The 1977 – 1979 protests were a broad-based popular revolution against the Shah’s dictatorship. The objectives of the revolution were to establish independence, freedom, and social justice. The opposition to the Shah included secular liberal democrats and social democrats of the Iran National Front (INF), liberal Islamists (e. g., Liberation Movement of Iran), various Marxist groups, and conservative Islamists (Khomeini). As fundamentalists gained more support among the population, they changed the slogan from “Independence, Freedom, Social Justice” to “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic.”
The Shah was widely considered to be a puppet of the British and Americans whose primary objective was to serve their colonial interests. For example, after the 1953 coup, which was organized by the CIA and MI6, the Shah returned Iran’s oil that had been nationalized by Mossadegh to a consortium of major oil companies. The Shah’s agreements with the oil companies were canceled by the provisional government in 1979 and Iran’s oil was in the hands of Iranians again.1 There were no freedoms of expression, of the press, or of political parties. The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, engaged in horrendous torture of dissidents including high school children and university students who had committed no crime other than reading books that the regime did not approve of. There were no free elections and the Shah had violently imposed his one-man tyranny.2 The Shah, his family, and their cronies were engaged in outright theft, financial corruption, and graft that made them grotesquely rich while millions of the people lived in abject poverty. The Pahlavis and theirnouveaux riches close associates lacked theNoblesse oblige of the upper classes or the social consciousness of the modern middle classes. Their extravagant, opulent, and pretentious lifestyles as well as their arrogance and condescending attitude toward the rest of the population alienated the overwhelming majority of the people. The demand for social justice came to mean that national wealth (state income from oil, natural gas, and the like) should be distributed fairly and legally among the population rather than siphoned off to a handful of corrupt monarchists.
The fall of the Shah did not usher in what many had struggled for. The so-called “Bahar Azadi” [Spring of Freedom] after the overthrow of the Shah’s dictatorship did n
