A relatively good article by Paul Jackson in the Calgary Sun. After all, when was the last time you read a statement even approaching Jackson’s daring acknowledgment that after the fall of the monarchy “Iranian women were brutalized and hundreds of thousands of decent Iranian men and women were slaughtered.” In the New York Times, where they actually praise and congratulate these killers and murderers? We also hardly ever see any reference at all to the White Revolution (see Links). Jackson’s mention of these reforms is praiseworthy, given the Islamist Republic’s legitimizers and apologists’ preference for “the 1953 coup against Mossadegh” as the only event during the Pahlavi II era worth mentioning! The 1979 Islamo-“communist” revolution was in a sense, as some commentators have pointed out, the ultimate expression of the feudal-clerical reaction towards the series of reforms to which the White Revolution collectively refers.

I do, however, strongly disagree with the writer on one point. The Iranian government did not fall because the Carter administration “deserted” or “abandoned” the Shah. The Iranian government fell because the Carter administration conspired against it and actively sponsored its fall.