Iran: Strategy of Blindness and Disinformation

French article published on 12/25/2024 | Atlantico.fr
Hilda Dehghani Schmit and Lilas Pakzad
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Iran: Strategy of Blindness and Disinformation

The manufacturing of foreign propaganda in Iran is a little-known story, one that notably rests on the magnification practiced by the French intelligentsia of the time. Here is what you need to know.

The effect of blindness is a well-known phenomenon among art experts. It occurs when the desire to see one’s expectations fulfilled overrides critical judgment. One confuses truth with falsehood in the elation of witnessing the unexpected come to pass. This blurring of discernment finds a tragic—and unfortunately frequent—echo in politics. The relentless and narcissistic urge to see one’s ideology realized numbs reason and sweeps away reality.

A Blind Fascination: Sartre, Foucault, and the Islamic Revolution

How could renowned thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault have misunderstood Khomeini and his “Islamic Revolution”? This common question should rather be rephrased as: Why did they so desperately want to believe in it?

In 1955, in The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron provided a revealing answer to this form of credulity, tinged with bad faith and dogmatism:
“Seeking to explain the attitude of intellectuals—ruthless toward the failings of democracies, indulgent toward the gravest crimes so long as they were committed in the name of the right doctrines—I first encountered the sacred words: left, revolution, proletariat. My critique of these myths led me to reflect on the cult of History, and then to question a social category to which sociologists have yet to give the attention it deserves: the intelligentsia,” Aron wrote.

The Sublime End Justified the Horrible Means: The Manufacturing of Khomeinist Propaganda
One of the key mechanisms of propaganda and public opinion manipulation is the demonization of the enemy. In 1979, opponents of the Islamic ideology were systematically discredited through rhetorical and visual smear campaigns. These methods made it possible to neutralize any ideological threat and to fabricate an illusion of unity among Iranians whose political opinions were deeply divided.

As Aron further wrote, “the sublime end justified the horrible means.”

“The revolutionary is cynical in action […] once he decides to join a party as uncompromising as he is against the established disorder, he will then forgive, in the name of the Revolution, everything he once tirelessly denounced. The revolutionary myth builds a bridge between moral intransigence and terrorism. […] Nothing is more banal than this double game of severity and indulgence.”

“The revolutionary myth builds a bridge between moral intransigence and terrorism”
In the name of anti-imperialist doctrine, falsehoods were fabricated and real faults were exaggerated to the point of caricature, so that public opinion would accept the necessity of the Shah’s downfall.

This is what Edward Bernays, the author of Propaganda (1928)—who orchestrated political destabilization campaigns in Latin America for the CIA—called the “manufacture of consent.” For Bernays, the choices of the masses are decisive, and those who succeed in influencing them truly hold power. Modern democracy implies a new form of government—an invisible one: propaganda. Truth is no longer the product of scientific knowledge but of an idea which, if repeated often enough, becomes truth.

In the case of the 1979 Iranian “revolution,” Khomeinist propaganda—uncritically echoed and amplified by Western media and intellectuals—became truth, then doctrine. It has dictated the Iranian policy of the Quai d’Orsay for the past 45 years, and continues to do so to this day.

The Manufacture of Foreign Propaganda in Iran: A Hidden History

Since the early 20th century, Iran has repeatedly fallen victim to foreign propaganda. The founding episode of this silent interference was the crisis surrounding the nationalization of Iranian oil and the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Thanks to declassified documents published in the tenth volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, it is now known that the main objective of U.S. policy in Iran was to maintain Western control over the country’s oil, primarily to limit Soviet influence in the region. American officials understood that nationalism was a real and powerful force in Iran, and that Mossadegh enjoyed substantial public support.

Frustrated by the failure of a negotiated settlement, the Truman administration began planning a covert operation. The coup was ultimately carried out under the Eisenhower administration.

In the months leading up to the coup, the United States spent over one million dollars, in part to buy the allegiance of influential Iranian figures, such as members of parliament. This coup was the CIA’s first covert operation against a foreign government and served as a model for future interventions. It left deep scars in the Iranian collective memory and foreshadowed the Islamic coup of 1979.

The Role of the French Intelligentsia in the Mythmaking

The years leading up to the 1979 revolution were marked by a massive disinformation campaign. Khomeini, a skillful ideological impostor exiled in France, managed to project the image of a charismatic Third World revolutionary leader, captivating a Western intelligentsia eager to oppose the imperialist despotism represented by the United States. Influential French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir openly supported the so-called Islamic “revolution.”

Blinded by the desire to see their theories embodied in reality, they turned Khomeini into a symbol of resistance, refusing to confront the facts or consider the disastrous consequences of their support. Foucault, for instance, described Islamism as a “spiritual alternative,” when simply reading Khomeini’s contemporary writings would have sufficed to understand he was a bloodthirsty religious fanatic. In service of their ideology, they willingly confused one of the 20th century’s most brutal torturers with Gandhi. Western media and progressive intellectuals echoed Khomeini’s accusations against the Shah’s regime without the slightest critical distance. This blind support was far from anecdotal—it helped legitimize a theocratic and mafioso regime in progressive European circles.

When Propaganda Produces Historical Amnesia

This is not about denying the existence of political prisoners or the political police under the Shah, nor about absolving his faults, but rather about analyzing all the facts—not just those that serve a doctrine. The duty of every free thinker, especially in a democracy, is to analyze—not to naively repeat propaganda carefully crafted by Khomeini and his allies in the Carter administration.

In the official Iranian narrative of the revolution, Khomeini proudly defied the United States and defeated the “Great Satan” in its desperate attempts to keep the Shah in power. But declassified documents from the Carter administration reveal a very different reality—well known to Iranians, yet strangely ignored by the rest of the world. These documents show that Khomeini was far more engaged with the U.S. than generally believed. Far from defying America, the Ayatollah courted the Carter administration, sending discreet signals that he sought dialogue and presenting a potential Islamic Republic as favorable to American interests. (Declassified documents available on the website of the National Security Archive.)

What happened 45 years ago between America and Khomeini, unfortunately, does not belong only to history. The desire of the United States—especially the Democratic administration—and its Western allies to strike deals with what they view as “pragmatic” elements within the Islamic Republic continues to this day, in cynical disregard for the Iranian people.

What Was Really Happening in Iranian Prisons?

To return to the reality as it truly was—and not as it was deliberately imagined—we can refer to the report published in 1980 by William J. Butler of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). He estimated that the number of political prisoners under the Shah of Iran never exceeded approximately 3,500.

According to Amnesty International, this population mainly consisted of Islamic and Marxist guerrilla groups (Mojahedin, Fedayeen) and local separatist movements (Kurdish, Baluchi, Azerbaijani), influenced by either the USSR or the United States in the context of Cold War power struggles. Prisoners of conscience made up only a small minority—about a hundred people.

Amnesty International, which began recording executions starting in 1972, estimated the total number to be around 300. The organization’s official yearbooks mention only two people executed after mid-1977—one was the murderer of an American embassy employee, and the other a general convicted of espionage.

Journalist David Frost reported that his researchers estimated between 1,000 and 1,500 executions between 1963 and mid-1977.

In early 1977, the Shah invited leaders from Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the ICJ to visit Tehran. In personal meetings, he informed Martin Ennals of Amnesty and Butler of the ICJ that he had ordered a halt to torture, and he challenged Butler to produce a single case since September 1976. He opened the prisons to the International Red Cross.

Butler confirmed that the Shah had promised “substantial changes” to the military judicial code for handling political crime cases. Shortly afterward, legislation to this effect was submitted to the Iranian parliament and was passed in August 1977.

In October 1977, the U.S. House Subcommittee on International Organizations held a hearing on human rights in Iran. Present were Butler, Charles Naas (Director of Iranian Affairs at the State Department), and two professors. Professor Richard W. Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh, a specialist on Iran, testified that the Shah “responded in a way that was not merely cosmetic.” Butler told the subcommittee that the ICJ had not identified a single case of torture in Iran during the previous 10 or 11 months.

And What Was Happening at the Same Time in French Prisons?

Analyzing the facts also means placing them in the context of contemporary history—particularly that of France. A political regime must be examined in all its dimensions and in the historical context of the era, which in France corresponds to Charles de Gaulle’s presidency and the third government of the Fifth Republic.

French archives on the Algerian War (1954–1962), some of which were declassified in late 2021 by decision of President Emmanuel Macron, provide insight into the practices of the French state during the same period: arbitrary imprisonments, torture, and assassinations committed in the name of “reason of state.”

Were the conditions in French prisons at the time any more dignified? In Une vie, Simone Veil, then a young magistrate and director of the prison administration, describes the horror she felt during her first visits to detention centers in 1957, sometimes feeling she had “plunged into the Middle Ages” given the “scandalous” conditions.

At the Versailles correctional facility, for example, only one room was “heated,” she wrote. The middle of the room served as a toilet, and waste was removed by a “cart pulled by a horse.” Beyond the lack of basic infrastructure, she condemned “everything that fosters humiliation and dehumanization,” describing the “particularly perverse practices” of the director of the women’s prison in Rennes. “Obsessed with homosexuality,” this woman punished, as Veil recounts in her memoirs, even the smallest gestures of kindness that she interpreted as signs of affection—such as one inmate giving a sugar cube to another.

According to former FLN prisoner Mohand Zeggagh, who spoke to Le Monde on August 8, 2017, Simone Veil “quietly saved many lives.” “Over 1,600 individuals sentenced to death were waiting in the death rows of French prisons. She actively worked to delay executions as much as possible. In agreement with Minister Edmond Michelet, Madame Veil would prolong the transmission time for the most at-risk files or delay them while waiting for new legal elements, in order to postpone their execution.”

When Propaganda Erases Part of History

Propaganda against the regime of the Shah of Iran, combined with a process of voluntary blindness, obscured the progressive reforms he carried out during his 38-year reign.

The emancipation of women, access to education, culture, and free healthcare for all, the end of clerical feudalism, land redistribution to farmers, and the allocation of shares in companies and factories to employees and workers were all major advances for Iranian society. Iran was on the threshold of modernity and democracy before Khomeini’s seizure of power.

Who in France has heard of the “White Revolution” of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi?
Who knows that his government legalized abortion in 1973—two years before the Veil Law in France?

Who knows that this regime, often caricatured as a tyranny, granted women the right to vote in 1963 and included female ministers in its cabinet, while France had none between 1948 and 1974?

Who knows that this so-called despotic regime raised the minimum legal age of marriage for women to 18 in 1975, while France only raised it from 15 to 18 in 2006?

Who knows about the extremely ambitious program of social, political, and economic reforms that was submitted to a public referendum and ratified by parliament in 1963? This program redistributed lands exploited by clerics to around 2.5 million peasant families, created literacy and healthcare units for rural Iran, further curtailed the autonomy of tribal groups, and introduced social and legal reforms that promoted the emancipation and liberation of women.

Who knows that in the following decades, the per capita income of Iranians soared and oil revenues fueled a massive increase in public funding for industrial development and infrastructure projects—many of which Iranians still benefit from today?

And who knows that it was precisely these emancipatory policies of the Shah that provoked the fury of the clergy, who felt that the liberalization laws concerning women were contrary to Islamic values—and, more importantly, would diminish their power and income? How did the country of anti-clericalism and the separation of church and state—France—manage to be so thoroughly misled?

The Shah’s reforms had indeed eroded the traditional bases of clerical power. The expansion of secular courts had already reduced the clergy’s influence over law and jurisprudence, and the reforms’ emphasis on secular education further weakened the ulema’s former monopoly.

Just two weeks after the announcement of women’s right to vote, protests broke out in the bazaar and southern neighborhoods of Tehran, instigated by the mullahs. In response, women also demonstrated and went on strike. On January 26, 1963, a referendum on the White Revolution was held. Although women’s votes were counted separately from men’s, the referendum easily approved women’s right to vote.

These major advances were ignored by French and Western intellectuals who became mouthpieces for one of the most bloodthirsty regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries. All the social progress implemented before 1979 was dismantled by the mullahs in favor of systematic regression—especially regarding minority rights and women’s rights.

As early as 1980, this barbaric regime—whose leader had been protected by France and whose rise to power was facilitated by it—executed the Minister of Education, Farrokhroo Parsa, as an inaugural act of the barbarity and sexual apartheid it intended to impose on Iran.

The Collapse of Truth: From Illusions to Disillusionment

After the fall of the Shah, no evidence was ever found of the alleged mass massacres committed under his reign. On the contrary, the bloody repression and systematic purges orchestrated by the new Islamic regime far exceeded anything previously imagined.

On February 16, 1979—barely two weeks after Khomeini’s return and just five days after the official end of the monarchy in Iran—mass executions began in order to eliminate military and civilian leaders who could pose a threat of counter-revolution.
In 1988, within just two months (between July and August), 20,000 to 30,000 political prisoners were executed. These men and women—some even minors—were arbitrarily killed for their opinions and dumped into mass graves. These 1988 massacres have been qualified as crimes against humanity by international NGOs.

Even among the revolutionaries, disillusionment came swiftly. Shahran Tabari, former member of the Tudeh Communist Party (whose uncle was the party’s leader), now living in London, questions the decision to overthrow the Shah: “We didn’t understand what democracy was,” she admits. “Some members of the opposition disagreed with what was happening, but they remained silent. Everyone wanted the Shah gone at any cost,” she says. “It’s hard to understand how this happened. I feel like we were all brainwashed and manipulated.”

Homa Nategh, professor at the University of Tehran during the Revolution, shares this sense of guilt. She lost her illusions a few months after the mullahs took power and sought refuge in France, where she reflected on her role. “My guilt may be greater than others’ because during the revolution, I acted as both educator and researcher. Unfortunately, I was carried away by the fervor, I discarded my reservations and knowledge and joined the crowds in the streets, aligning myself with the ignorance of the masses.”

“The end justified the means,” she noted. “We cried out for freedom, but we didn’t truly understand what it meant. Neither I nor anyone else discussed freedom or grasped its essence; we interpreted it according to our own interests.”

“Revolution or Mistake?”
The Iranians who fight today under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” denounce what they call “The Mistake of ’79.” Despite the regime’s efforts to erase pre-1979 national history and impose ideological brainwashing, Iranians are well aware of the emancipatory reforms implemented under the Shah. They condemn the blindness of previous generations who sacrificed their freedom and their country on the altar of propaganda and ideological illusions.

In the face of this clear-sighted youth—now immune to the regime’s relentless propaganda—it is striking to observe that the errors in judgment of 1979 continue to be echoed in France and throughout the democratic world. Khomeini’s Islamic coup is still presented as a spontaneous and legitimate uprising, while the caricatured image of the Shah’s regime has become crystallized as historical truth.

France and Iran: 45 Years of Blindness

History must not be held hostage by ideology. It is time for France—the cradle of the Enlightenment—to wake up and finally acknowledge its blindness and its role in the rise of an Islamic state in Iran. France owes this to itself and to all those who continue to suffer the consequences of this tragic error. Not out of a sense of repentance, but out of respect for the values that underpin our democracy.

For 45 years, French diplomacy has continued to maintain conciliatory relations with the Islamic Republic, disregarding the will of the Iranian people. Under the pretext of “dialogue,” the Quai d’Orsay turns a blind eye to the systematic violations of human rights and the crimes against humanity committed daily by this regime—both against its own population and beyond its borders.

Facing the truth also means, for France, taking the opportunity to finally stand on the right side of history—and to seize the opportunities that a free Iran could represent for our own nation.

The hope of a democratic and secular future shaped by a young, highly educated, and fiercely determined people

Iran is home to 88 million people within its borders, and a diaspora of 8 million Iranians spread across the globe. With an average age of 32 and an educational level comparable to that of France, Iranians possess the free will and capacity to choose—by and for themselves—the best system of governance. One that can fulfill their civic aspirations and meet the geopolitical, economic, and climate challenges facing their nation, the region, and the world.
After 45 years of systematic destruction, they legitimately aspire to rebuild their Iran. They want to live in a secular democracy and in a peaceful Middle East.

Resistant to political manipulation and immune to all ideologies after 45 years of propaganda and totalitarianism, Iranians will not allow themselves to be instrumentalized again. They will not accept that their legitimate aspiration to overthrow a totalitarian regime be reduced to a mere demand for superficial reform.

The time has come for this nation—upon which the world has imposed its biased viewpoint for four decades to serve its own interests—to regain its sovereignty and decide its own future. The invisible engineers of propaganda may well devise new tools of manipulation, but let there be no mistake: Iran is not Libya, nor Syria.
Whether the West likes it or not, the Iranian people will be free, and the Iran of Enlightenment will rise again.

It is up to us to decide whether we wish to persist in our tactical blindness—or finally choose to accompany them toward the light.