Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons | Lex Fridman Podcast #334

This is not a nice, Islamic, fatherly regime. Clear signs of fascism. Clear signs of the state control and pay any price to stay in power.

So, even violence?

Extreme violence.

The following is a conversation with Abbas Amanat, a historian at Yale University specializing in the modern history of Iran. My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people in their current struggle for freedom. I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen understand the nature and the importance of this struggle. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Abbas Amanat. Let's start with the current situation in Iran. On September 16th, protests broke out in Tehran and quickly spread over the death of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death by the morality police. This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic. What... Can you explain what happened?

The protests are now in their, uh, sixth week. The death of that young woman occurred, who was visiting Tehran as a tourist, sparked, uh, something very deep, uh, that particularly concerned the younger generations. That is what you would call the equivalent of the Z generation in this country.

(laughs) Yes.

They call themselves دحه هشتدي in Persian, because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own. It's an ancient solar calendar. And this... The, the, the time that they were born, they were in the 1380s. That's what they call themselves, هشتدي.

Mm-hmm.

80s, هشتده, for the '80s. And, uh, the... Well, the circumstances that surrounds the, uh, unfortunate death of this young, beautiful, uh, Kurdish woman, uh, is, uh, really tragic. Uh, she was arrested by the, what is referred to as the morality police, morality patrol, called گشت ارشاد, a guidance police, that is. Presumably, there were two women fully clad that is officers serving on that force, and two men. And, mm, nobody exactly knows what had happened. She had been beaten up, and apparently there was no, uh, uh, uh, sign of any wrongdoing on her side. She was fully covered. Uh, it seems that, uh, uh, there was some altercation in the process and, uh, the, the outcome was that she was unconscious. Uh, not necessarily when she was arrested, but in the course of the detention when they take them to a center, presumably to re-educate them.

Yeah.

And, um, and she apparently collapsed, and maybe my sense is that she must have had some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken or something had happened, and she died in the hospital the next day. And that, through the social media, was widely spread throughout Iran and almost the next day, surprisingly, you could see this outburst of sympathy for her. People are in the streets, uh, weeping because she was seen as such an innocent young woman, 22 years old. And the family, the mother and the father, also mourning for her. Uh, and being a Kurd visiting Tehran, uh, this all added up to really turn her into some kind of a martyr of this cause, and that's what it is. And her, uh, picture, um, uh, uh, graphics that were artistically produced based on her portrait has now dominates basically as the symbol of this protest movement, and the protest movement goes on. Everybody was thinking, or at least the authorities were thinking, that it's going to die out in a matter of a few days. But it became more, uh, intense first in the streets of Tehran by young women, mostly probably between I would say 17, 18, teenagers to 22, 23 or thereabout, and then to university campuses all around the country, and then even to high schools. And that also made it a very remarkable protest movement because first of all it involves the youth and not necessarily the older generations. You see them around, but not as many. Also, you see men and women together, young, uh, uh, girls and boys, and, uh, um, they are adamant, they are desperate in a sense of the tone of their protests, and they are extremely courageous because they stand against the, uh, security forces that were immediately, uh, were sent after to the streets, so... And in full gear, that is.