by Sayid Marcos Tenorio
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addresses to the public on the occasion of the 47th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution at his residence in Tehran, Iran on February 1, 2026. [Iranian Leader Press Office – Anadolu Agency ]
Forty-seven years after 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Iran remains one of the most explosive and most defamed events in contemporary history. It was not merely the overthrow of a corrupt monarchy. It was the rupture of a people with an imperialist system that treated Iran as a strategic colony.
For this reason, the Islamic Revolution does not belong to the past. It continues today, waged through sanctions, sabotage, psychological warfare, and permanent attempts at “regime change”.
To understand this continuity, it is necessary to go back to 1953. The Anglo-American coup against President Mohammad Mossadegh destroyed a democratic and nationalist experiment in order to reinstall the Shah Pahlavi as guardian of Western interests in the Persian Gulf.
Iran was turned into a US military base, a captive market for the West, and a laboratory of political repression through SAVAK, the political police trained by the CIA and “Israel”. This was the cradle of the authoritarianism that the Revolution demolished.
In this context, Imam Khomeini emerges. His opposition was not moralistic, but structurally anti-colonial. He denounced the “White Revolution” as subordinate modernisation, rejected the capitulation law that rendered foreign military personnel untouchable before Iranian justice, and condemned the Shah’s alliance with “Israel”.
Imprisoned and exiled, he became the voice of a silenced nation, a voice that crossed borders through cassette tapes, sermons, and pamphlets, creating a political consciousness impossible to suffocate.
The return of Imam Khomeini on 1 February 1979 was a global political earthquake. More than 6 million Iranians took to the streets, forming a human corridor over 30 kilometres long, from the airport to the Beheshte Zahra cemetery. There was no chaos. There was popular organisation and collective dignity, with the people demonstrating that they did not need Western tutelage to be politically mature.
At the martyrs’ cemetery, Khomeini decreed the end of the puppet regime and instituted a government based on popular sovereignty. Something was born there that the West would never accept: an independent state that combined faith, social justice, and resistance to imperialism.
Since then, revolutionary Iran has built achievements that the hegemonic media tries to erase. It has developed its own science and technology, an autonomous defence industry, advanced medicine, aerospace capability, energy, and a multipolar foreign policy.
It forged a regional architecture of resistance against occupations and wars of aggression. It did all this under a brutal sanctions regime designed not to “negotiate”, but to suffocate the people and break their political will.
The central pretext for this siege is the Iranian nuclear programme. While “Israel” possesses nuclear weapons outside any treaty and under US protection, Iran, a signatory of the NPT, is treated as a threat simply for claiming peaceful nuclear technology.
But the current siege is above all psychological. The so-called “colour revolutions” do not begin in the streets; they begin on social networks, in front NGOs and think tanks that manufacture narratives to turn terrorism into “protest” and imperial repression into “defence of democracy”.
At the end of December 2025 and the beginning of January 2026, Iran faced a new hybrid offensive. What began as a legitimate demonstration by merchants was quickly converted into urban terrorism, with armed attacks, arson against schools and mosques, sabotage of public services, and the murder of civilians and police officers.
Degenerate figures linked to the former regime, such as Reza Pahlavi, and figures like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, acted as open instigators, promising sanctions and external support.
The character of this operation, architected by foreign intelligence agencies, became blatant. The objective was coordinated armed violence, information warfare, fabrication of victim numbers, and attempts to blame the Iranian state itself.
The former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, admitted that the US and Mossad acted in support of the unrest – an admission that dismantles the farce of “spontaneous protest”.
The pattern of this hybrid war is well known. When Iran resists, the West responds with direct repression. When that fails, it launches psychological warfare. When this fails, it imposes sanctions. And when sanctions do not bring down the regime, it again attempts a “colour revolution”.
The objective was at no point human rights or freedoms. It was always regime change and the restoration of an order submissive to imperialism.
That is why the Islamic Revolution continues to be demonised. It challenges three pillars of the imperial system: US military hegemony, the regional supremacy of “Israel”, and the economic dependency of the Global South. By articulating faith, sovereignty, and resistance, Iran created an alternative model that inspires peoples and alarms empires.
At 47 years old, the Revolution is not a relic; it is a trench and a living example. It has survived the war imposed by Iraq, decades of sanctions, sabotage, targeted assassinations, and incessant campaigns of defamation. The Islamic Revolution stands because it is rooted in the memory and will of its people.
Today, as the West tries to strangle Iran through economic and narrative means, the lesson remains strong: no empire can indefinitely subjugate a nation that has decided to be free. The history of 1979 was not an accident. It was the expression of a collective will that still pulses and serves as a beacon for peoples who resist for sovereignty.
To understand the 47 years of the Islamic Revolution is to understand the struggle between sovereignty and domination, between truth and propaganda, between resistance and empire. And in this battle, Iran continues to be one of the great arenas of dispute of the 21st century, not as a passive victim, but as a historical subject in combat.
