I actually wrote a paper in undergrad for one of my classes looking at American media portrayals of the Iranian revolution, and Simfan's perspective of the Shah and the revolutionaries is almost verbatim what the Wall Street Journal was printing in the winter of 79-80. The Shah was always portrayed sympathetically: he and his people were serious modernizers who knew how to run an economy; the revolutionaries were all hot-headed Muslim savages, whipped up into a riotous frenzy, who would destroy the Iranian economy. Never mind the fact that the revolution was supported by all strata of society, secular and religious, working and middle class, and never mind that the Shah was a murderous, nasty dictator, who created a society of stark inequality and corruption, robbing Iran of its oil wealth to fund his opulent palaces and have meals flown in from Paris.
I'd rather be free and poor than wealthy yet under the boot of a SAVAK agent.
If you lived in Iran in the late 1970s you'd probably be under the boot of a SAVAK agent
and poor. I don't know where Simfan gets this nonsense that Iran was some prosperous place free of economic inequality.
