 This is a story about how the great powers Britain and America conspired to murder democracy in Iran, driven by their greed for oil, and how the women of Iran are paying the price for this criminal geopolitical act. On 16th of September, a car was going down a highway in Tehran when it was stopped by Iran's dreaded guidance patrol of moral police. Sitting inside was a young 22-year-old woman, Maesah Amini. The police arrested Maesah for not following Iran's strict hijab protocol for women, which stops them from showing any part of their hair in public. Maesah was taken to a detention center and this footage released by the authorities shows a waiting in a hall along with other detainees. She then walks up to a detention center employee and can be seen trying to convince them that her scarf and robe meet the religious dress code. She is then seen holding her head and collapsing. After a while, medics come and carry her away. Now, Maesah's brother who was waiting outside the detention center says that he heard screaming from inside the detention center and then an ambulance drove up and then a witness came out and told him that the security forces had killed a young woman inside. Maesah was taken to a local hospital where she stayed in a coma for two days after which she died. A photograph released by an Iranian human rights group shows blood oozing out of her ears, which doctors say suggests she had suffered brain injuries. Witnesses told Maesah's family that she was severely beaten inside the detention center because she had protested against the way she was being insulted. But the authorities say that she had a massive heart attack and collapsed. We don't know what really happened, but what we definitely know is that Maesah's death sparked off massive protests across Iran and across the world. Scores of women took off their hijabs and headscarves in solidarity with Maesah, risking their own arrest and hundreds of men came out in their support. This viral video of a man getting off a bike and striking a protesting woman represents the current sentiment on the street, even though its authenticity cannot be verified. The men gather and beat him as he tries to show some sort of an identity card, perhaps to prove that he is an undercover security agent. The Iranian government has reacted by clamping down on public demonstrations and shutting down the internet. Viral videos claiming to be recent scenes from Iran suggest that the security forces are finding it very difficult to control the streets. There are two things to be said here. The first is that protests against the hijab are not new in Iran. They've happened in the past, but probably never at this scale so widespread. The second is that we need to be careful not to fall into stereotypes about Iran. Since the Islamic revolution, there are many aspects of women's life which has actually improved, such as education, health, and even labour participation rate of women when compared to other countries in West Asia and even other Asian countries. But when it comes to civil rights, personal rights, women have been systematically subjugated in Iran. The West economic siege has only made things worse because it has allowed religious fundamentalist groups to project gender reforms as westernization and that has got them a lot of popular support for subjugating women and often from women themselves. But was Iran always this conservative when it came to women? The answer is a resounding no, but for understand that we have to rewind some 70 years to 1951-52 when this man Mohammad Mozadek used to govern Iran. He was the country's last democratically elected secular progressive leader. In the two short years that Mozadek was prime minister, he pushed through many pro-people reforms. He forced factory owners to give sick leave, banned forced labour and farming, imposed a 20% tax on the rent collected by landlords and allowed women to vote in local body elections. In other words, he was pushing through many democratic secular processes in Iran's polity. But his single biggest reform was to nationalize Iran's biggest oil company, the Anglo-Iranian oil company which was owned largely by the British government. Under the deal with Iran, 84% of the revenues were supposed to be kept by the British. But the books were cooked in such a manner that Iran actually got hardly anything from the proceeds of the oil trade. In May 1952, Mozadek cancelled Britain's concessions on the Abadan oil field where this company extracted oil. And since then, he became their biggest enemy and plans were hatched by the secret service of UK MI5 to replace Mozadek, to get rid of it. Initially, Mozadek got support from President Truman of the USA who backed Iran's right to own its own natural resources. But by late 1952, Truman was replaced by Eisenhower who was convinced by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that Mozadek was a Soviet spy dependent on the Iranian Communist Party. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a CIA operative and a grandson of an American president, was sent across the border from Lebanon to Tehran under the fake identity of an American businessman with the express order of organizing a coup against Mozadek. He was ably helped by Norman Dabishire, an MI5 agent who had already been working on a possible coup. It took two coup attempts to get rid of Mozadek and American and British agents paged huge bribes to local gangsters, to army officers, to ministers, to clerics, to journalists, to create public opinion against Mozadek. Finally, a plan was hatched to attack Mozadek's home. Army units with tanks and machine guns attacked it. And many Iranian army soldiers who were protecting that house were killed in the operation. Mozadek was arrested and in a show trial he was sent to three years of solitary confinement and then kept under house arrest for another 11 years. The Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pellavi, who had fled to Rome, returned to Tehran to rule as the king. General Fazlullah Zahidi, who had been the face of the coup, was installed by the CIA as Iran's new prime minister. He was a known Nazi collaborator and opium addict and kept an illustrated register of prostitutes. The first thing the Shah did when he came back to power was to return the Abadan oil fields to the western powers. But now the British didn't call the shots anymore. The Indo-Iranian oil company had to join hands with several other American companies, including Gulf oil, Shell and others, to form a consortium which would then extract oil from Iran. But popular anger could not be suppressed and there was a lot of resentment against the Shah which was brutally suppressed by the Shah's new secret police called the Sawak, which had been trained by the CIA, run by the CIA and also trained by Israel's Mozadek. Over the years, Sawak came to be known as one of the world's most brutal secret police organizations and through brutal torture they would make many dissidents confess to their so called crimes. Poets, writers, intellectuals were sent to prison, many were tortured for days on end, thousands died, many leftists, liberals were completely removed and decimated from Iranian politics. With secular left liberal voices gone, people turned to Ayatollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist clerics who led the Islamic revolution later on. One strange side effect of this suppression of democratic forces related to the Hijab or the Chador, the first Shah of Iran had actually banned Hijab in public places in 1936 because he considered it to be a sign of being backward and what that did was women from conservative traditional families could no longer go out in public because they would not go out without a Hijab or a Chador. What was meant to liberate women ended up pushing them even more back into their own traditions and back in the home and wearing a hijab actually became a sign of silent protest in the 1970s and many women started wearing it and Ayatollah Khomeini supported them and they had this belief that when the Shah is removed, when the Shah is ousted, they would stop wearing the hijab or at least have it as a choice but that was not to be. When the Islamic revolution took place in 1979, anyone who was a government servant or worked in a government office was forced to wear a hijab and many women were stopped from entering public spaces like hospitals, schools and banks if they didn't wear a hijab and in 1983 a law was passed which made hijab and cloak compulsory and mandatory for women in public places even if they were inside a car. This was the result of the CIA's deliberate policies from the 1950s onwards to dismantle democratic secular liberal forces in the entire West Asian region. Iran is one of those places which could not be controlled by the Western powers but look at Saudi Arabia where women's condition is even worse it is one of the biggest allies of Western forces. Ultimately women have paid the highest price for the West's greed for oil that's the show today keep watching news click do subscribe to our channel like this video share it as well