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Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

Iran is an unusual country.

On one hand, the Iranian people are inheritors to one of the most important civilizations in human history.

Yet in modern times, Iran has fallen victim to two separate political diseases.

Hunta style military autocracy under the Shah, who was deposed in 1979, and then Islamist

Theocracy under the Ayatollahs, who have ruled ever since.

Over the last four decades, the country fought a crippling and massively destructive war with Iraq,

made clandestine efforts to build a nuclear weapon,

subsidized terrorism in Lebanon and elsewhere,

propped up warlords in bordering countries, weathered oil booms and busts, threatened

the immolation of Israel, and sent out its tiny patrol craft to play chicken in the Persian

Gulf with the most powerful navies on earth.

Yet despite it all, the Ayatolas have hung on to a power structure that really hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.

Last month, in response to a spike in gas prices, thousands of young Iranians took to the streets to demand change.

What they got instead were mass killings by the shock troops sent out by the regime to suppress the unrest.

Over 200 are known to be dead and some say the real death toll could be as high as a thousand. Ali Rezonadir is a former international policy analyst at the Iran Corporation and

...