-Analysis-

LONDON — Western capitals are witnessing large demonstrations to support the Palestinians people and denounce Israeli actions in Gaza, typically with prominent left-wing politicians leading marches and the liberal media inciting opinion against the Jewish state. For those old enough to remember events in Iran in 1978 and 1979, when protests helped topple a Westernizing monarchy to replace it with a revolutionary regime, there is a sense of deja vu.

Throughout 1978, Western capitals were also the setting of mass gatherings against Shah Mohammadreza Pahlavi, Iran's last monarch, whom the Left especially denounced as a tyrant. The protests expressed broad sympathy with his nemesis the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

By early 1979, Khomeini had seized power, and was showing Iranians what a real dictatorship meant.

Looking back, we know the Islamic Revolution might not have succeeded — though it's difficult to say for sure — without the intellectual collusion of Western writers, public figures and politicians.

It was a different time in terms of mass media, in their scope and impact, and there was certainly no Internet. Many inside Iran would catch the news, if not rumors, listening to the BBC World Service. Yet even the limited media like radio, television and newspapers duly allowed the friends of the revolution, including its Western friends, to inject their ideas into Iranian society.

Iran's know-it-all generation of 1978 lapped it all up, swallowing the propaganda whole. It was a epic mistake that engulfed the nation and ruined the lives of its children and grandchildren, with the punishment for such hubris cascading down to the generations that would follow.

And yes, the idiocy wasn't confined to Iran. It had infected cultural and political circles in the West that would turn their backs on the 18th century Enlightenment and all the advances it had made in history, politics and religion.