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Learning from 1979 [1]

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Date: 2026-01-15  

This article is also about the current protest movement in Iran. In a previous diary, I outlined my thoughts on why the current protest movement is likely going to fail. But I realize that there is an all-powerful misconception of how/why the 1979 revolution succeeded. There are lessons from that success that we should be absorbing; but our biases hold us back. I am not excluding myself from this: as an atheist, it was hard for me to accept that religious clerics (or “Mullahs”, if you will) can get anything right.

So here are the lessons.

(1) The 1977-1979 revolution was largely non-violent. This was the hardest factoid for me to grasp. Religious clerics are not supposed to be smart enough to copy Gandhi’s mass non-cooperation movement. But that assumption also reflected my own bias: Gandhi was not a religious cleric, but he may as well have been one. He could certainly have been described as a religious nutcase. The fact that I may admire him does not change that. And MLK Jr was obviously a “Reverend”. And Mandela, while not a religious cleric, was very very religious. There is nothing inherently incompatible with people of faith successfully launching mass non-cooperation movements that remains largely non-violent.

Link:

The Iranian Revolution of 1977-79 was the first in a series of mass popular civil insurrections which would result in the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in dozens of countries over the next three decades. Unlike most of the other uprisings that would topple dictators in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa, the result of the Iranian struggle was not the establishment of liberal democracy but of a new form of authoritarianism. However, except for a series of short battles using light weaponry in the final hours of the uprising, the revolutionary forces themselves were overwhelmingly nonviolent. The autocratic monarchy of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi faced a broad coalition of opposition forces, including Marxists and constitutional liberals, but the opposition ultimately became dominated by the mullahs of the country’s Shia hierarchy. Despite severe repression against protestors, a series of demonstrations and strikes over the previous two years came to a peak in the fall of 1978, as millions of opponents of the Shah’s regime clogged the streets of Iran’s cities and work stoppages paralyzed the country. The Shah fled into exile in January 1979 and exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to lead the new Islamic Republic.

(2) An Armed Insurrection is not an option today.

That is not to say that violent revolutions cannot succeed. There was plenty of violence during the October revolution, for example. Or during the French Revolution. Or during the American revolution. Menachem Begin’s autobiography is called “Revolt”. But violent revolutions follow a different trajectory: armed militias with armaments being supplied by a hostile foreign power to take on the regimes. That was not an option for the 1977-1979 revolution; so they had to default to the non-violent non-cooperation model.

Iran is not lacking in hostile foreign powers, obviously. Iran has never been deficient in hostile foreign powers (it is the most “un-Canadian” state ever). However, none of those hostile foreign powers want to see a successful armed insurrection in Iran today. That is because everyone is afraid of what that entails. The water crisis in Tehran is so bad that there is an imminent apocalypse (with, or without a revolution). It is not unreasonable to expect that Iran may produce tens of millions of refugees in the near future. At least, that possibility is not an impossible to conceive scenario. Tens of millions !! Those refugees won't go east or northeast because of geographic constraints… mountains and deserts. They will either go west, or north, or into diaspora communities across the world (including Los Angeles). Imagine a world in which Tens of Millions are moving around. Among other things, it will dissolve the meaning of nationalism in quite a few places. Think of 700,000 Jews moving into the British Mandate of Palestine during the Mandate period, and what that entailed. And now multiply that 10 fold.

You know that the hostile powers all know this, or else they would have been acting differently. Israeli media, for instance, is openly broadcasting that Israeli agents have been arming the protestors. If they were truly interested in an armed rebellion, then that would have been a closely guarded secret.

So, by default, the only option for the current protestors is also a largely non-violent non-cooperation movement.

(3) Non-violent non-cooperation movements require more discipline. To understand the escalatory nature of violence, it is helpful to keep in mind that most people in any group are not psychopaths. Most people will have trouble shooting into a crowd of unarmed/defenseless civilians…. unless you give them a valid (in their minds) reason to do so. And violence from the protestors is often seen as being a sufficiently valid reason.

People often talk about the relatively low death toll during the 1977-1979 revolution. This was not because the Shah was an overly pious man. He was not !! In fact, the Shah did try to crush the rebellion through overwhelming violence (similar to what the clerics are doing now). It is just that the protestors stayed largely non-violent, and so his troops (who also did not have enough psychopaths) were not able to deploy larger scale violence.

As an example, consider the Black Friday (Sept 8, 1978) massacre. The monarch’s troops opened fire on a crowd in Tehran, killing about 60 people (estimates vary, obviously). Let us ignore the events leading upto what gave the Shah’s troops justification to kill 60. 60 deaths is a tragedy, obviously; but not enough to suppress a protest movement in a country of 90 million (40 million in 1978). For that, the regime needs to kill a few thousand (a number that is large enough to be a deterrence). And the Shah’s troops did not have enough of a valid reason to kill 1000. At least, not yet.

In Iran, these protest cycle on 7 and 40 day periods, corresponding to funeral marches. So the next opportunity to escalate the violence is 7 and 40 days after the original protest. But the mourners stayed largely non-violent; in fact, I have not found any reporting on any violence being indulged on by the mourners (and I have looked). The religious clerics were very skilled in using these funeral processions to further inflame passions, and to organize the protests, but simultaneously avoiding any breakouts of violence.

(4) The current protest movement will also have this opportunity. Iran still operates on the 7 and 40 day cycles of mourning. The current protestors can use that just as effectively as the Mullahs did in 1977-1979.. If the protestors can figure out how to avoid violence from their side (despite provocations from the regime), then they will succeed. Otherwise, they will fail !

So, what I am paying attention to are the videos being leaked or smuggled out of Iran. If I see protestors lynching and burning regime security forces (there was plenty of this in the last 10 days), then to me, that will mean an opportunity that has been wasted… along with a few thousand lives.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/15/2363601/-Learning-from-1979?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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