No this is not some pseudo-Marxist analysis as favoured by the looney Iranian left to blame the Pahlavis and the Shah for Brexit although I am sure some of the derranged Islamo-Fascist supporting serial commentators here will find a way of blaming HIM.

Yet the two events are analogous not in physical calamity but as examples of how nations  can commit national suicide for no  reason.

Not wishing to wade into the arguments of either side of Brexit suffice to say the EU has a lot of problems but since Britain was neither part of the EU nor Schengen nor Euro to give up its veto and  its membership is a sheer act of luacy and economic vandalism.

Aside from oxymoronic examples of leavers arguing Britain could leave yet keep the benefits of the single market, the clear sign of British lunacy was it must leave without a plan for the future.  It is the same lunacy that affected the vast majority Iroonis in 1978/9, in the case of Iranians the sheer collective madness expressed by the mantra "the Shah must go" without a single thought about what was to come next. Those fervent supporters of the above mantra who later came to regret their actions bitterly, could never answer the question of what would happen once HIM left. Khomeini never hid his contempt for democracy but nobody would listen as their revolutionary egos would not allow it.

The same madness gripped Britain, to leave without any planning or forethought about what came next and the future relationship with the EU. How did their common sense and natural conservativeness evaporate? We know factors such as "it was a protest vote against austerity" or "it is xenophobia" as in rebellion by those corners of England against EU's freedom of movement that had never seen immigration as most third worlders settle down in the cities or industrial centres, but there is no satisfactory explanation.

Nations can and do commit suicide often without even realising it.