“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever,” George Orwell on totalitarianism.

The Shah, at the behest of the USA, was not only turning the country into a dark stranglehold of his authoritarian and oppressive rule, hounding and obliterating pro-democratic forces, but he was also unintentionally driving the people into the fold of theocratic revolutionaries who were on the rise as an alternative force. By the time his SAVAK realised the perennial threat to the kingdom from the clergy, it was too late to avert the heightening agitation against the Pahlavi rule, spearheaded by the students and young Ayatollahs of Qom and its subordinate seminaries clustering around Grand Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini. The USA, as usual, was slumbering while the fall of its most important ally in the Middle East was imminent.

The Grand Ayatollah was exiled into Iraq. The Iraqi rulers, under pressure from the USA, showed their reluctance to host the rebellious Ayatollah. He was compelled to shift to France. The USA, by supporting the wobbling regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi and pressuring Iraq to repatriate Ruhullah Khomeini to Tehran, earned the enmity of an entire young generation involved in the extensive struggle for the establishment of an Islamic revolutionary state.

The Iranian revolutionaries apprehended that the USA would repeat its mischievous role to fail their revolution, like the overthrow of the Mossaddegh regime through a military coup in 1953. The revolutionary activists targeted both the pro-monarch civilian as well as military forces during the chaotic conditions in Tehran and elsewhere.

This anger against the USA........

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