I feel very uncomfortable when people (particularly Westerners) white wash the atrocities of the Shah out of some twisted logic that Iran was somehow any better off. When Iranians wave the former flag of the monarchy, is there unironic support for that part of their history?

An excerpt from Robert Fisk’s chapter on the Iranian Revolution showing how hypocritical it is for Westerners to claim the Islamic Revolution wasn’t a popular movement - "(in 1979) I was stopped by a schoolboy outside the gates of Tehran University who wanted to sell me a remarkable example post-revolutionary graphic art. It was a cardboard face mask of the Shah, his jowls slack and diseased, his crown kept in place only by two massive black horns. Push out the detachable cardboard eyes, place the mask over your own face and you could peer through the Devil’s own image. Whenever a stroller purchased a mask, whenever I held it to my own face, the young men would cry Marg ba Shah - "Death to the Shah!

An account of SAVAK (the Shah’s intelligence squad) torture rooms from the same chapter - “… downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bed frames so that the people strapped to them could be brought down onto the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife, and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer, they had been shaving off people’s hands”.

Iranians have every right to be frustrated but Westerners co-opting such demonstrations with disgusting pro-Shah nonsense must be firmly opposed