Iran’s 1979 revolution condensed revolution and counter-revolution in one moment

Evidence

By 1978, the two great revolutionary decades, inaugurated – roughly speaking – by the onset of the Algerian War in 1954 and culminating in the liberation of Saigon in 1975, were over. The decisive turning point had come in Chile in 1973, with the defeat of Unidad Popular, but we did not know it then, because the liberation movements of Indochina and the Portuguese colonies in Africa were still in progress. The two revolutions of 1978-79, in Iran and Afghanistan, then made the shift unmistakable. The Khomeiniite takeover in Iran was one of those rare conjunctures in which the revolution and the counter-revolution were condensed in the same moment. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 354

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Iranian and Afghan revolutions of 1978-79 decisively ended the Left’s revolutionary decades — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 787; Iranian workers, especially oil workers, powered the 1979 revolution but did not win power — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 407

Related

• The Iranian and Afghan revolutions of 1978-79 decisively ended the Left’s revolutionary decades (similarity 0.87)
• Iranian workers, especially oil workers, powered the 1979 revolution but did not win power (similarity 0.82)
• Iran’s 1979 revolution was a classical mass revolution (similarity 0.81)
• US-weakened leftists let Khomeini seize leadership of Iran’s revolution (similarity 0.80)
• Iranian workers powered the 1979 revolution yet lost power to Khomeini (similarity 0.80)
• The Iranian revolution reached far beyond Iran into the broader Islamic world (similarity 0.79)