The Shah destroyed all of the former kind of buffers and intermediary sort of classes and elements, social forces that could deflect responsibility and blame on the Shah. So with the white revolution, we see in many ways a consolidation of forms of agribusiness and so on by favored elements of the court and maybe landed families as well. We also see this in terms of the disenchantment of the traditional clergy, in part because their role in the judicial system has been again massively eroded if not like pretty much neutralized.
Featuring Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour on the history of modern Iran. This is the third episode in our four-part series. We pick up in the wake of the US-British 1953 coup against Mossadegh, assess the Shah's repression and attempts to manufacture consent through passive revolution, and then close by laying out the 1979 Islamic Revolution in all of its wild complexity.
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