Funny thing about history — it doesn’t knock twice. It slips in through the side door while everyone’s busy watching the front. 1979 was one of those years when the world blinked and woke up to find everything upside down. One minute Iran was a modern, secular country where women wore miniskirts and scientists debated nuclear energy. The next, the Ayatollah was on a balcony promising salvation and handing out death sentences.
In the 1970s, Iran was called the “Japan of the Middle East.” Oil money flowed, education was booming, women studied medicine and law, and Tehran looked more like Paris than Kabul. People may not have loved the Shah — he ruled with an iron hand and a secret police that had a talent for making people disappear — but few imagined what would come after him would make that look gentle.
Then came Jimmy Carter, with his sermons about “human rights.” He pushed the Shah to ease up on repression, free the political prisoners, and allow protests. The CIA, meanwhile, sat on its hands, convinced the Ayatollah Khomeini — an old cleric in exile — was just another harmless religious leader. When the Shah fled in early 1979, the revolution filled the vacuum not with freedom, but with fury.
In the first two years of Khomeini’s rule, tens of thousands were executed — officials, officers, students, journalists, and women who didn’t veil fast enough. Iran’s universities were purged, its thinkers silenced, and its young men sent off to die in the trenches of the Iran–Iraq War. The dream of democracy was replaced by a nightmare dressed in holy robes.
What began as a people’s cry for dignity turned into a decades-long sermon of obedience. The women who once studied engineering now fought to show their hair. The poets who once wrote of love now wrote of prison walls. And the world learned, too late, that revolutions don’t guarantee freedom — they only guarantee change.
In the decades since, Iran’s rulers have turned the same zeal inward and outward — sponsoring terrorism from Lebanon to Yemen, arming groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and shouting “Death to America!” as national policy. What was once a proud and cosmopolitan nation became a factory for hate and proxy wars. Now, as it joins BRICS, Iran is trying to trade isolation for influence — aligning with Russia and China to build an anti-Western economic bloc. The irony is bitter: the revolution that promised independence ended up selling its soul to new masters.
If 1979 had gone differently, maybe Iran would look today like South Korea — a prosperous, educated country, free to argue and invent. Instead, it became a warning label for the world: how fast liberty can fall when faith is forced, and how long a country can suffer when lies are preached as truth. The saddest part isn’t that history repeated itself. It’s that we still act surprised when it does.
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