The 1953 Coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq marks a clear rupture with the lawful and nonviolent aspirations of the Iranian elites which were mainly formulated and experienced during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. In the 1960s and 1970s, Frantz Fanon's celebration of violence as a means of liberation from colonial rule became a source of inspiration for all those who were dreaming of putting an end to the Shah's oppressive regime. Violence as the dominant intellectual project of pre-revolutionary Iran was embodied by the religious and secular segments of the Iranian intelligentsia. At the same time, the nativist attitudes of thinkers like Šariati and Al-e Ahmad left plenty of space for tradition to become a political statement. The two utopias of a classless society and Islamic government became the dominant narratives of dissident thought and action in the Pahlavi state. As such, the Shah's political war against Iranian liberalism and the followers of Mosaddeq in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the diminution of nonviolent political discourse and the rise of the radical Left and Islamic fundamentalism in pre-revolutionary Iran. It was on the violent stage framed and normalized by Mohammad Reza Shah and his Marxist opponents that Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded in establishing a violent theocracy in Iran. Those who made Mosaddeq's nonviolent reforms impossible did not know that they were guiding Iranian society towards tremendous, inexorable violence twenty-five years later.