It is still unclear what will happen next in Iran. I fervently hope the current protests will cause the tyrants of Tehran to fall. It would be ideal if they were replaced by an order that allowed the population of 90 million to choose who governs them and build a country that reflects joy, hope and modernity rather than Ali Khamenei’s brutal Islamist fever dream.

I also know how unlikely that is. Revolutions tend to produce disorder and repression, not order and freedom. After the failure of the Constitutional Revolution in 1911, there was a decade of chaos, fragmentation and insurgency in Iran until Reza Khan seized power and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. In 1979, his son was driven into exile by a revolution welcomed by progressives – including the unspeakable Michel Foucault, the radical feminist Kate Millett and the international jurist Richard Falk (who was happy to criticise Israel at the drop of a hat). That turned into an obscurantist nightmare and a decade of war.

And since the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Khomeini, the signature achievement of the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has been to turn Khomeini’s personalised theocratic tyranny into a financially centralised, highly organised and brutally repressive praetorian state protected by hundreds of thousands of ideologically indoctrinated Basijis (the thuggish street militia) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). There may be a question mark over the regular army, the Artesh. But if the Basij, the IRGC and the religious elite remain cohesive, the regime will survive for now – no matter what the cost in human life.

There are people – all Iranian – whose views on these matters I greatly respect: Karim Sadjadpour, Ali Ansari, Behnam Ben Taleblu, Saeid Golkar and Holly Dagres, for example. There are some – step forward Owen Jones – who have become instant experts and want to ensure mostly that neither the US nor Israel benefits from the Islamic Republic’s collapse. There are others........

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