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1979: The Revolution That Was Never Digested
To grasp why Iran occupies this singular place in the architecture of the contemporary world, one must return to the source— and the source is far more complex than Western memory tends to acknowledge. The revolution of 1979 is most often reduced to the advent of a Shia theocracy, to the hostage crisis at the American embassy, to the image of Ayatollah Khomeini returning from exile on an Air France Boeing. All of this is real. But the Islamic Revolution was also— and above all— an anti-imperialist revolution, a direct heir to the decolonization struggles of the twentieth century. It toppled a Shah whose regime was the very prototype of neocolonial domination: installed in 1953 through a coup jointly engineered by the CIA and Britain’ s MI6 to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whose crime was wanting to nationalize Iranian oil. This founding story— the coup against Mossadegh— is essential to understanding why Iranian anti-Americanism is not a manifestation of religious fanaticism but a political response to a documented historical reality. And it is precisely why the Iranian revolution belongs, in the imagination of the Global South, to the same family as the Cuban revolution of 1959, Egyptian Nasserism, Venezuelan Chavismo, and the pan-Africanisms of Nkrumah and Sankara. Ideologically heterogeneous movements, often antagonistic toward one another, but united by a common conviction: that the world order constructed by Western powers is fundamentally unjust and must be overthrown or circumvented. This lineage explains what can appear to Western eyes as paradoxical solidarities: between a Shia theocracy and a secular, communist Cuba; between an Islamic revolutionary regime and Putin’ s nationalist Orthodox Russia; between Tehran and the military juntas of the Sahel. This is not ideological coherence. It is a solidarity of resistance, cemented by shared adversity toward the same order.
Flashmag! Edition 171 Avril 2026
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