The Cause Worth Championing

Via the Americans, whom would the Israelis impose on Iran? Affections have lately been transferred to the ridiculous fantasist Reza Pahlavi, who is supported by a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and by almost no one else in the world. They have been prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. The Iranian monarchist flag has therefore become conspicuous at Far Right events the world over as the liberal media waxed sympathetic. But the tide may be turning, since Étienne Verité writes:

As global anger towards Iran’s Islamic Republic grows – especially among the Iranian diaspora – a dangerous nostalgia for Iran’s last monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, has resurfaced. The shah is being increasingly reimagined as a progressive moderniser, a misunderstood leader who supposedly propelled Iran into modernity, only to be toppled by religious fanatics.

Unsurprisingly, one of the most prominent supporters of this view is the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi. As Israeli and American bombs fell on Iran in June, Pahlavi declared that Iran had arrived at its ‘Berlin Wall moment’. He promised to lead a ‘free and democratic Iran, living at peace with our neighbours’, if Iranians overthrew the Islamic Republic. Pahlavi, who has lived in exile in America since the overthrow of his father’s regime in 1979, was cheered on by Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Unfortunately for Pahlavi, Iranians have longer memories than he seemingly does. To present the monarchy as a preferable alternative to the current regime is not only historically inaccurate, it ignores a critical detail. Namely, that the Islamic Republic’s architecture of repression was built on the shah’s foundations. Iran’s feared security apparatus – its instruments of surveillance, torture and centralised control – did not emerge spontaneously in 1979. Its blueprints can be found under the shah’s rule.

The pre-1979 regime epitomised tyranny in every meaningful respect. Power resided exclusively with an unelected monarch. Dissent was crushed by the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (SAVAK), a secret police force that, by the end of the shah’s reign, was infamous for its brutality. Political freedoms were nonexistent. Critics faced censorship, imprisonment, torture and execution.

SAVAK’s methods were notorious for their cruelty. After the fall of the shah, one former security chief admitted to murdering dozens of dissidents and torturing hundreds more. One of SAVAK’s murders very likely occurred on UK soil, when prominent intellectual Ali Shariati was found dead in Southampton, two months after fleeing his homeland. Indeed, the brutal legacy of Iran’s SAVAK continues to haunt its many victims to this day. Parviz Sabeti, the deputy head of SAVAK under the shah in the 1970s, was hit earlier this year with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Iranian exiles, who claim he subjected them to years of torture.

The rule of the shah proved that repression under a secular banner can be just as vicious as under a religious one. While the Islamic Republic expanded ideological persecution to women, minorities and religious dissidents, it was the shah’s Western-backed regime that pioneered the industrialisation of inhuman punishment.

Repression and fear were just some of the means by which Iranians suffered under the Pahlavi monarchy. Despite its leaders projecting a façade of modernity, which included Western architecture and relative equality between the sexes, profound inequality and injustice festered just beneath the surface. A tiny elite monopolised oil wealth, enjoyed imported luxuries and travelled widely. Most Iranians, however, languished in poverty, and were denied access to adequate education or healthcare. Rural areas in particular were catastrophically neglected.

The shah’s much trumpeted economic ‘development’ only served to entrench power and enrich cronies, not empower citizens. In 1979, a report from the New York Times found that the shah had misappropriated $1 billion before his overthrow. The shah didn’t modernise Iran equitably – instead, he deepened resentment and ignited the tinderbox of revolution.

None of this makes the case for the Islamic Republic. Rather than dismantle the shah’s machinery of oppression, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his predecessor, Ali Khamenei, absorbed and expanded it. SAVAK’s infrastructure, personnel and techniques became core components of the new regime’s security apparatus. The shah forged the very tools of repression his successors wield with even greater ruthlessness.

Tyranny is tyranny, regardless of whether it wears a crown or turban. The core malignancy isn’t the flavour of despotism – it’s despotism itself.

There is another profound danger posed by Pahlavi nostalgia. It manufactures a false binary: monarchy or mullahs. Iranians deserve far more than this grim choice. They deserve a future grounded in genuine self-determination, free expression and pluralism, not another top-down autocracy imposed in the name of ‘order’ or ‘modernity’.

From Western capitals, it’s easy to romanticise the shah’s era. Dictators often soften in memory when the present is unbearable. But Iran’s protest movements aren’t clamouring for a Pahlavi restoration. They demand an end to authoritarian rule, full stop. That is the cause worth championing.

In that case, let there be no return to the longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim of installing as Iran’s new regime the weirdest political cult in the world, which had been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population was under 30 years of age.

The Americans relocated that People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) to Albania between 2013 and 2016, not without local resistance, although it also maintains a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.

Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden’s, Bush’s and Blair’s Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn.

Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But these people really did and do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet they were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.

If Israel now wanted the Pahlavis instead, then the Americans would presumably have to jump to it, and Donald Trump would be glad to do so, recognising kindred spirits. Half the American electorate would now vote for Trump if he were dead, and will vote for his dynastic successors at every opportunity. At last, the United States has a conservative movement and party in the purest Old World sense, straightforwardly loyal to rule by a particular House. But it is not, as had once seemed likely, the Bourbonesque Bushes, but America’s Bonapartes. Or Pahlavis. Like Napoleon, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi even crowned himself. Your move, Donald.