Current Events > Was the Iranian Revolution a good thing or bad thing, for the Iranian people?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've been brushing up on it. I must confess, I didn't know THAT much.

On the one hand, the former government was pretty brutal, appeared to force Western values on people who didn't want them, and was pretty lavish with the spending on itself; on the other hand, the new regime wasn't exactly progressive, wasn't as good with religious tolerance as it might have been, and was essentially a dictatorship.

What do people think? Of course, it had a pretty bad effect on the West, before and after the Revolution, with the high level of uncertainty about oil prices, and having to deal with another hostile government in the Middle East.


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I don't know enough about it. I guess in my head I would think a secular or somewhat secular government is better than a heavily religious one, but Iran doesn't seem as off the rails as some of its neighbors in terms of stability.

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At the very least it was pretty shitty for women.

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Bad, it became a theocracy.

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hard to know if Iran would be in any better or worse a state today if it were still under the rule of an authoritarian monarchy. what is clearer was that the revolution was an inevitable result of western imperialism violently overthrowing a popularly supported secular democracy

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Iran is a fairly repressive state much of the time, but it is nowhere the worst basket case in that region and is a fairly stable middle income country, sanctions as a result of it's often poor foreign policy choices have been it's great undoing.

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The Shah was a horrible oppressive monster(installed with our help because Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry).
The Shah managed to unite the opposition against him, and the clerics had a ton of pull in rural areas and a charismatic leader.
Even so, it's important to note that the revolution was not entirely unsuccessful for other groups: Iran is, after all, semi-democratic, even if the clerics can (and occasionally do) overrule the civilian authorities and you have the occasional stolen election and brutal suppression of popular protests(*laughs nervously in American*). So not the best, but it could definitely be a lot worse. Like, it's possible the system could become more democratic in a gradual, organic way.

Anything that increases the power of the religious right (irrespective of religion) is a bad thing
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