Russia’s relentless barrage of force networks with missile payloads also reaches dozens of Iranian Shahed suicide drones. Inside Iran, some 15,000 detained protesters are now threatened with mass execution following a recent court ruling by authorities in Tehran. As I pointed out in the last column, any of the countries competes against internal disintegration with external expansionism. In either case, ethnic regions show symptoms of fragmentation. (Currently, the Islamic Republic is busy bombing Iraq’s Kurds for inciting their own Kurdish provinces. )Iran’s dividing lines are widening. , long suppressed through the false anti-colonial and pan-Shiite fervor of the mullahs. Having fully exploited the old grievances, Tehran now faces deeper ancient forces that it can no longer ignore.
We vividly relive what we already knew of the main story, rising from uncontrollable nationwide protests against the Shah to his leaving the country, ultimately to treat his terminal cancer. Secret saved. The Iranian state, without its absolute rule, almost completely evaporated, leaving the embassy defenseless. Soon the United States had to grudgingly give asylum to the sick, wandering, and loveless Shah. Meanwhile, Khomeini returns from years of exile in France to become the central figure of the revolution. He and his fanatics showed up to free the hostages on the Shah’s return, a lawsuit. As the agony dragged on, Carter’s management also became a hostage to Khomeini, so obsessively was the crisis gripping America. The Shah died but the imprisonment continued. Khomeini discovered that he could use the hostages as a tool against his secular national opposition. Then, in September 1980, in medias res, Iraq invaded Iran. Desperate for the confiscated budget and even spare portions for US weapons originally purchased through the Shah, Tehran has sued Washington for a deal. In the end, President Carter was returned to the Americans, but only after squandering Ronald Reagan’s election, only on inauguration day, and only by holding Iran and the wider Middle East hostage. of the spread of the cancer of political Islam.
We knew this, those of us who lived through the months of drama through the daily television news. But the documentary also explains why it all happened in the first place, the impetus of the decades behind it. As such, the ancient narrative begins with the young shah being appointed under British patronage as some kind of World War II constitutional monarch, but actually begins when the popular Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, is overthrown in a coup of the CIA and MI6. Array In this almost universally accepted narrative, Iran’s fashionable story begins with the treacherous 1953 overthrow by Western colonial powers of a democratic nationalist hero. We see excerpts from a disturbingly candid interview years later with the coup leader’s planner, CIA Middle East leader Kermit Roosevelt, unabashedly acknowledging the action and his role in it. Array Power was necessarily transferred from the Mejlis, the elected parliament, to the Shah who have become a consumer despot of the United States. He built a great police state, a brilliantly corrupt elite, squandered vast amounts of national profits on his whims, which the great ranks of street protests in 1979 invoked with fervor and hatred of Britain and America.
While I appreciate the film, its liveliness, dynamism, likeability, intelligence, and complexity, I tend to think that the story cycle is now entering a phase where this familiar anti-Western narrative feels incomplete. Array And, in fact, the moment two hours explicitly highlight some of the contradictions. The Shah, for example, defended general schooling and, specifically, the schooling of women. The Khomeinists not only opposed the shah’s Western drift as an outsider to Iran, but rejected the more productive kinds of westernization he pushed as affronts to their devout fundamentalist values, adding women’s liberation to the forefront. The documentary is sensible in highlighting the paradoxical effect of the revolution on women’s rights, as it hints at what is to come 4 decades later in the existing uprising. One can be forgiven, therefore, for wondering. . . how do progressive thinkers who see all of Western imperialist/colonialist history as a monolithic evil reconcile this with, say, the relative benevolence of European domination for women and minorities in countries. like iran? Especially compared to what followed. To be frank, the external colonization was succeeded by a much harsher internal colonization, as is the case.
To draw an even more direct line between 1979 and the present, one will have to start before Mossadegh and the Shah. We have to go back to the early 1900s when, in effect, the British invented Iran as a geographical entity by drawing lines of demarcation against the incursions of Tsarist Russia. Until then, Persia had existed as an empire until the 19th century, itself colonizing other ethnic groups, contracting over the decades, being replaced by Russia’s march into the Caucasus. Around 1900, the British colonial powers began to rule Iran and soon created the Pahlavi dynasty from scratch to protect the unity of the country, necessarily to displace the decaying Qajar dynasty that had shown signs of nationalist resistance. This sounds commendable, but even then the anti-colonial elements were split between secularists and mullahs, with a clear likelihood of chaos and conflict. We’re talking about 1907. Skip ahead to 1941, when Iran, under the so-called British Monarchy, began taking reckless steps for independence by inviting Nazi influence, thereby threatening Allied oil supplies. It was therefore obligatory for the British to come back in force, to make the old Shah Pahlavi abdicate and make a passing fortune from the Shah of our time. He, at least, completely sided with the allies, albeit as a puppet.
What sense does all this Hitlerian tale of the Old Regime make? Just this: simplistic political morality of anti-Western imperialism/nationalism/colonial evils don’t keep a country or its other people in combicountry for long, they properly remove the darkness of hitale, wait for long-term events. Array Persia, as an empire, was an entity controlled by force and a devout code (Shia) first created in combicountry in the 16th century to enforce unity through a conquering Turkish dynasty. As a country-state since 1900, Iran was sewn into a combicountry by the British and Russians. It was a makeshift craft, occasionally through strangers. Then come the anti-imperialists of the 20th century, inflamed by nationalism. The nationalists of 1907 or 1979 never consulted any of the minorities and ethnic groups about whether they considered themselves Iranian. In effect, the countrymen rebelled against the call of a country created for them through foreigners whom they anathematized, who treated women and minorities better. The story is not as undeniable as the liberal certitudes of the 20th century believed. (In Saudi Arabia today, the ruler with the highest authority is the most progressive in the country to date towards women. )
In today’s era of open borders, where the concept of geographic region is on the verge of collapse, the reverse canonization of Mohammad Mossadegh is, or appears, naive. He was a nationalist of what nation? Not the fundamentalists. Or, for that matter, Turkish Kurds or Azeri. None of this is a criticism of the film’s fascinating and realistic storytelling. It is not a matter of a documentary to talk about the philosophies of history. But the accepted narrative is called for a profound reassessment, in Iran and elsewhere, with the metamorphosis of historiography in recent years. There is a segment where we see photographs of British settlers living elegantly juxtaposed with photographs of starving Iranian peasants. Damnable, to be sure, but the British did not create poverty in Iran, it was the collapse of the Persian Empire that did, while the British imposed stability. Britain had created the world’s largest oil facility at Abadan and was siphoning off the country’s oil wealth. Mossadegh sought to nationalize it for the benefit of the Iranians. Noble indeed, but in what country with nationalized oil would he like to live? Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Saddam’s Iraq? Where has this not led to great corruption, oppression, poverty and conflict? The 21st century has given us enough distance from the past that we can now ask such questions.
The United States, under President Eisenhower, replaced Britain and overthrew Mossadegh. In the decades that followed, the shah was short of money. Especially after the 1973 oil crisis that quadrupled prices. Nor did he absolutely abuse him. He has virtually eliminated famine in his country. He brought schooling to the villages for the first time, and targeted women in particular. The new middle class, relaxed and fed enough – also for the first time – to ask for more, is disgusting. Rural people, on the other hand, were horrified by the luxury and license only of the elites, but of all well-informed people. to depose the Shah.
How the hell was Mossadegh going to align those social forces any other way? He was not there. With much of the population illiterate in his day, the circle of democrats informed of him included an elite as small as the colonial British in Iran. What did the provinces know about the rule of law, equivalent rights, minorities or secular ideas? Above all, if Mossadegh had succeeded in driving the West back in 1953, the Soviets sitting just north of the border would have exerted pressure and twisted the fate of Iran, just as the Russians are doing now. So enough of this crazy Mossadegh mythology. He has done Iran more harm than good. A quarter of a century later, and after 1979, Moscow did try to interfere, looking to mobilize the Tudeh Party communists in Iran, but the Khomeinists, with the help of the Shah’s former secret police, eliminated one by one. a fact that has never been fully made public either then or now. What no one learned for decades, none of the players or even the protesters, was that they were playing with ancient forces other than what they thought, still unrecognized at the time, but clearer now. for us in hindsight. The documentary does not go into such arguments, but subtly leads the way and presents the unbiased evidence, offering the means for a new look back.
One comes away with a predominant sense of the blind arrogance of everyone involved. Kermit Roosevelt and his confidence in thankfully power the fate of some other culture. Mossadegh and his fanatics for thinking that intelligent intentions would only tip history in their direction, with no concept of the unmentionable forces inside and outside the country. Or whether the country intended to be a unified country. The Shah and his despicable despotism. Mutiny protesters on all sides intoxicated by the overthrow of the Shah, with no concept of internal divisions and what would result. Khomeini and his cronies and their cynical, relentless, ruthless, power-driven cruelty. Especially the Western media and its vampiric and self-destructive spectacles, manipulated so gently by the enemies of the West. A lot can be blamed, as the film makes clear, silently, relentlessly. What emerges from all sides is a total absence of doubt, modesty of purpose, until it is too late. And now, the only hope for those brave and steadfast women who abandon their hijab in the face of bullets comes from the much-maligned West and its values.