We live in a moment where critique risks flattening into instinct, where binaries do not merely polarize, but offer the illusion of coherence. Liberal humanism and conservative militarism, in their supposed opposition, often co-produce a world where historical struggle collapses into media soundbites, and moral clarity becomes a function of narrative simplification. Events like October 7 are swiftly severed from their historical contexts, recast not as echoes of long-standing structural violence but as ruptures demanding immediate condemnation, stripped of their genealogies and folded neatly into the grammar of spectacle.
In the shadow of the latest escalation, and before the next inevitable one, this strategic amnesia is no longer merely a failure of history, but a calculated act of memory-taming: a theft of the past, curated by those determined to keep its meaning sterile, singular, and useful only for our despair and compliance. To position ourselves meaningfully within this engineered reality, we must first revive the memory that charts the future we seek.
Within this logic of compression, a documentary like Al-Jazeera’s Long War begins its historical narrative. Released two years ago, the film exemplifies the framing dictated by Western powers portrayed by oil-funded outlets: that Iran’s antagonism toward the West begins with the 1979 Revolution, as though British gunboats, oil concessions, and CIA coups had not already laid the groundwork long before Khomeini’s sermons.
But revolutions are rarely the origin of antagonism. They are the breaking points of accumulated struggle. Iran’s 20th century, as historian Ervand Abrahamian shows in Iran Between Two Revolutions, was riddled with unresolved tensions over foreign interference, most visibly in the oil economy. The 1901 oil concession, granted during the late Qajar era, gave Britain near-total control over Iran’s oil resources, directly alienating the very social forces that would later fuel widespread resistance: the bazaar merchants, the clerical establishment, and the emerging professional class.
The Tobacco Protest of 1891–92 was one such expression. Not yet a revolution, but more than dissent, it marked one of the earliest moments when foreign control was met with mass refusal. Sparked by a royal concession granting the British monopoly over Iran’s tobacco trade, the protest quickly escalated into a nationwide boycott. A fatwa by Mirza Hasan Shirazi declaring tobacco use haram shut down consumption across the country, forcing the Shah to cancel the deal. In this context, the fatwa becomes not merely a religious ruling but a mobilization of the sacred against the infrastructural. Such a moment resists easy categorization and thus sits uneasily with liberal sensibilities, because here, resistance arrives not through policy briefs but through a theological injunction that suspends imperial aggression. Indeed, the historical fusion of religion and politics in this region, and its transformations, demand an analytical framework that transcends imported frameworks of thought, which often flatten, or even actively obscure, local realities.
The Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 continued this refusal of passive sovereignty. It was as much a revolt against monarchical arbitrariness as against the way imperial power was smuggled in through the language of “development” and reform. The demand for a parliament (Majles) and national control over concessions signaled a profound desire for representation, and crucially, marked a pivotal turn: the attempt to institutionalize resistance and translate it into durable political architecture. The revolution’s motto, that the country was being “sold to the British” and that foreign economic policies were “destroying Iran’s economy”, spoke directly to the need to empower the Majles with the final say over concessions.
In 1953, the coup against Mohammad Mossadegh brought the question of imperial authorship back to the surface. Mossadegh, who despite leading a secular, democratically elected government, did not conform to the West’s prescribed mold. When he moved to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), Britain responded with a global boycott and lobbied the United States to intervene. Playing on Cold War anxieties, they cited the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party, whose anti-imperialist platform resonated deeply with a population long disaffected by foreign control. The CIA and MI6, through Operation Ajax and Operation Boot, orchestrated the coup that reinstated the Shah and dismantled the broad-based movement that had rallied around Mossadegh. The arrests, censorship, and violence that followed accumulated into what would eventually erupt in 1979.
The explicit targeting of “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) became a central pillar of this new ideological infrastructure, framing the incoming revolution not merely as a domestic uprising but as a comprehensive reassertion of Iranian sovereignty against global imperial designs
What followed the coup was not merely a reinstatement of the Shah, but a full-scale US-engineered reordering of the Iranian state. The Shah’s regime became the linchpin of a new imperial logic: one that fused modernization with repression, economic growth with deepening inequality, and military buildup with political suffocation. US advisers flowed into Tehran alongside arms deals and development plans. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, was trained and equipped by the CIA and Mossad, tasked with rooting out dissent, especially from the left and the religious opposition. The countryside was remade under the banner of land reform, a reform largely designed to modernize agrarian structures rather than truly empower the peasantry, leading to significant rural displacement. Oil wealth also flowed disproportionately into state coffers, consolidating the regime’s power and enriching its elite. Iran was rendered both a marketplace for US capital and a garrison for regional containment.
The repressed memory of Mossadegh’s nationalization, however, persisted beneath the surface, feeding underground organizing, clandestine literature, and a growing sense that development without dignity was just another form of subjugation. This antagonism, forged in decades of foreign interference and internal repression, began to coalesce into organized networks. From student cells in universities to religious circles within the bazaars and mosques, and even among disaffected elements of the military, a diverse constellation of groups, often drawing on both modern nationalist and Shia revolutionary thought, systematically articulated a rejection of Western dominance. This institutionalization was not uniform; it manifested in the development of a shared lexicon of defiance, the forging of clandestine communication channels, and the construction of parallel social and political structures designed to counter the Shah’s regime and its perceived foreign backing. The explicit targeting of “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) became a central pillar of this new ideological infrastructure, framing the incoming revolution not merely as a domestic uprising but as a comprehensive reassertion of Iranian sovereignty against global imperial designs, and crucially, as a distinctive political imagination. It heralded a new model of power structure, specifically the innovative infusion of the modern “state” or “republican” form with Islamic governance, a synthesis previously unprecedented at such scale. Despite its inherent contradictions, this foundational shift represents a unique turning point in the region’s history, and the last successful revolution to overthrow a monarchy and fundamentally reconfigure its political system. The Republic did not invent anti-imperialist legitimacy; it inherited, translated, and institutionalized it. As Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi argues, Iranian nationalism was not born in rejection of progress, but as a counter-vision of modernity forged under the pressure of foreign domination. The Republic inherited this vision, repurposing it through the rhetoric of resistance. This legacy helps explain not only the regime’s ideological posture but also the broader sense of solidarity and nationalism displayed by the Iranian people, including those who oppose the regime, during the recent US-backed Israeli war.
It is worth noting that during the decades of US-backed modernization in Iran, Gulf monarchies were being fastened into a parallel imperial order, an arrangement of outsourced sovereignty: their external security ensured, their oil flowed, and their obedience guaranteed. While the Shah styled himself as the Gulf’s policeman, the monarchies performed submission as pragmatism, normalizing foreign presence through soft diplomacy and petro-dollar realignments. Under the US “Twin Pillars” strategy, Iran and Saudi Arabia were cast as co-guardians of Western interests in the Gulf, a pairing that saw the Shah assert regional leadership not only militarily but through OPEC’s oil diplomacy, shaping pricing and production decisions the Gulf would initially follow. But as Iran’s revolutionary rupture broke with this consensus, Gulf monarchies doubled down on the model of compliance, turning petro-influence into a currency of preservation rather than transformation. What followed was not simply geopolitical recalibration, but the slow, deliberate manufacturing of a sectarian grammar, where Iran’s Shia-inflected defiance was strategically recast as a threat to the Sunni regional order, transforming a political rupture into a sectarian crisis, which offered imperial alliances a convenient cover for what remained a strategy of suppression and control.
What matters now is not mythologizing Iran, but restoring context, refusing the amnesia that reduces every confrontation to a clash of liberal values rather than a struggle over history.
With the advent of the revolution, the new Islamic Republic moved quickly: expelling US advisors, seizing the US Embassy in Tehran as a symbolic blow against the “Great Satan,” nationalizing remaining foreign assets, severing diplomatic ties with Israel, and backing resistance movements across the region as part of a broader national defense strategy, fundamentally aimed against US influence. Anti-imperialism was no longer a slogan from the margins; it was policy, law, and export. This institutionalization of refusal, rooted as much in theology as in the memory of coups and concessions, was intolerable to a global order built on containment and compliance. The US, now deprived of its most stable outpost in the region, responded through encirclement. Economic sanctions quickly followed the severing of ties, and Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the devastating 1980-1988 war further solidified Iran’s perception of the US as an active adversary, often seen as an “imposed war.” Sanctions, assassinations, and media demonization became the tools of a long containment strategy. In this context, the latest Israeli war can be read as a continuation of that same logic: a war explicitly aimed at regime change, as exemplified by calls from figures like Netanyahu urging the Iranian people to “seize the chance.” This toppling of the state, however, is strategically inseparable from the dismantling of the historical narrative and the revolutionary legitimacy it claims, thereby resurrecting the fabricated illusion of the Shah’s past as Iran’s only acceptable trajectory.
Western observers, as Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi notes in Foucault in Iran, have long misunderstood this history, trapped in binaries of secular versus religious, modern versus traditional. That misreading persists. The fixation on clerical power often obscures the longer arc of anti-imperialist sentiment, how it has been co-opted, institutionalized, and at times betrayed by the very state claiming to carry it forward.
This context doesn’t call for yet another account of Western hypocrisy on “individual freedoms,” “terrorism,” or Iran’s “nuclear threat”. That story is already well-exposed. The irony, for those willing to see it, is blinding. What matters now is not mythologizing Iran, but restoring context, refusing the amnesia that reduces every confrontation to a clash of liberal values rather than a struggle over history, over material conditions, and over the unfinished battle for liberation.
This is not a call to romanticize the Islamic Republic either. It is a call to historicize; to resist the smoothing violence of media cycles and the branding of geopolitics. Because when memory collapses under spectacle, we lose the ability to locate ourselves within an Axis, an Axis that carries memory, enacts refusal, and points toward liberation.
The Empire, it seems, is always allowed a long memory. For that, this kind of historical grounding is not indulgent; it is necessary.
Because without memory, there is no direction.
And without direction, liberation becomes little more than a slogan.
source: Al Akhbar