The Red-Green Alliance: How the Left Brought the Mullahs to Power — and What the Mullahs Did to Them

The "Red-Green Alliance" describes the recurring tactical coalition between the political left (Red = communism, socialism, Marxist movements) and Islamist movements (Green = political Islam). The two ideologies are fundamentally incompatible — Marxism is atheist and materialist; Islamism demands theocratic governance under divine law. Yet they repeatedly align against a common enemy: Western liberal capitalism, American influence, and the existing order.

The alliance is not accidental. It has a predictable structure, a predictable dynamic, and a predictable outcome. Iran 1979 is its most thoroughly documented case study.

The Red-Green Alliance is not driven by shared values — the left and political Islam share almost none. It is driven by a shared enemy.

The Marxist framework identifies Western capitalism and American imperial power as the primary force of oppression in the world. Any movement opposing American influence is, by this logic, an ally in the struggle — regardless of what that movement believes or what it would build in America's place. This is the "enemy of my enemy" logic applied without examination of who that enemy actually is.

The Islamist framework identifies Western liberal civilization as the primary obstacle to the global establishment of Sharia law. Alliances with non-Muslim political actors are tactically acceptable when they serve the movement's goals — a principle explicitly endorsed in Brotherhood documents. The Muslim Brotherhood's Explanatory Memorandum (1991) describes the process of "eliminating Western civilization from within" using "their hands" — including non-Muslim allies.

The result: Two movements with incompatible ultimate goals cooperate tactically against a common target, with each believing it will ultimately prevail.

Who is using whom: This is the central question. In every documented historical case, the answer has been the same: the Islamist movement is using the left. The left believes it is using the Islamists as shock troops. The Islamists are correct.

The common enemy: Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — the Shah of Iran — was a US-backed autocrat who had modernized Iran rapidly through a program called the White Revolution (1963): land reform, women's suffrage, literacy programs, industrialization. He was secular, pro-Western, and authoritarian. His secret police (SAVAK) was brutal. He was the perfect common enemy for both the Iranian left and the Iranian Islamist movement.

The pre-revolutionary coalition:

• The Tudeh Party (حزب توده ایران): The Iranian Communist Party, founded 1941, affiliated with the Soviet Union. After years of suppression under the Shah, Tudeh fully aligned with Khomeini and publicly endorsed his leadership. Tudeh General Secretary Noureddin Kianouri called on members to "unite behind Imam Khomeini" as the leader of the revolution.

• The Fedayeen (Sazman-e Cherik-ha-ye Fada'i-ye Khalq): Marxist guerrilla organization. Fought against the Shah's regime through armed struggle from the early 1970s. Aligned with the revolutionary coalition in 1979.

• Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK): A hybrid Islamic-Marxist organization — they interpreted Islam through a Marxist lens, seeing it as a revolutionary liberation theology. They were the largest and most organized armed opposition group. They marched alongside Khomeini's forces in the revolution.

• Secular nationalist left (National Front, various socialist parties): Secular parties that had opposed the Shah for decades, many in exile. They believed Khomeini would lead a broadly democratic movement that they could then guide.

Khomeini's strategy: Before and during the revolution, Khomeini presented himself carefully. He spoke of freedom, of democracy, of the rights of all Iranians. He told Western journalists that clerics would not run the government — they would return to their seminaries. He described his vision in broad terms that the left could interpret as compatible with their own. He did not publicize the concept of velayat-e faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist — absolute clerical rule) to mass Western or leftist audiences until he had consolidated power.

The New York Times published an op-ed in January 1979 by political scientist Richard Falk describing Khomeini as a man of "impeccable integrity" with a "remarkable combination of the popular and the spiritual." Falk wrote that Iranians would be "best served by an Islamic republic" that would be "a new model of popular revolution." This view was representative of significant left-liberal Western opinion at the time.

The Shah fell on February 11, 1979. Khomeini returned from exile in Paris on February 1. The revolutionary coalition had achieved its goal.

The consolidation of theocratic power was rapid and systematic.

1979: Revolutionary courts began executing former Shah-era officials and SAVAK agents. This had broad revolutionary support. Khomeini's Islamic Republican Party moved to dominate the new state structures.

1980 — Cultural Revolution: Universities closed for two years. Purge of secular and leftist faculty. Curriculum rewritten on Islamic principles. Student organizations not aligned with the regime dissolved.

1981 — The break with the MEK: The MEK, which had been the most powerful armed non-clerical revolutionary organization, declared war on the Islamic Republic after it became clear that theocratic governance left no role for them. The regime responded with mass arrests and executions. Thousands of MEK members were killed in street fighting, arrested, and executed. By the end of 1981, the organization had been effectively destroyed inside Iran.

1981-1983 — The purge of the left:

• The Fedayeen were suppressed and driven underground or into exile.
• The Tudeh Party — which had actively supported Khomeini and the Islamic Republic for four years, calling it a legitimate anti-imperialist revolution — was banned in 1983.
• Tudeh General Secretary Noureddin Kianouri, who had publicly endorsed the revolution, was arrested, tortured, and forced to deliver a televised confession renouncing Marxism and confessing to Soviet espionage. He was released in 1988 after a public show-trial confession and died under house arrest.
• Dozens of Tudeh leaders were imprisoned. Many were executed.

1988 — The Prison Massacres: The bloodiest episode of the post-revolutionary purge. In July-September 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the execution of political prisoners who remained "loyal" to opposition organizations — primarily MEK members, but also Fedayeen, Tudeh, and other leftist prisoners who had already been in prison for years.

"Death committees" were formed in each prison. Prisoners were called before committees and asked a series of questions: Are you a Muslim? Do you pray? Do you renounce your organization? Those who answered incorrectly — who refused to renounce their ideology or their organization, or who were judged insufficiently cooperative — were sent to the gallows.

The executions occurred in batches, over weeks, in prisons across Iran. Bodies were buried in mass graves.

Estimated death toll:

• Amnesty International: 4,500–5,000 executed in the 1988 massacres
• The MEK: 30,000 (disputed; likely an upper bound)
• Iranian human rights researchers: approximately 4,000-7,000 confirmed
• The Iranian government: still officially denies the massacres occurred

In 2016, a leaked audio recording of Deputy Supreme Leader Ayatollah Montazeri (who was the presumed successor to Khomeini until he was purged for objecting to the massacres) confirmed the scale and deliberateness of the executions. Montazeri is heard telling the Death Committee: "The greatest crime committed during the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, has been committed by you."

The total pattern:

Yuri Bezmenov said in 1984: "The useful idiots... are the first to be executed after the revolution succeeds. They are lined up against a wall and shot." He was describing a pattern he had observed from the Soviet side. The Iranian case confirms it from the Islamist side.

Iran 1979 is not an anomaly. The Red-Green Alliance structure recurs wherever Islamist movements are building political power in Western countries:

The logical contradiction no one examines:

• Hamas executes gay men. The Palestinian Authority criminalizes homosexuality. Iran executes gay people. Yet LGBT organizations lead and populate "Free Palestine" marches and have been among the loudest voices in anti-Israel activism.

• Women under Islamist governance face unequal legal testimony, polygamy, honor killing frameworks, compulsory covering, and restricted public life. Yet feminist organizations defend Islamist cultural practices as autonomy and align with Islamist political causes.

• The Western academic left argues for abolishing capitalism, Western imperialism, and bourgeois democratic institutions. Islamist political movements explicitly aim to replace those institutions — not with Marxist collectivism, but with theocratic governance. The left ignores this distinction because the primary target (Western liberal capitalism) is shared.

The question the left does not ask: After we win — what happens next?

The answer from Iran is: the mullahs execute you.

Why the alliance is asymmetric: The Islamist movement knows exactly what it is building. The Muslim Brotherhood's Explanatory Memorandum describes the end goal clearly to its own members — a world governed by Sharia law, Western civilization eliminated. The Western left does not have an equivalent clarity about what comes after the revolution. This asymmetry — one party knowing exactly what it wants, the other unclear — consistently resolves in favor of the party with a coherent end state.

The historical pattern: Every revolution in which a tactical alliance between a disciplined ideological movement and a broader leftist coalition has succeeded has ended the same way. France 1793 (Jacobins eliminated the Girondins who enabled them). Russia 1917-1921 (Bolsheviks eliminated the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries). China 1949 (CCP eliminated liberal intellectuals and democratic socialists). Cuba 1959 (Castro eliminated the anti-Batista liberals who enabled the revolution). Iran 1979.

In each case, the disciplined ideological movement — the one with a clear vision of the end state — eliminated the broader coalition that had enabled it to gain power, once that coalition was no longer needed.

The recurrence of this pattern — documented across two centuries, across multiple ideologies and continents — raises a question: why does the Western left keep forming alliances with movements that will eventually destroy it?

The answer is in the demoralization framework: If you have been taught that Western civilization is the source of all evil — colonialism, capitalism, racism, imperialism — then any movement opposing the West appears as a liberation movement. You evaluate the movement by what it opposes, not by what it would build. You do not examine the end state because the end state is secondary to the shared enemy.

This is precisely what Yuri Bezmenov described as the product of Stage 1 demoralization. A person who has been fully demoralized cannot accurately assess information — including information about the nature of the movement they are supporting. They evaluate everything through the frame that Western civilization is the primary evil, and that frame was installed precisely to disable their capacity to recognize other threats.

The tell: When a Western leftist is shown that Hamas executes gay men and responds "but Israeli apartheid" — that is the demoralization response. The information about Hamas was processed through the frame, not evaluated on its own terms. The frame overrides the data.

The frame was built over decades. In the United States, Bezmenov said in 1984, it had already been built. Whether you accept his assessment of the mechanism or not, the observable behavior — supporting movements that would kill you, if they had the power — suggests that something has disabled the evaluative faculty that would normally prevent this.

Iran 1979 — primary and secondary sources:

• Times of Israel: "1979 Iran: When the Left Helped the Islamists Gain Power"
• Wikipedia: Political repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• Wikipedia: 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners
• Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (1999, University of California Press)
• Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982, Princeton University Press)

The Montazeri audio recording:

• Leaked 2016; transcript published by BBC Persian, Radio Farda, and multiple human rights organizations
• Montazeri explicitly condemns the Death Committees: "The greatest crime committed during the Islamic Republic... has been committed by you"

Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum:

• Discovered FBI 2004; entered as evidence in Holy Land Foundation trial 2007-2008
• Published by Center for Security Policy: An Explanatory Memorandum: From the Archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America (2010)

Yuri Bezmenov:

• G. Edward Griffin interview (1984); transcript at american-pride.net
• Thomas Schuman [Bezmenov pen name], Love Letter to America (1984)

Useful idiots — historical pattern:

• Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990, Knopf) — on the Bolshevik elimination of socialist allies
• Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (1971) — on Castro's elimination of liberal allies
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) — on the structural dynamics of revolutionary purges