian Oil Company.
1:40:49 Speaker 01 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
1:41:34 Speaker 01 of their own oil in Iran. The CIA was afraid of the Soviet penetration in, in the South, and particularly because there was a very powerful, very powerful Communist Party in Iran, the To the Party of Iran. So they gradually shifted between the Truman administration and Eisenhower administration. These are early days of the CIA. And then they actually did participate to send their agents. There's a long story to that. And it eventually resulted in a successful coup that removed Mossadegh from power.
1:42:16 Lex Fridman? What's the United States' interest here? Why are they using CIA? Are they trying to make sure? There's not too much centralization of power in this region?
1:42:25 Speaker 01 They were afraid of the fact that the, that of the Soviet Union and during the Cold War, that was their concern, the only concern.
1:42:34 Lex Fridman? They, they actually almost want to protect Iran and its own sovereign processes from influence of the Soviets.
1:42:42 Speaker 01 Because they were afraid of the fact if Iran, or at least this is part of the, I'm simplifying a very complex picture, but the, but, but the Americans basically were thinking that if Iran is going to be lost to Soviet influence, then eventually, basically, the, all the oil resources in the Persian Gulf are going to be threatened. And this would, basically, is the national security of the United States and all of the Western allies, European allies. So in a sense, this was the long arm of the CIA to try to, to try to make sure that that's not going to happen.
1:43:27 Speaker 01 And then, of course, they were persuaded by the British. The British were the old hand, which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century. They always had relations with Iran and so forth. So they gradually replaced, and of course, I don't want to give them this kind of a satanic view that Americans was a bad influence, because they had also some very good influences in Iraq. But this particular episode somehow shed a dark light on the American presence and was used and abused time and again, particularly the revolution in 1979, which was this great Satan idea that Khomeini created,
1:44:12 Speaker 01 basically was based on the fact is 1953, you were responsible for the downfall of a national government in Iran, which as a matter of fact, he had no respect for it. Khomeini had no respect for the national, secular national liberals, including Muhammed Musaddegh, but he was using it as a, as a rhetorical tool for his own purposes. But what happened is that after 1953,
1:44:43 Speaker 01 We see again the rise of authoritarian Muhammad Rizal Shah's power.
1:44:51 Lex Fridman? And then he's, that's the Shah?
1:44:53 Speaker 01 That's the Shah, that we know as Shah, this is son of Rizal Shah.
1:44:57 Lex Fridman? And technically, what is Shah?
1:45:00 Speaker 01 Shah is an old term in Persian that comes from a pre-Islamic Persian of ancient times.
1:45:08 Lex Fridman? So in the context of democracy, should it be seen as like a supreme leader, king?
1:45:14 Speaker 01 Is the head of the executive power, according to the constitution of nineteen oh six.
1:45:20 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's in the constitution, the actual term Shah?
1:45:22 Speaker 01 Of course, he has a place in the constitution.
1:45:24 Lex Fridman? But the actual term Shah, okay, interesting.
1:45:26 Speaker 01 But the Shah is a very old term.
1:45:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's almost like a monarchical term, like a, like a king.
1:45:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is, actually is a term peculiar to Iran. I've written about it somewhere. But because the term that the Western world in the ancient times has been Rex for royalty and the king. In the Eastern world in India is Raj, is the same origin, the same root. Iran never shared that. They had the idea of, because Rex and Raj, I don't want to get into too much of etymology, but this is an interesting one.
1:46:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:46:02 Speaker 01 Rex and Raj both means the one that opens the road for, basically enforcer of religion, okay?
1:46:12 Speaker 01 Enforcer of the right religion, because Rex and Raj both have the, of the etymological origin of right, you see? And right means the right religion, basically.
1:46:27 Lex Fridman? By the way, there's so much beautiful language here. I'm just looking at the Persian constitution nineteen oh six, and it says it's the constitution of the sublime state of Persia, Kajah, Iran. I mean, just, just the extra adjectives on top of this stuff is beautiful.
1:46:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, because that was actually. The change that came about, I don't want to go in too much into it. But it was called, as I pointed out before, the guarded domains of Iran.
1:46:56 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:46:56 Speaker 01 They changed that to the sublime state of Iran during the constitutional revolution. Because they wanted to give a greater sense of centrality of the state.
1:47:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:47:06 Speaker 01 And sublime was the term was used.
1:47:08 Lex Fridman? But also, what permeates all of this is a poetic. I mean, there is a history of poetry.
1:47:15 Speaker 01 Of course, very strong.
1:47:16 Lex Fridman? To the culture.
1:47:16 Speaker 01 Very strong.
1:47:17 Lex Fridman? It's fascinating. So I mean, it's, I, of course, I don't speak the language, but even in Russian, there's also a music to the soul of the people that represents itself, that presents itself in the form of poetry and literature in the way that it doesn't in the, in the English speaking world. I don't know what that is. There's a.
1:47:38 Speaker 01 There's a romantic side.
1:47:40 Lex Fridman? Romantic side.
1:47:41 Speaker 01 Almost, yeah.
1:47:42 Lex Fridman? Romantic side, that's right.
1:47:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree with you. In Iran, of course, you know, there's a time of the constitutional revolution, is a time of great poetry. This kind of patriotic sentiments that comes through poetry plays a very important part. Of course, these days, poetry has kind of declined. And instead, you see the visual image that is at the center. That's why cinema is so important.
1:48:11 Lex Fridman? Kids these days with their TikTok.
1:48:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, let me finish this about the period of Mohammed Reza Shah. He built up because he received a greater income from the oil revenue and he built up a very strong state with a strong security force, a strong security apparatus, which is the SAVAK, which is an acronym for the security force in security organization. And he, of course, unfortunately, in the 90s, 60s and 70s, particularly 90s, 70s, basically suppressed the voices of, or the possibility of any kind of mass participation
1:48:58 Speaker 01 in the political process. It became very much an authoritarian regime with its own technocrats.
1:49:07 Speaker 01 Very much a modernist vision of Iran's future. And almost kind of messianic that he was hoping that Iran in a decade would become the fifth most powerful state in the world and the richest, as he would have said, the gates of the great civilization, very much in the mind, had this image of ancient Iran, of the Akhenaten empire. And we want to go back to that greatness of the Akhenaten empire, somewhat rather naive and very nationalistic in a crude fashion. And what happened is that, as a result, there was built up some kind of a resistance from
1:49:51 Speaker 01 the intellectuals, from the left, eventually resulting in a kind of a protest movement, as I said, by 1977, 1978. Then, of course, the question that comes to mind, and probably it you would like to know about, is the fact that why it becomes religious, why it becomes Islamic? If it's the popular, you know, nationalist, liberal tendency of opening up the political space and allowing greater participation, going back to the constitution of 1906, 1907,
1:50:32 Speaker 01 why it's all of a sudden it becomes Khomeini, where does he come from? The reason for that, at least in a concise fashion, is the fact that on one area that after the greater suppression of all the other voices remained open was religion. Masks, the mullahs on the pulpit, and the message that gradually shifted from the old traditional message of the Sharia of Islam, I mean, all the rules and regulations of
1:51:15 Speaker 01 how one has to live, into something very political. And not only political, but also radical political. So...
1:51:28 Speaker 01 In the whole period from the constitutional revolution to the revolution of 1979, basically, the religious establishment gradually was pushed to the opposition. They were not originally very conservative, supported us of state, as the Catholic Church, for instance, was supporter of majority of the authoritarian governments around the world.
1:51:53 Speaker 01 But the politicization was the result of isolation, because they were left out of the system. And while in isolation, they did not, they were not successful in trying to reform themselves, to try to become, to try to find answers to many of the questions of modern times. What happens to women? What happens to civil rights? What happens to a civil society? How modern law and individual freedoms have to be defined in Islamic terms? How to separate religion and state? Or how to separate religion and state?
1:52:38 Speaker 01 These issues were never addressed. What happened is that there was this bypass through political Islam and revolutionary Islam, as it gradually they learned, you know, that this is the bypass, bypass to power, basically, to become again a voice in the society and eventually a prominent voice and eventually a monolithic voice in the society. That's the process that led into the revolution of 1979. Basically, this period, greater attention was paid to religion, even among the secular middle classes,
1:53:19 Speaker 01 who were alienated for a very long time because of this extensive modernization of the Balawi period. They had, they didn't have a sense of that old mullahs with their turbans. But they became, they had a kind of aura in this period. Yes, they are those who remained, not corrupted.
1:53:44 Speaker 01 They are the people who basically went against the suppression of the Pahlavi regime. And Khomeini became a leader, a symbol of that. Nobody ever thought in the earlier stages. And among these very excited multitudes that came to the streets of the Iranian cities in 1979, or 1978 actually, really thought that this old wall line in the 70s that all of a sudden has appeared from Najaf through Paris to Tehran is going to take over and create a autocracy, a religious autocracy.
1:54:28 Lex Fridman? We have to back up for just a second. Who is Khomeini? You just mentioned a few disparate facts about the man.
1:54:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:54:37 Lex Fridman? He was the person that took power in 1979, supreme leader of Iran.
1:54:42 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:54:42 Lex Fridman? You mentioned something about Paris, something about being in the 70s.
1:54:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:54:46 Lex Fridman? What should we know about the guy?
1:54:48 Speaker 01 Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually was known as Imam Khomeini. He was kind of promoted to an even more sublime position.
1:54:57 Lex Fridman? Okay, can we, just a million tangents. Ayatollah Imam, what do these terms mean?
1:55:04 Speaker 01 Well, ayatollah means the sign of God. In the course of the 19th century or early 20th century, as the religious establishment gradually lost its greater presence in the society and its prominent places in society, they had some kind of an inflation in titles. So they gave themselves more grand titles.
1:55:31 Lex Fridman? Yeah, more adjectives.
1:55:33 Speaker 01 More adjectives, more grand titles such as ayatollah that became a kind of a highest rank of the religious hierarchy.
1:55:43 Lex Fridman? But it's not.
1:55:43 Speaker 01 Incidentally, was in an unofficial hierarchy. It was not, it's not like the Catholic Church that you have bishops and federals. It was very unofficial model. And he was an ayatollah. Was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah.
1:56:02 Lex Fridman? He wasn't the first Ayatollah?
1:56:05 Speaker 01 No, no, no, not at all. The Ayatollahs were before him ever since the beginning of the century. But he was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah. And if I want to start it this way. Ayatollah Khomeini was born in nineteen hundred. And in a sense, all this tremendous change that Iran witnessed in the course of the
1:56:32 Speaker 01 twentieth century was, in a sense, materialized in this person. He become a mullah of a lower rank, went to the traditional madresses, to the traditional centers for the education of the seminarians. Never had a secular education.
1:56:57 Speaker 01 Had a very complex Islamic education on this one hand jurisprudence, on the other hand, probably a little bit of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, which is unusual for the jurists, for the, for the faqih, as they call them. These religious scholars or, or legal scholars of Islam. And then he, in the nineteen sixties, when he was residing in Tehran and gradually becoming more important. He became a voice of opposition against the Shah. And the reason for opposition
1:57:40 Speaker 01 in the nineteen sixties, early nineteen sixties, was the fact that the Shah carried through a series of extensive modernization policies, of which the most important was the land reform. So in effect, the land distribution that took place in the early sixties removed or weakened greatly that class of landowners from the nineteenth century. And he, Khomeini, saw himself as a voice of that old class
1:58:21 Speaker 01 that felt that, actually declared that this land redistribution is un-Islamic. According to the Islamic law, property is honored. And you cannot just, no matter how much and how large are these estates that the landowning class has, the government has no right to redistribute it, even among the peasants, among the people who are tilling the land. So that was a major issue. Shah also gave the right of vote to women.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 And that also, he objected, says that women should not have a right.
1:59:14 Lex Fridman? Can we just linger on the Islamic law? How firm and clear is the Islamic law that he was representing and embodying? Is this?
1:59:26 Speaker 01 Codified?
1:59:27 Lex Fridman? Codified, yes, it's a good term.
1:59:29 Speaker 01 That's another issue. Not only the hierarchy was unofficial, informal, but also Islamic law, particularly Shiite law, did not have any codified system. Because this religious authority is always resisted.
1:59:54 Speaker 01 Becoming under a umbrella of a more codified system of Islamic law. Because they were outside the state in a sense. Civil law was in the hand of the religious establishment. They had their own courts, independent of the state. But other matters, legal matters, was in the hand of the government. There was a kind of in the fact or division between these two institutions. State versus the religious establishment. Therefore, it was not codified. So he could declare that this is unofficial, or I'm sorry, illegal according to the Islamic law, that you would distribute the land to the peasants.
2:00:36 Speaker 01 And another mosh tahed or another religious authority would say, no, no, it's perfectly fine. Because he would has a different reading of the law. So that being in mind, that adds to the complexity of the picture. He, in the 1963, there was a period of uprising of the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. That was a turning point in a sense to try to politicize the religious supporters of Ayatollah, who were loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini. And in a sense, all the community of more religiously oriented,
2:01:15 Speaker 01 against the secular policies of the Shah and against, of course, the dictatorship of the Shah. So that's where the religious movement became a political party. In 1963 is the first moment, it's a huge uprising. And the government suppressed it. But then suppression would start to build. Of course. And he was sent to exile. He went to Najaf, which is this great center in southern. Became a martyr on top of this. A martyr, he was probably even forgotten to some extent.
2:01:51 Speaker 01 But not, it was forgotten for the, for the secular middle class, but not to those supporters of his who were paying him their dues. Because in Islam, you would pay dues to religious leaders. You know, there's religious dues and alms that you would pay to the cleric authorities, and they redistribute them among their own students and so forth. So they built actually a network of loyalty based on these donations. And these donations that received by Ayatollah Khomeini was very effectively through his network,
2:02:33 Speaker 01 was distributed even if he was in exile at Sadira. So the 1977, 1978, when the situation changed and there was a little bit of opening in the political climate,
2:02:51 Speaker 01 then you saw that Ayatollah Khomeini starts sending cassette messages. That was his mean of communication. Was sending cassettes and cassettes were sent through the country by his network. So all declarations and saying first that we would like to see a greater democratization and the Shah has to abide by the constitution of 1907. This is a constitution, this is a democratic system and so forth. Was he charismatic? Well, it depends who would call, what do you call charismatic?
2:03:32 Speaker 01 He had the long beard, he was kind of a man in turban and the gown, which was a very unusual leadership.
2:03:42 Speaker 01 For people who were much more accustomed to the civilian clothing or to the equipments of the Shah's military uniforms that he used to wear.
2:03:53 Lex Fridman? But I also mean like, he is a man that was able to take power, to become popular, sufficiently popular. So like, I would like, is it the ideas? Is it an accident? Or is it the man himself, the charisma? Or something about the man that led to this particular person basically changing the tide of history in this part of the world in a way that was unexpected?
2:04:18 Speaker 01 All the above that you mentioned?
2:04:21 Lex Fridman? Or was it just the beard?
2:04:23 Speaker 01 No, I think though it's beyond the appearance. The appearance greatly helps, as you know.
2:04:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:04:29 Speaker 01 You know?
2:04:29 Lex Fridman? In the 20th century, appearance is helpful. Yeah. Pictures for propaganda, for messaging.
2:04:34 Speaker 01 That's an important factor. And he was a kind of adamant and very severe
2:04:48 Speaker 01 in his own positions. He could appear very uncompromising.
2:04:55 Speaker 01 And he had a sense of confidence, self-confidence that virtually everybody else lacked.
2:05:04 Speaker 01 And he was a man of opportunity. As soon as he would see that
2:05:13 Speaker 01 a chance, an opportunity would open up, he would jump on it. And that's what he did, basically. As more the political space opened, the weaknesses of the Shah's government became more evident. His indecision became more evident. His lack of confidence became more evident. Khomeini managed to move further into the center of the movement because he was the only authority that had this network of support through the mosques, through the people who paid homage to him,
2:05:56 Speaker 01 who followed him, because there's a sense of following of the religious leader in Shizam. You are a follower of this authority, you're a follower of that authority. And he's basically created
2:06:11 Speaker 01 An environment in which people looked upon him as a kind of a messianic figure.
2:06:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:06:20 Speaker 01 That came to save Iran from what they considered at the time, the problems of dictatorship under the Shah.
2:06:32 Lex Fridman? So there's not a suspicion about Islamic law being the primary law of the land?
2:06:36 Speaker 01 Not at all. People had very little sense that what Islamic law is all about, because the secular education has left that into the old religious schools. This is not something that ordinary educated Iranian who goes to the universities is going to learn. Therefore, there is a sense of idealization, that there is something great there. That is good. And there were quite a number of intellectuals who also viewed this kind of an idea of, they would refer to as West toxication, that is, this civilization of the West that has brought with it
2:07:19 Speaker 01 all the modernity that we see around ourselves, has enormous sinister features into it. And it has taken away from us our authenticity. That was the thing, that there is something authentic that should be protected. And therefore, a man in that kind of a garb and appearance seemed as a source for return to this originality of their own culture, authenticity of their own culture. And he perfectly took advantage of that, that is Khomeini,
2:08:00 Speaker 01 took advantage of it and the circle around him, at the expense of everybody else, which he managed in the course of nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty nine, which he passed away, he died in the ten years during this period, managed to basically transform.
2:08:20 Speaker 01 The Iranian society to create institutions of the Islamic Republic
2:08:29 Speaker 01 and to acquire himself the position of the guardian jurist. That was something completely new, it didn't ever existed before. As a matter of fact, as you might know, the model of government that a religious establishment takes over the state is unprecedented throughout the course of Iranian history, throughout the course of the Islamic history, I would say. This is the first example, and probably the only example, of a regime that the religious establishment, that has always, in the course of Iranian history,
2:09:12 Speaker 01 ever since, I would say, probably at this 16th century, if not earlier, has been always separate from the state and always kind of collaborating with the state with a certain tensions in between the two of them. There were two, basically, as they would call themselves, the two pillars of stability in the society. That situation changed. For the first time, the religious establishment took over the power of the state. And that's at the core of what we see today as a major issue for Iranian society. Because these are basically that old balance
2:09:56 Speaker 01 between the religion and the state, which was a kind of a de facto separation of the authorities of the two, has been violated. And now you have in power a theocracy, in effect, which of course only in its appearance is theocracy. Deep down, it's a, in my opinion, it's a brutal fascist regime that stays in power, but it has the appearance of religion into it. So this is really the story of the revolution. And as a result of that, the Iranian middle class has greatly suffered. It's not without a reason that you see 4 million Iranians abroad.
2:10:42 Speaker 01 Because basically, the emergence of this new power gradually...
2:10:48 Speaker 01 Isolated or marginalized the secular middle class, who could not survive under that regime, and gradually moved out
2:11:02 Speaker 01 in the course of perhaps thirty, forty years up to now. Iran has the largest, I think I'm right to say so, has the largest brain drain in any country in the world according to its population.
2:11:16 Lex Fridman? So fascinating that, how much of a weird quirk of history is it that religion would take hold in a country? Like, does it have to do with the individual? It seems like if we reran the twentieth century a thousand times, we would get the seventy-nine revolution resulting in Islamic law like less than, you know, one percent of the time, it feels like. Or no, which percentage would you put?
2:11:53 Speaker 01 Well, I think it has something to do with the very complex nature of how Iran evolved over a long period of time, since the sixteenth century. That's why, if I would for a moment talk about what I have written, I've written a book that's called Iran: A Modern History, and it does not start in the twentieth century. It starts in the sixteenth century.
2:12:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:12:22 Speaker 01 Because that's what I have argued, that this complex process that at the end of the day resulted in what we see around us today is something that was in making for a very long time.
2:12:35 Lex Fridman? And religion was a big part of it.
2:12:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:12:37 Lex Fridman? She and the Messiah complex.
2:12:41 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
2:12:42 Lex Fridman? The longing for this great vision of a great nation that somehow is
2:12:49 Lex Fridman? The sublime nation that can only be fully sublime through religion.
2:12:57 Speaker 01 Or at the time, it was thought that is true religion. Ever since then, it's disillusionment with that image.
2:13:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:13:06 Speaker 01 Or at least a process of disillusionment. The outcome of it is what we see today. Basically, that process of forty years is a process of readjusting to the realities of the world. That that great moment of romantic success of a revolution, like most revolutions, of course, that is going to change Iran and bring this kind of a moment of greatness, led into this great disappointment. It's a movement of the great disappointment in a sense. Like most messianic movements, by the way, messianic movements in general are always leading into great disappointments. But what I have here that perhaps should be added to it,
2:13:51 Speaker 01 that, yes, it was a peculiarity of Iran as a society that had to experience this eventual encounter between religion and state. That's something to do with the nature of Shizam. That's just one point that should be pointed out. Most of Sunni Islam don't have that kind of, I say most because there is something there. But Sunni Islam in general does not have that kind of an aspiration for the coming of a messianic leader.
2:14:32 Speaker 01 Shizam does. Shizam in its very shaping, particularly the way that it was set up in Iran. Was a religion that has always this element of expectation to it for the coming of this messianic leader. Of course, I mean, between parentheses, all societies look for messianic leaders and just look around us.
2:15:02 Lex Fridman? But some societies more than others. There's certain culture, it might have to do with the the romantic poetry that we mentioned over there. I mean, surely, I mean, not to draw too many parallels, but with the Soviet Union, there is romanticism too. I mean, I don't know, there, there, it, it does maybe idealism.
2:15:24 Speaker 01 A sense of a savior.
2:15:26 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:15:26 Speaker 01 Who would, who would bring you out of the misery that you are in. And, and always looking for a, for a third party to solve your issues. That's why probably this movement has a particular significance because it probably doesn't look for a Messiah. Although I was talking to my brother, who is a historian also. And he was saying perhaps the Messiah of this movement is that Mahsa Amini, the 22 year old girl that was killed. It's a martyred Messiah who is now leading a movement which
2:16:11 Speaker 01 no longer has that charismatic leadership with it. But yes, I would say that Iran has been the birthplace, if I might say that, of messianic aspirations. Going back to ancient Zoroastrianism, which is the really the whole system that you see in major religions, or at least best so-called Western religions. It's the Abrahamic religions is parallel or perhaps influenced by Zoroastrianism in which there is an idea of this world and the other world, there is a hereafter.
2:16:55 Speaker 01 There is an idea of a judgment at the end of the time.
2:17:00 Speaker 01 And there is a concept that there is a moment of justice that is going to come with the rise of a religious or a charismatic figure. So it's a very old phenomenon in Iran, very old. And it's time and again repeated itself in the course of its history, but never as powerfully as it happened in 1979 and never in the form of authority from within the religious establishment. It was always the dissent movements that were kind of antinomian, they were against the authority of the religious establishment. That changed in the 20th century.
2:17:43 Lex Fridman? But the revolution 1979, that change is still with us today. What, can we just linger on, are there some practical games of power that occurred, you know, in the way that Stalin took power and held power in the early days? Is there something like this in terms of the establishment of the Revolutionary Guard and all those kinds of stuff?
2:18:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:18:11 Lex Fridman? So it's the messianic figure that has some support from the people, but does he have to crush his enemies in competition?
2:18:19 Speaker 01 It certainly did, probably not, certainly not as brutal in terms of the victims as you would see in Soviet Union under Stalin, who the bloodshed or the destruction of the population was far greater than what you would find in Iran of the Islamic Republic. It's uncomfortable. Perhaps I would find a greater parallel with Mahzidung and particularly because China has a very strong messianic tradition since the ancient times.
2:19:01 Speaker 01 So they have something, and Mao appeared as a kind of a messianic figure.
2:19:07 Speaker 01 There I can see there is a parallel. But also, you can see with any other authoritarian regime with the messianic fear at the head of it, that it destroys all the other forces. So during the course of the first 10 years of the Islamic Revolution, it destroyed the liberal nationalist secular. It destroyed the guerrilla movements, some of them Islamic, some of them Marxist, who turned into political parties or tendencies. In the course of the post-revolution 1979, they were completely destroyed. And in a very brutal fashion.
2:19:51 Speaker 01 And their opposition, even within the religious establishment, because it wasn't a uniform, there were many different tendencies. Those that were opposed to the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini, or now Imam Khomeini, meaning almost a sacred religious figure above the level of a religious authority. He's a saint kind of a figure. It's Shizam has this idea of imams. There were 11 of them, the 12th is hidden and would come back at the end of the time, this messianic figure.
2:20:32 Speaker 01 So the title that was always used for them only, in Shizam, never used for any other person. He is the first person in the revolution of 1979, first referred as Deputy of Imam, but the term deputy gradually disappeared and he became Imam Khomeini. That's his official title.
2:20:56 Lex Fridman? I love human beings so much. It's so beautiful. These titles that we give each other, it's marvelous to observe.
2:21:06 Speaker 01 You love it because you haven't been under that system.
2:21:08 Lex Fridman? No, I love it in a way, I love it in a very dark humor kind of way. It caricatures itself. It's almost funny in its absurdity, if not for the evil that it has led to in human history.
2:21:27 Speaker 01 But also the fact that it's a man, it's in fact fulfillment in a kind of completely... Um, unintended fashion is a fulfillment of that idea of a Messiah that they've been fighting for. This Imam, which is in a hide for a thousand years, is here and not here. And therefore, Khomeini would have, in effect, fulfilled those anticipations. But beyond that, I just give you one example. I know that you may have other concerns. But when I say elimination, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, by the direct order of
2:22:08 Speaker 01 Ayatollah Khomeini, a fatwa that he wrote, a group of prisoners who belonged to a variety of political parties, the left, religious left, majority of them, the left and the Marxist left and the religious left. In a matter of a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, I'm not actually quite sure about the time span, in a series of, these were people who have already been tried and they were given sentences.
2:22:48 Speaker 01 They were brought back before the summary trials of three judges, or more, three, four of them. One of them is now the new president of the Islamic Republic, Raissi. And they were given a quick summary sentences, which meant execution. So something between probably six to eight thousand were executed in a matter of a month or two months, something like that, mostly in Tehran, but also in provinces.
2:23:28 Speaker 01 And that remained an extraordinary trauma for the families, for those who had these kids in, they're all young, all young.
2:23:40 Speaker 01 So this remains very much a kind of a original sin of the Islamic Republic that cannot get rid of. And it's in people's memories, they didn't allow them, even the families, to go and mourn their dead in an official cemetery which they created for them. Now, the latest thing is that they put a huge concrete wall around it so nobody would be able to get into it. So this is all part of this extraordinary level of level of atrocity, brutality,
2:24:23 Speaker 01 that you see that the regime claimed that it comes with the morality of religion and Islam to bring back the justice and be more,
2:24:38 Speaker 01 in a sense, kind to people, ended up with what it is in the memory of many of the people in Iran.
2:24:46 Lex Fridman? So developing these fascistic tendencies.
2:24:48 Speaker 01 Very much so. Destroying minorities, Bahays one of them. Hundreds of Bahays were, without any reason, without any involvement, were picked up and executed. Their properties were taken over, their rights were taken away from them. Even up to this day, this is the largest, by the way, religious minority in Iran. So you would see that in many areas, this is a axe very much as an beyond authoritarian. It's a kind of really a fascistic regime.
2:25:25 Lex Fridman? So how many held power for 10 years?
2:25:31 Lex Fridman? And then took power the next supreme
2:25:35 Speaker 01 Correct.
2:25:36 Lex Fridman? leader, who is still the leader today for over thirty years. Who is he?
2:25:41 Speaker 01 Well, he was one of the, this is Ali Khamenei.
2:25:46 Lex Fridman? Ayatollah.
2:25:47 Speaker 01 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
2:25:48 Lex Fridman? Imam one day, perhaps?
2:25:49 Speaker 01 No, well, they hesitated to use the term Imam for him. But in any other respect, he was given all of that adulation.
2:26:00 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:26:00 Speaker 01 That they did to Khamenei. He is the guardian jurist. That's what's important. Because the guardian jurist in the constitution of the Islamic Republic is an authority that is above the state. He is not elected, quote unquote, because this is a divine authority. Although he's been designated by the group of the Taliban, Mullahs, like himself. And he has the full power over all
2:26:36 Speaker 01 institutions of the state. The army, the media, the economy, every aspect of it. He acts like a Shah. He acts like this authoritarian authority.
2:26:52 Lex Fridman? Did that gradually develop, or was that very early on?
2:26:56 Speaker 01 Well, that's part of the constitution of the Islamic Republic. The first constitution,
2:27:04 Speaker 01 the first draft of the constitution did not have the authority of the guardian jurist. But then it was added by Khamenei and his supporters.
2:27:15 Lex Fridman? Are there actually in the constitution any limits to his power?
2:27:20 Speaker 01 Yes, there is a council of the experts, so to say, that would
2:27:29 Speaker 01 remove him from power, I think theoretically. But there is so much restrictions to that, that I don't think it would have ever happened in reality, in his case, at least.
2:27:41 Lex Fridman? But in terms of executive, to make decisions and all that kind of stuff, does he need to check with anybody?
2:27:47 Speaker 01 No.
2:27:49 Lex Fridman? Oh, boy.
2:27:49 Speaker 01 He does check with his own advisers, but he doesn't have any constitutional obligation to check on the decisions that he's making.
2:28:05 Lex Fridman? So that's the Supreme Leader, but there's been presidents.
2:28:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:28:10 Lex Fridman? And what's the role of the president?
2:28:12 Speaker 01 The president, in a sense, is the executive power on the Islamic Republic. There are three heads of powers.
2:28:26 Speaker 01 There is the president that presumably has the executive power. There is the head of the judiciary, and there is the head of the Speaker of the Parliament, Majlis, Islamic Majlis, which is the legislative. So there's a legislative, judiciary, and executive. Raissi, who is now the president, is the head of the executive. Above them is the Supreme Leader or the guardian jurist.
2:29:06 Lex Fridman? Can you give me some insight? Because I especially, I'm not exactly sure why, but President Ahmadinejad is somebody I'm, as an American, really familiar with. Why is that exactly? But why was a president the public-facing person to the world versus the Supreme Leader? Is that just an accident of a particular humans involved? Or is this by design?
2:29:38 Speaker 01 No, because the Supreme Leader tries to keep himself out of issues of everyday politics, supposedly.
2:29:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:29:47 Speaker 01 But therefore, he is not coming to the United Nations to give a speech during the session. But Mr. Ahmadinejad, who at the time was the president,
2:30:01 Speaker 01 would come and make outrageous statements. That's why you probably know something about him.
2:30:08 Lex Fridman? So all of them make public statements, but he had a proclivity for outrageous statements?
2:30:14 Speaker 01 He does all kinds of things, he makes all kinds of statements, but he is somewhat above the everyday politics in theory. But of course, he's pulling all the strings without doubt in every respect. And it seems that you were asked, I thought you were going to ask me this question. Almost without an exception, since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979, up to the last of the presidents of the Islamic Republic, Rouhani, before the guy that is last year or a year and a half ago,
2:30:56 Speaker 01 was in a phony election, got into the position of the president. All of them, there's a long list, all of them eventually fell out with the regime. So there is no president, except perhaps to some extent Rouhani, but we'll wait and see what's going to happen to him. But prior to him, all of them, including Ahmadinejad, fell out with the regime, with the current regime in Iraq.
2:31:29 Lex Fridman? Who's Rouhani? He was officially president for eight years.
2:31:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, prior to Raisi.
2:31:34 Lex Fridman? Ibrahim Raisi, the 221, what you're saying is a phony election.
2:31:39 Speaker 01 Yes, it's a phony election.
2:31:40 Lex Fridman? What happened? What's interesting about what happened?
2:31:43 Speaker 01 Because the process of actually candidacy for presidency is completely controlled by a council that is under the control of the supreme leader. So they have to approve who is going to be the candidate. So not everybody can enter and say, I would like to be a candidate.
2:32:11 Lex Fridman? So did Rouhani fall out of favor? You're saying there's some...
2:32:15 Speaker 01 Well, he is kind of out of favor now because he was more moderate than this most recent regime. But the point is that... If you look, this is something almost institutional, constitutional to the regime. This is a regime that rejects all of the executive powers. Because it's because the division between the supreme authority, as this place of a supreme authority, versus the presidency has problematic.
2:32:53 Speaker 01 It is as if there would be a supreme leader in the United States above all these three sources of power. I mean, that's the kind of a view that we can see in today's Iran. And of course, he is at the focus of all the criticism that he receives from the demonstrators in today's Iran.
2:33:18 Lex Fridman? So on top of all this, recently and throughout the last several years, US and Iran are in the midst of nuclear deal negotiations. This is another part of the story of Iran is the development of nuclear weapons, the nuclear program. They're looking to restore the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA. What is the history, the present and the future of these negotiations over nuclear weapons? What is interesting to you in this full context from the 16th century of the messianic, yeah,
2:34:02 Lex Fridman? journey? What's interesting to you here?
2:34:05 Speaker 01 You can argue that for a long time, even under the Shah, but much more expressly and decisively, under the Islamic Republic, there was a determination to have a nuclear
2:34:25 Speaker 01 Power or nuclear weapon, in a sense. I think the bottom line of all the negotiations, everything else, is that Iran of the Islamic Republic had the tendency of having its own nuclear weapon. The reason for that is that Iran was subject of nearly nine years, eight and a half years of Iran-Iraq war, when not only Iran faced an aggressor, Iraq, that actually attacked Iran at a very critical time, at the very beginning of the Iranian revolution.
2:35:07 Speaker 01 But the fact that Iran felt kind of helpless in the course of this war and has to make great sacrifices, actually, which supported the Islamic regime, consolidated the Islamic regime because of this war. And most of the time, the support of the United States was behind Iraq vis a vis Iran. And Iran felt that it's been isolated and has to protect itself. So there is some argument for having a nuclear capabilities.
2:35:52 Speaker 01 But in reality, this has resulted in a completely mindless, crazy, wasteful attempt on the side of the Iranian regime to try to develop a nuclear power. And therefore, the rest of the world, particularly in this region, were very worried that if Iran would get access to a nuclear weapon, then the entire region of the Persian Gulf might, particularly Saudi Arabia, possibly Turkey,
2:36:30 Speaker 01 possibly Egypt, all of them may require, may, may demand to have also nuclear weapon, given the fact that Pakistan and India has already have it. So there was a determined attempt, as you might know, on the side of the Western communities or now gradually world communities to try to, as much as possible, to control Iran from getting access to a nuclear capability or actually limit Iran's nuclear capabilities to what was defined usually in a euphemism as a peaceful fashion. Okay.
2:37:12 Speaker 01 That being said, there was also Israel,
2:37:18 Speaker 01 which viewed the Islamic Republic as a arch-enemy. And some of it might be due to the Israelis' own exaggeration of Iran's threat. And some of it is because Iran has developed a fairly strong military, as we see today. And as such, this attempt to try to prevent Iran from ever getting access to a nuclear weapon, which resulted, as you might know, in these massive sanctions that were imposed upon Iran
2:38:03 Speaker 01 ever since the beginning of the revolution in 1979 and of course, more intensively since 2015, 2016, even prior to that, probably a little bit earlier.
2:38:17 Speaker 01 This agreement, the nuclear agreement, was supposed to control or monitor Iranian nuclear industry or nuclear setup
2:38:33 Speaker 01 in exchange for removing the sanctions.
2:38:37 Speaker 01 But this never worked, as a matter of fact, in a very successful, satisfactory way for the Iranians or for the Americans, particularly under Trump administration, which I think foolishly decided to scrap the agreement that was reached under President Obama. Like many other policies that was implemented under Trump administration, this created a major problem. That is, how to, under Biden, how to try to come up with a new nuclear agreement with Iran.
2:39:22 Speaker 01 In this process, since 2016, where the United States withdrew from the agreement, Iran felt comfortable to try to go and do whatever they want without any kind of monitor, being monitored by the international community. And that's the situation now. We don't know whether Iran is really sincere under the present regime to negotiate a deal. We don't know that the United States is willing to do so.
2:40:00 Speaker 01 And it seems that now, what is happening in terms of the protests in the Iranian streets makes it even harder in a public eye to try to negotiate a deal with Iran. Because that means, in the minds of many, and with some justification, that if the nuclear agreement would result in the removal of many of these sanctions, millions, billions,
2:40:40 Speaker 01 as the result of the removal of the sanctions and Iran's ability to sell its oil in the international market without any restrictions.
2:40:51 Speaker 01 Means that the Iranian government is going to become even more powerful, more financially secure in order to suppress its own people. So that's the agreement that goes against coming to terms with Iran. But the problem is that there is no clear alternative, even I'm not particularly personally favorable for this agreement to be ratified. But the alternative is very difficult. There's no way to try to see what can be done.
2:41:33 Lex Fridman? Geopolitics where every alternative is terrible. Let me ask you about one of the most complex geopolitical situations in history.
2:41:48 Lex Fridman? One aspect of it is the Cold War between Iran and Israel. The bigger picture of it is sometimes referred to as Israel-Palestine conflict.
2:42:00 Lex Fridman? What are all the parties, nations involved? What are the interests that are involved? What's the rhetoric?
2:42:11 Lex Fridman? Can you understand, make the case for each side of this conflict?
2:42:18 Speaker 01 You're opening a new can of worms that it takes another three hours of conversation.
2:42:25 Lex Fridman? Just three hours?
2:42:27 Speaker 01 At least. What I can tell you is this.
2:42:33 Speaker 01 Iran prior to 1979 viewed itself under the Shah as a kind of a...
2:42:43 Speaker 01 If not supporter of Israel, was in very good terms with Israel. They had an embassy in Iran, or unofficial embassy in Iran. They had certain projects that helping with the agriculture and so forth in Iran. But since 1979, that completely reversed. Part of it is that the issue of the Palestinian plight remained very much at the heart of the revolutionary Iranians who would see that a part of the United States is to support, part of the United States guilt,
2:43:27 Speaker 01 sin, is to support Israel vis a vis it's very suppressive, a very oppressive treatment of the Palestinians, completely illegal taking over of the territories which is not theirs since 1967. And therefore, it is upon the Iranian regime, Iranian Islamic Republic, to support the cause of the Palestinians. This came about at the time when
2:44:08 Speaker 01 the rest of the support for the Palestinians, including Arab nationalism, basically reached a stage of bankruptcy. I mean, much of the regimes of the Arab world either are now coming to terms with Israel or in one way or another, because of their own contingencies, because of their own concerns and interests, are willy-nilly accepting Israel in the region. Now, that old task of rhetorically supporting the Palestinians falls upon the Islamic Republic
2:44:50 Speaker 01 that sees itself as the champion of the Palestinians now. We doubt, as a matter of fact, having either the support of the Iranian people behind him. If you ask, if tomorrow there would be a poll or a referendum, I would doubt that...
2:45:08 Speaker 01 Eighty percent of the Iranian people would approve of the policies of the Islamic Republic vis a vis the issue of Palestine. Nor the Palestinians themselves, because the Islamic Republic is only supporting those factions within the Palestinian movement which are Islamic, quote unquote. And even within that, there is problems with Hamas, for instance. But nevertheless, it's for the Islamic Republic some kind of a propaganda tool to be able to use it for its own sake and claim that we are the champions of the Palestinian people.
2:45:53 Speaker 01 Whether they have a solution, if you look at their rhetoric, if you listen to their rhetoric, it's the destruction of the State of Israel. And that, it seems to me, creates a certain anxiety in the minds of the Israelis, Israeli population and Israeli government, particularly those who are now in power, Netanyahu, the Likud, and more kind of a right-wing politics of, policy of today's Israel.
2:46:34 Speaker 01 That being said, I think also the Israelis try to get an extra mileage out of threat of Iran, quote unquote, in order to present themselves a rightful to, for terms of security and whatever else. The way that they are treating the Palestinians, which I think is extremely unjust. I think it's extremely unwise for Israel to carry on with these policies, as they did since sixty-seven at least, and not to try to come to terms with it. Of course, there are huge amount of, I'm not denying that at all,
2:47:19 Speaker 01 the huge amount of failures, mistakes.
2:47:27 Speaker 01 And stupidity on the side of the Palestinian leadership in various stages, not to try to make a deal or try to come to terms in some fashion. But it's a very complex picture and it's rather unfair to the Palestinians to accuse them for not coming to terms with Israel under a very uneven circumstances, when they are not in a position to try to make a fair deal in terms of the territories or in terms of their security in future vis a vis Israel.
2:48:07 Lex Fridman? So I think there's, as you probably know, quite a lot of people that would have a different perspective than you just stated in terms of,
2:48:18 Lex Fridman? you know, taking the perspective of Israel in characterizing the situation. Can you still mend their side? Can you still mend Israel's side? That they're trying to be a sovereign nation, trying to protect themselves against threats, ultimately wanting to create a place of safety, a place where people can pursue all the things that you want to pursue in life, including foremost happiness.
2:48:50 Speaker 01 I tend to agree with you. And I have all the respect for the fact that Israel would like to create security and happiness for its own people. But there are two arguments. One is a moral argument. To my mind, as a historian,
2:49:10 Speaker 01 Jews across around the world, for all through their history, suffered. And this is a history of suffering. It's a history, memory of suffering. And I find it enormously difficult to believe that a nation that is the product of so much
2:49:31 Speaker 01 sacrifice, suffering, loss of life,
2:49:37 Speaker 01 and variety of Holocaust above all, would find itself in a position not to give the proper justice to a people who could be their neighbors.
2:49:52 Speaker 01 And that is a moral argument which I cannot believe under any circumstances can be accepted. Second, in real terms, what do you want to, you want to commit a genocide? Do you have a population there? That you have to come to terms with it? And you cannot just postpone as they did. Since sixty seven, they are postponing and hoping that it goes away somehow. I don't think it's going to go away. And, and it's going to get worse rather than better.
2:50:31 Lex Fridman? It's a long nuanced discussion and I look forward to having it. So we'll just leave it there for the moment. But it is a stressful place in the world where the rhetoric is existential. Where Iran makes claims that it wants to wipe a country off the face of the earth. It's just the level of, of intensity of rhetoric is unlike anywhere else in the world.
2:51:06 Speaker 01 And extremely dangerous.
2:51:08 Lex Fridman? And in, in both directions. So one, the real danger of the rhetoric actually being acted upon. And then the extreme political parties using the rhetoric to justify even a greater escalation. So if Iran is saying that this is saying that they're wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, that justifies any response.
2:51:41 Speaker 01 On the other side.
2:51:42 Lex Fridman? On the other side.
2:51:43 Speaker 01 Of course, I tend to agree with you fully. And unfortunately, this is a very critical situation that this region is facing Iran in particular. I would say that I hope that in the minds of the people of Israel.
2:52:04 Speaker 01 There is enough or common sense to realize that probably escalation on the Israeli side is not in the favor of anybody. And try to let the Iranians to go on with their empty rhetoric as they do so far. But at the same time, I cannot deny the fact that, you know, there is a danger on the side of this regime. And what it says, it cannot be denied, nobody can justify that.
2:52:42 Speaker 01 Particularly because the Iranian population is not behind this regime. Certainly in the case of the Palestinians. Or for that matter, it's not Palestine. It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Lebanon with Hezbollah. It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Syria with Bashar Assad. Its involvement in other parts of the world, perhaps even Yemen. That all of them creates extraterritorial responsibilities or interventions, unnecessary interventions,
2:53:22 Speaker 01 that ultimately is not in favor of best interests of the Iranian people or Iran as a country. Iran has never been involved in this kind of politics before of the Islamic Republic. So in a sense, the Iranian regime, it seems to me, by going to the extreme, try to create for itself a space that it did not have or did not deserve to have within the politics of the region. It's a, so in other words, that has become part of the tool,
2:54:03 Speaker 01 a kind of an instrument for, if you like to call it, some kind of an expansionism of the regime. In parts of the world where it can see there is a possibility for its presence, for its expansion. Of course, historically speaking, Iran, ever since 15th century, I think that's the earliest example I can see.
2:54:32 Speaker 01 In early mother times, has always a tendency of moving in the direction of not only what is today the state of Iraq, but further into the eastern coast of Mediterranean. So that's a long-term ambition that has been in the cards as far as Iran as a strategic unit is concerned. But by no means justified and by no means could be a reasonable, could be a sane policy of a nation-state as today's Iran.
2:55:09 Speaker 01 But the second point is that also regimes are always victims of their own rhetoric. So it's, once you keep repeating something, then you become more and more committed to it. And it cannot remain any more in the level of a rhetoric. You have to do something about it. So it's a compelling pressure to try to to materialize what you've been saying in your rhetoric. And that is even extremely more dangerous as far as Iran is concerned.
2:55:53 Speaker 01 And it brings it to some unholy alliances that today we are witnessing Iran is getting involved. Even more dangerous than this rhetoric in terms of the visit of Israel is its involvement with Russia and to some extent with China, which we can talk about.
2:56:18 Lex Fridman? What do you think about the meeting between Hamani and Vladimir Putin in July? What's that alliance? What's that partnership? Is it surface-level geopolitics or is there a deep-growing connection?
2:56:34 Speaker 01 I cannot see the difference between geopolitics and these deep connections. I see this one and the same. Why? Because I think the experience of forty years of distancing from the West in terms of the Islamic Republic.
2:56:54 Speaker 01 And the fact that there is a shelf life to imperial presence.
2:57:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:57:02 Speaker 01 For any empire, anywhere in the world. So after the terrible experience of the United States in Iraq and in Afghanistan, pretty much like the British Empire, that after the Suez Experience in fifty-six, decided to withdraw from east of Suez.
2:57:32 Speaker 01 Maybe there is a moment here that we are witnessing, or it may come, that a great power like the United States sees in its benefits not to get too much involved into nitty-gritty things in other parts of the world, that it's not its immediate concern. And I think that is part of the reason, not the entire reason. Part of the reason why we see the emergence of a new geopolitical environment in this part of the world, of which China, Russia, possibly Iran, possibly Turkey,
2:58:16 Speaker 01 possibly both of them, are going to be part.
2:58:21 Speaker 01 Perhaps Saudis also, but I doubt that the Saudis, under the present circumstances, although we witnessed some remarkable issue in the course of the past few weeks, where the Saudis giving assurances to American administration and then shifting and getting along with Putin. In terms of the oil production, I think it's more than that even. And it's not only them, but also the Emirates are doing the same thing. So what does that just tell us?
2:58:53 Lex Fridman? And that's another. Many hour conversation about the oil industry in Iran and the whole region.
2:59:01 Speaker 01 In emerging this kind of a world, which was perhaps even ten years ago unimaginable. That you see now a great power, China, that it's going to remain, from what we see around us, as a great power. And Russia, adventurous, foolish, but nevertheless would remain criminal, I would say, as far as the its behavior in Ukraine. But actually, it's a rogue nation that attracts another rogue nation.
2:59:42 Speaker 01 So Iran finds itself now in a greater place of security, in alliance with Russia, in the hope that this would give Iran a greater security in this part of the world. Whether this is realistic or illusion, I think remains to be seen. I think Iran-China relation makes more sense.
3:00:13 Speaker 01 Although, if you ask ordinary Iranians, they don't like it. They would tell, why should we be tied up with China as the only trade party with America because of the foolish isolations that you have created for us? Because of all the sanctions that you have created for us, the Islamic Republic. So, in a sense, it's a very difficult question to answer. Probably Iranians also like to be more on the other camp. But what happens is that, in real term, what surprises me most is not this alliance with China,
3:00:58 Speaker 01 but it's kind of a becoming a lackey or subservient to Putin's regime in Russia.
3:01:10 Speaker 01 Since if you look at it, Iran, ever since at least the 19th century, not going further back, the beginning of the 19th century, always viewed Russia as the greatest threat strategically, because it was sitting right at the top of Iran.
3:01:32 Speaker 01 It was infinitely more powerful than Iran has ever been.
3:01:40 Speaker 01 And Iran fought two rounds of war at the beginning of the century, lost the entire Caucasus to Russia, and learned its lesson,
3:01:52 Speaker 01 that you have to be mindful of Russia, and you have to keep it as an arm's length. And that's what was Iran's policies throughout the course of the 20th century, 19th and 20th century, up to what we see now around us, which is a very strange situation.
3:02:17 Speaker 01 Whether the balance has changed in terms of if Russia is purchasing weapons from Iran, which was unheard of, it means that there is a new balance is emerging, a new relationship is emerging.
3:02:41 Speaker 01 Perhaps remains to be seen. But if you look at the historical precedence, it would have been enormously unwise to be an ally of Russia, given its long history of aggression in Iran. See, Russians, part of the reason why actually Iran allied itself with British Empire was the fact that it was so much afraid of the Russian expansion.
3:03:16 Speaker 01 And as such, I don't know what's going to be the future of this relationship.
3:03:22 Lex Fridman? There is a big disconnect between governments and the people. And I think ultimately, I have faith that there's a love across the different cultures, across the different religions amongst the people. And the governments are the source of the division and the conflict and the wars and all the geopolitics that is in part grounded in the battle for resources and all that kind of stuff. Nevertheless, this is the world we live in. So you looked at the modern history of Iran, the past few centuries. If you look into the future of this region. Now, you kind of implied that historian has a bit of a cynical view
3:04:06 Lex Fridman? of protests and things like this that are fueled, at least in the minds of young people, with hope. If you were to, just for a while, have a bit of hope in your heart and your mind, what is a hopeful future for the next 10, 20, 30 years of Iran?
3:04:25 Speaker 01 I'm not cynical.
3:04:26 Lex Fridman? Yes.
3:04:27 Speaker 01 I'm trying to be realistic. And I actually may be critical, but I have great hopes
3:04:35 Speaker 01 in Iran's future for a variety of reasons. I actually did write an article, only if the last version of it is going to go out today,
3:04:47 Speaker 01 in which the title of it is "The Time of Fear and Women of Hope", which in a sense is this whole coverage about what this movement means that we see today. It may fizzle in a few weeks' time, or it may just go on and create a new dynamics in Iranian society that would hopefully result in a peaceful process of greater accommodation and the greater tolerance within the Iranian society and with the outside world.
3:05:30 Speaker 01 And I think majority of the Iranian people don't want tension, don't want confrontation, don't want crisis.
3:05:43 Speaker 01 They, if forty years they have suffered from a regime that have dictated an ideology that it's
3:05:54 Speaker 01 regressive and impractical, they want to go back to a life in which they don't they don't really create trouble for their neighbors or for the world.
3:06:08 Speaker 01 And therefore, I would see a better future for Iran. That's for one reason. Strategically or geopolitically, maybe in Iran's advantage, in a peaceful fashion, to negotiate, as it's the fate of all the nations, rather than commit itself or sworn to a particular course of policy. So there's a give and take, as the nature of politics is art of possible, as it's been said. So probably Iran is going to be, hopefully, move in that direction.
3:06:51 Speaker 01 I think there is a generational thing, that's the third reason. No matter how much the Islamic Republic tried to Islamicize the Iranian society in its own image of kind of radical ideological indoctrination, it has failed.
3:07:17 Speaker 01 It has failed up to what we see today in the Iranian streets. And the Iranian population said no to it. And I think if there would have been, and I very much hope there will be, a possibility for a more open environment, more open space, where they would be able to speak their views out.
3:07:44 Speaker 01 Iranians are not on the side of moving in the extreme directions. They are in the side of greater accommodation and the greater interest in the outside world. And if you look at every aspect of today's, beside the government, every aspect of life in today's Iran, we can see that. From the way that people dress.
3:08:12 Speaker 01 To the way that they try to live their lives, to the way that they're educating themselves or educated in the institutions, that you see a desire and intention to move forward. And I'm optimistic.
3:08:29 Lex Fridman? Well, in that struggle for freedom, like I told you offline, one of my close childhood friends is Iranian. Just a beautiful person, his family is a wonderful family. On a personal level is one of the deeper windows into the Iranian spirit and soul that I've gotten a chance to witness, so I really appreciate it. But in the recent times, I've gotten to hear from a lot of people that are currently living in Iran, that are currently have that burning hope for the future of the country. And so my love goes out to them in the struggle for freedom.
3:09:04 Speaker 01 That's so nice of you to say so. And I very much hope so. There are moments of despair and there are moments that you would think that there is no hope. And but then again, something triggers and you see 100,000 people in the streets of Berlin that are hoping for a better future for Iran. And I very much hope it eventually emerges. Even I'm hoping at the same time, there's not going to be a very strong leadership, as it was the case in the past.
3:09:44 Lex Fridman? We started with hope, we ended with hope. This was a real honor. This is an incredible conversation. Thank you for giving such a deep and wide story of this great nation, one of the great nations in history.
3:10:01 Speaker 01 Well, that's very kind of you to say so.
3:10:03 Lex Fridman? And thank you for sitting down today.
3:10:05 Speaker 01 Well, and a history that's
3:10:08 Speaker 01 As I've said in the start of my book, I say it's the history of a nation which has learned a huge amount from the outside world by force of its geography. It was always located somewhere that people would invade.
3:10:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:10:23 Speaker 01 Or come for trade or something happened to it that this diffused culture continued to. And they were not afraid of learning or adopting as they do right now today. This is a very different society.
3:10:40 Lex Fridman? Never a boring moment in its history, as you write about. Thank you so much. This is awesome.
3:10:46 Speaker 01 Thank you.
3:10:47 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Abba Samana. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with a few words from Martin Luther King Jr. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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