A Very Brief History of Modern Iran

For those who wish to understand how our histories – you and mine – are intertwined

Iran has been struggling for sovereignty and democracy for over 100 years. This struggle has been not just for freedom from tyrants at home but mostly from foreign powers colonising our land. I wrote simple and very brief history of Iran’s modern struggle for self determination, democracy and sovereignty.

In 1905 the first struggle for democracy began - the Constitutional Revolution sought to establish a constitutional system to bring power to the people. We established our parliament then (majlis). It was crushed in 1911 by Imperial Russia and Britain.

Iran was the first country in the region to implement such nascent democratic processes.

But this was not in the interests of Russia and Britain who were engaged in the Great Game and divided Iran into two spheres of influence – Russia taking the north while Britain took the south of Iran

A British man called William KNox D’Arcy, fresh from prospecting successfully for gold in Australia, got the concession to drill for oil in Khuzestan (the region of my birth) and oil was struck in 1908. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed.

I would say oil has been our curse, but the history of British interference in Iran sadly goes way back – for example you can look up the Tobacco Protests of 1890s. The colonialist playbook – from which was birthed Capitalism – precedes oil by centuries. Do read William Dalrymple’s excellent book The Anarchy: the Relentless Rise of the East Indi Company is a well-written and entertaining way to learn this history.

In 1914 on the eve of WWl, a certain Winston Churchill persuaded the British government to buy a majority share in the Company; Iranian oil had become crucial to them in 1912 when the Royal Navy converted all its ships from coal- to oil-fired engines.

Great Britain took 84 % of the profits of Iranian oil.

Stop and read that again. Yes 84%. And by the time Europe was rumbling towards war, profits from the nascent oil industry were already clinking in British coffers.

When WWl broke out, Iran announced neutrality, but regardless Russia occupied the north of the country, while the British added the oil fields of Khuzestan to their patch. The land was riven by fighting and famine.

Having survived the battle of the Great Powers in their land, the Iranian people were now starving to death or falling to typhus and the influenza epidemic

In 1925 an illiterate army officer was put on the throne of Iran, ousting the Qatar Dynasty. He was picked from Iran’s Cossack regiment by Britain, groomed by Britain and then put on the throne. He called himsel Reza Shah Pahlavi and he was a British puppet.

(This illiterate Reza Pahlavi chose that surname – possibly because Pahlavi is the name of an ancient Persian language and he sought to connect himself with our ancient past. He is the grandfather of the clown who calls himself crown prince and has zero legitimacy. There is no bloodline, the whole sorry ‘dynasty’ has only ever been puppets of foreign powers. Just in case you were under the misunderstandings that the Pahlavi ‘dynasty’ had any kind of blood line or other sort of legitimacy.)

Iran declared neutrality in WWII but was invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union and Britain from 1941 until 1946. My father as a boy in Iranian Kurdistan watched the Russian tanks roll over our mountains.

Britain and the Soviets removed Reza Shah from power in 1941 (being a foreign puppet is a dangerous game, Clown Prince please note) and when they eventually deigned to leave our devastated land in 1946, they put his Swiss-educated spineless son Mohammed Reza on The Peacock Throne of Iran. All the better for the imperial powers controlling him.

In 1951, Iran's popular democratically elected prime minister, Mossadegh, nationalised Iran’s oil industry.

In 1950 alone, Britain's profits from our oil just for that year were more than Iran had made in the previous half century.

Read that again.

(Hey lovely Brits, ever wondered what made your country ‘great’? What won you the war? What paid for the establishment of your NHS and welfare state?

Yep, profits from Iranian oil – as well as wealth from India and Ceylon etc. While my people were starving under British and Russian occupation.)

“The moral aspect of oil nationalisation is more important than its economic aspect,” said Mossadegh. Iran became the first in the world to take back its own resources from foreign powers. The British-controlled Shah ran away in 1951.

Mossadegh was a national hero. He was even named as TIME magazine’s Man of the Year.

In 1953, the newly formed CIA and Britain’s MI6 fomented a coup, removed Mossadegh from power and put the foreign-controlled Shah (who had fled the country) back on the throne.

(Go back and read that again. Yep, USA and Britain removed our democratically elected prime minister just because he wanted Iran to have control of its own oil. Reflect for a moment.

Still think these countries stand for freedom and democracy?)

This coup was the template for what the US government would order all over the world for the next decades: squashing democracy and subjecting people to brutal dictators... in the name of democracy.

The American era in Iran had now begun, and the Shah continually passed laws that meant that Americans in Iran could commit even murder without being held in any way accountable.

The 1979 revolution is too complex to unpack here, but please first know that it was NOT Islamic in nature. It was about sovereignty from foreign powers. It was about self-determination. It is more properly called the Anti-Shah revolution. It was a broad-based coalition of groups, from secular democrats to leftists and just regular people who were fed up with being repressed in the name of forms of Western imposed ‘development’ that impoverished large swaths of the population.

Khomeini was allegedly tacitly supported by those same powers (the Shah had been getting too big for his boots – being a puppet is a dangerous game, please note Clown Prince).

Once Khomeini took power and proved to be virulently anti-Western, the Western powers armed and secretly supported Iraq in a devastating 8-year war against Iran.

Iraq liberally used chemical victims against Iranian civilians throughout the eight year war. Illegal in international law and the largest use of chemical gas in military history. More than all of WWI. This chemical arsenal was built and supplied by the West.

It's important to note that the US also led a global arms embargo against Iran, supplied weapons to Iraq, and made a deal to arm the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras against another popular liberation front (the Sandinistas), which Congress had prohibited. To fund these illegal arms sales to the Contras, the Reagan officials colluded with Israelis to sell arms to Iran against their own (in public) embargo.

Read that again, if your eyes aren’t smarting from the hypocrisy.

In the early 2000s I was part of a group of activists that helped uncover and publish letters from British government ministers acknowledging that chemicals they were selling to Iraq were being used in the war against Iran. All illegal. The UN did nothing.

If you’d like to know what it’s like to have civilians attacked by chemical weapons, what it does to the eyes and lungs and skin. What it does to the environment, go read my award-winning piece about it below.

READ MY AWARD-WINNING ARTICLE HERE.

“The river went white with dead fish.” A testimony from one of the many affected people that I interviewed in early 2000s for this story.

So, let’s recap. How many democratic moments in my country did the West kill?

From 1905 to this day, Iran is punished for wanting its freedom, its own resources, its sovereignty. Today’s war is no different.

Oh and I didn’t mention the sanctions that for nearly 50 years have targeted civilians with economic aggression.

In the past decade, America's maximum pressure' campaign has brutalised even more innocent Iranians through economic warfare. Professor Narges Bajoghli has published invaluable research on the toll of the sanctions on ordinary Iranians.

ORDER NARGES BAJOGHLI’S BOOK

What we are seeing now is not about nuclear weapons. It's about control, imperialism and Iran’s resources. As it has always been. Do not be fooled by the narratives they’ve been feeding you for decades

Inform yourself (all the info is out there please stop being lazy) and then practice your democratic rights by writing to your representatives, making your voice heard, amplifying ours.

The power is yours.

The West has bled our countries dry to give YOU wealth and ease and progress and liberalism. It's time to give it back – use your voice for the voiceless.

Information is power.

Our history is your history.

Our fates are intertwined.

Your indifference allows the slaughter.

STEP UP

SPEAK UP

LEARN YOUR HISTORY

Bani Adam

Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain, the name of human you cannot retain.

This is 13th-C poem by Iranian poet Sa’adi and hangs above the UN building in NYC.

If you want to read more of modern Iranian history woven with the stories of my family, consider reading my book The Cypress Tree which details all this – and much more – in a poetic narrative way with a cast of the best characters I've ever met – my prodigious beloved family. There is also an ebook so you can get instant access all over the world.

ORDER KAMIN’S BOOK HERE