I'm John Batchel, spending a moment talking to a co-author of a new book for The Sun After Long Nights.

Poetry. Iran values poetry.

The story of Iran's women-led uprising since September of 2022 when a young woman whom is affectionately now called Gina was murdered by the police, by the

authorities, for her hair, how did we get here? Where does this come from, this brutality

towards young women in the streets of Tehran? Nil, we need to start somewhere, so I say

Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister for a few years in the early 1950s,

looking to transform Iran from the, what should have to say, autocracy into a republic.

He was pulled out of office by the CIA and the MI6. Why? And is that the

beginning of the trouble? Well, I think it's hard to talk to an Iranian and say, what is the

beginning of the trouble? Because we will go back centuries and centuries. We have a very long view of history. So I'm tempted to go back even further, but I think

this will make sense for the listeners to start here. There's a few competing theories about why

Mossadegh was removed from power, why there was a coup against him. So I'll bring a few reasons

and some things that we've learned through our research.

One, he was popular among the Iranian people. Why was he popular? Because he wanted to nationalize

oil. So at this moment, oil, there was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, where oil was being

extracted from Iran. And the Iranian workers that were working there really did live in slums.

And so, you know, we see a classic, you know, colonial moment at play here.

He wanted to nationalize this.

This obviously made the, you know, Western powers very nervous of, you know, Iran accessing this on their own.

That was one part of it.

Another part, we were in a moment where there was,

you know, red scare, fear of communism. And so there was this whole narrative trumped up that

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