A Strange Year: 1979

Khomeini railed against dictatorship (and then created one) but that wasn't all.

A quick note for subscribers: My book The Problem of Democracy is now available on Amazon for one of the lowest prices I’ve seen since it came out. It’s also now available as an audiobook, narrated by the Egyptian-American actor who starred in the Prison Break revival (!)

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Some of you will know that I have a perhaps unhealthy preoccupation with a now obscure Ayatollah Khomeini interview in the New York Times interview in which he, among other things, pronounced (with no apparent sense of irony) that “dictatorship is the greatest sin in Islam.” That was early 1979, before the Iranian revolution became what it turned out to be—a prelude to dictatorship despite (or perhaps because of) Khomeini’s idiosyncratic politico-theological musings.

A lot was happening in 1979, though. I do wonder what that year would have been like if people had social media.