The Other Side of the Shah
A few weeks ago I came across a YouTube video of an interview with the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. I watched it, then another, and then another, and before I knew it I'd spent an hour watching videos. From my years of reading about the country, mainly through "left" or "liberal" books discussing the sordid history of American interventionism, I had developed a view of the Shah as an American-controlled puppet dictator; certainly better than his successors turned out to be, but objectionable nonetheless. Contrary to that, most Iranians I've talked to regarded him as an educated, righteous leader, but since they all came from the same small, relatively well-off north Tehran community, I was always more inclined to believe what I read about him in books. But from watching these videos - the first time I'd actually seen him speak - I developed a keen interest in him, and found that even though he seemed a bit snobbish, there was something about him that fascinated me; I suddenly wanted to learn more about this man.
I started reading more about him online and found that he'd written a book in 1980 called Answer To History (Pasukh bih Tarikh in Farsi). The book detailed his time as Shah, starting with his coronation in 1941 when his father, Reza Shah, stepped down soon after the British and Russians invaded the country during World War II, all the way to the 1979 revolution and ending with his brief period in exile. His failing health lead to his death just a few months after completing the book but it wasn't published until 1982.
The next day I located the book in a library (it apparently only had one printing in 1982 and is difficult to find new in any retail or online stores) and picked it up. While there I also got his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi's book Faces In A Mirror, published in 1980.
In short, I found the Shah's book fascinating. As time goes on, I'm starting to increasingly find that many of the books I've chosen to read in the past have been very consistently one-sided. Hearing the story in his own words, it was undeniably clear that the Shah was an intelligent, educated man, who truly desired to see his country progress and become a world power through modernization and education. The reasons for his downfall are many and varied and complex, but in essence, he seemed to believe - and subsequent history seems to have confirmed - that the reforms he was trying to make were simultaneously too slow for his American and British allies and too fast for his citizens. With the wrath of both groups against him, increasing pressure from both outside and within the country, it was only a matter of time until something had to give.
He gives example after example of reforms he initiated, or industries he built, or education he improved, and on numbers alone it's obvious that his governance did wonders for the overall state of the country. His detractors, especially toward the end, usually focused on human rights violations, especially by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police; although he denies claims of their excesses, I did get the feeling that either he was leaving something unsaid or he just didn't know what had actually been going on, having possibly been insulated from such vulgar details by his loyal court. Either way, his refutation of those criticisms seemed weak, especially relative to the solid defense he made of everything else he'd accomplished over his 37-year reign.
When I finished the book, I felt I had an entirely new perspective on the Shah and the revolution. What a stark contrast to the Iran that my generation knows, which starts with Khomeini and the hostage crisis, and completely overlooks the preceding fifty-plus years when the country was mostly a strong ally, where US presidents would routinely visit, and tens of thousands of American university students would study! It was like an entirely unexpected second side to a long-familiar story had been revealed to me, and I was fascinated. In particular, his detailing of the pathetically flip-flopping support by the US government was frustrating in light of later events, and his predictions of how the revolution would alter both the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the US, and the West's relationship with the Middle East, were uncannily accurate.
I quickly moved on to Ashraf's book and found it a great companion to the Shah's narrative of the same time period, if quite a bit more personal and slightly less historical. Again, she painted an impressive picture of a country whose government was struggling against all odds to drag it into the modern era.
Having finished that book last night, I then read a chapter on Iran from The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, which shed additional light on this period, especially regarding the KGB's destablization campaigns against the Shah, including support for the Tudeh Communist Party in Iran. Among other interesting facts I was able to glean by comparing these texts, it seems that Fereydoun Hoveyda, the brother of the Shah's former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and who served as Iranian Ambassador to the UN (and who, at first, turned against the Shah after the revolution, blaming him for his brother's execution by Khomeini) was on the payroll of the KGB and passed falsified intelligent reports on to the Shah multiple times. This was the first and only reference I've ever seen to this, possibly due to the relatively recent release of this book only nine months ago. Another surprise was an explanation of how the KGB paid someone to introduce Farah Diba, the Shah's third and final wife, for the first time to the Shah, hoping that her leftist leanings developed while a student in Paris would clear the way for greater Soviet influence over the Shah.
Taken together, these videos and books have whetted my appetite to learn more about this period, and about all the forces that came together to create the revolution. As agreed on by just about everyone, but told particularly eloquently and personally by the Shah, the revolution was a profoundly disruptive and regressive event that not only destroyed the progress made by a growing country over many decades, but undeniably changed the world political landscape for the worse and helped set the stage for many of the most pressing problems of the recent past, today, and probably well into the future.
Once again I'm amazed at how random, mostly aimless wandering around the internet can lead a person down a path of knowledge that they never expected to find; this has happened to me numerous times and is one of the reasons I so love the internet. Many people complain that we've become too reliant on it and don't often enough question it's accuracy, which is a valid complaint, but the fact is that much, if not most of what's out there is quite factual and useful, especially if it leads to exploration of other, less accessible forms of media too.
I started reading more about him online and found that he'd written a book in 1980 called Answer To History (Pasukh bih Tarikh in Farsi). The book detailed his time as Shah, starting with his coronation in 1941 when his father, Reza Shah, stepped down soon after the British and Russians invaded the country during World War II, all the way to the 1979 revolution and ending with his brief period in exile. His failing health lead to his death just a few months after completing the book but it wasn't published until 1982.
The next day I located the book in a library (it apparently only had one printing in 1982 and is difficult to find new in any retail or online stores) and picked it up. While there I also got his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi's book Faces In A Mirror, published in 1980.
In short, I found the Shah's book fascinating. As time goes on, I'm starting to increasingly find that many of the books I've chosen to read in the past have been very consistently one-sided. Hearing the story in his own words, it was undeniably clear that the Shah was an intelligent, educated man, who truly desired to see his country progress and become a world power through modernization and education. The reasons for his downfall are many and varied and complex, but in essence, he seemed to believe - and subsequent history seems to have confirmed - that the reforms he was trying to make were simultaneously too slow for his American and British allies and too fast for his citizens. With the wrath of both groups against him, increasing pressure from both outside and within the country, it was only a matter of time until something had to give.
He gives example after example of reforms he initiated, or industries he built, or education he improved, and on numbers alone it's obvious that his governance did wonders for the overall state of the country. His detractors, especially toward the end, usually focused on human rights violations, especially by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police; although he denies claims of their excesses, I did get the feeling that either he was leaving something unsaid or he just didn't know what had actually been going on, having possibly been insulated from such vulgar details by his loyal court. Either way, his refutation of those criticisms seemed weak, especially relative to the solid defense he made of everything else he'd accomplished over his 37-year reign.
When I finished the book, I felt I had an entirely new perspective on the Shah and the revolution. What a stark contrast to the Iran that my generation knows, which starts with Khomeini and the hostage crisis, and completely overlooks the preceding fifty-plus years when the country was mostly a strong ally, where US presidents would routinely visit, and tens of thousands of American university students would study! It was like an entirely unexpected second side to a long-familiar story had been revealed to me, and I was fascinated. In particular, his detailing of the pathetically flip-flopping support by the US government was frustrating in light of later events, and his predictions of how the revolution would alter both the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the US, and the West's relationship with the Middle East, were uncannily accurate.
I quickly moved on to Ashraf's book and found it a great companion to the Shah's narrative of the same time period, if quite a bit more personal and slightly less historical. Again, she painted an impressive picture of a country whose government was struggling against all odds to drag it into the modern era.
Having finished that book last night, I then read a chapter on Iran from The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, which shed additional light on this period, especially regarding the KGB's destablization campaigns against the Shah, including support for the Tudeh Communist Party in Iran. Among other interesting facts I was able to glean by comparing these texts, it seems that Fereydoun Hoveyda, the brother of the Shah's former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and who served as Iranian Ambassador to the UN (and who, at first, turned against the Shah after the revolution, blaming him for his brother's execution by Khomeini) was on the payroll of the KGB and passed falsified intelligent reports on to the Shah multiple times. This was the first and only reference I've ever seen to this, possibly due to the relatively recent release of this book only nine months ago. Another surprise was an explanation of how the KGB paid someone to introduce Farah Diba, the Shah's third and final wife, for the first time to the Shah, hoping that her leftist leanings developed while a student in Paris would clear the way for greater Soviet influence over the Shah.
Taken together, these videos and books have whetted my appetite to learn more about this period, and about all the forces that came together to create the revolution. As agreed on by just about everyone, but told particularly eloquently and personally by the Shah, the revolution was a profoundly disruptive and regressive event that not only destroyed the progress made by a growing country over many decades, but undeniably changed the world political landscape for the worse and helped set the stage for many of the most pressing problems of the recent past, today, and probably well into the future.
Once again I'm amazed at how random, mostly aimless wandering around the internet can lead a person down a path of knowledge that they never expected to find; this has happened to me numerous times and is one of the reasons I so love the internet. Many people complain that we've become too reliant on it and don't often enough question it's accuracy, which is a valid complaint, but the fact is that much, if not most of what's out there is quite factual and useful, especially if it leads to exploration of other, less accessible forms of media too.
posted by GregP at 2:02 PM
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