generalspeaking

Well Intentioned, Far Far - Too Fast

He meant well, loving his country and feeling very personal responsibility as the Shah of Iran, to haul it out of the dark ages of poverty and intellectual stagnation. He became his country's leader when Great Britain and the Soviet Union helped to remove Reza Pahlavi his father, for his coziness with Nazi Germany eager to accept Iran into its orbit as another superior Aryan 'race'.

Hassan Esfandiary, and Mussa Nuri Esfandiari Iranian ambassador to the German Reich meeting Adolf Hitler Wikki Commons

So in 1941 young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the peacock throne of Persia. Taking the country from a backward dictatorship to that of a benevolent dictatorship which he administered deftly and with the future in mind of a wealthy, educated, technologically advanced country where medical services were top rated and education for girls and women front and centre.



In three decades of rule by the 'new' Shah of Iran the country had skyrocketed to become an industrial powerhouse with a strong, central government, and annual growth rates that averaged 10% between the 1960s and 70s. Its modernized health and education and communications systems were second to none. Its car factories and hydropower dams emphasized its growth.

The ranks of the middle class steadily expanded, and the country's military was envied by all its neighbours with well-trained and armed troops, provided with the most up-to-date weaponry. Nor did the Shah, a pious Muslim himself, ignore the place of religion in his country. Iran had a burgeoning Left and from them he took ideas in his overhaul to prevent them from gaining influence. He picked up social justice and equality standards, implementing them quietly.

He instituted a land reform plan breaking up large inherited landholdings and parcelling them to tenant farmers, and he launched a national literary campaign, introducing suffrage for women, while nationalizing forests, pasture lands, and water resources. He instituted legislation to privatize state-owned enterprise, allowing workers to earn shares in companies they worked for.

This spurred the country into finance and manufacturing leaping into mass industrialization that brought peasants to aspire to middle-class lives and move to the urban areas for factory and service jobs. The Shah proved himself an able and enterprising administrator of his country's affairs. His father's move toward secularizing the country was reversed while he consolidated his position as monarch, the proud possessor of all he surveyed.

And then came the backlash. The dreaded secret police called the SAVAK were loosed on the country's communists called the Tudeh, to prevent them from provoking social tensions in the country. A young member of the Tudeh attempted to assassinate the Shah, resulting in a huge police action. Eventually the modernization and economic reforms that had been instituted, though they all benefited the country and its citizens came up hard against a backlash.

Rationalizing the economy meant departing from custom and tradition and Iranians who had produced goods and services in a traditional way saw their hand work being sacrificed for mechanization. Dislocation of people who had always lived rurally finding themselves in urban settings for which they were unprepared led to prostitution, drug addiction and alcoholism. Parents lost authority over their children as a result of prevalent decadence and delinquency.

People began to feverishly cling more adamantly to their faith as traditional mores broke down around them.

"An almost delirious admiration for things Western had seized the country Everywhere in North Teheran one saw liquor stores, fancy international hotels, and signs advertising Gucci clothes or Kentucky Fried Chicken, as well as Western movie theaters and discos where young people could dance and drink on Thursday nights until all hours. Everyone, especially the young, was avid for European or American clothes, films, music. Such developments might not have seemed disturbing in the West, but in our country, propriety and filial obedience provided the glue that held families together, and  hence society itself. Many people felt that we were not only trying to catch up with the West, but to become the West, while an entire older generation of parents, even among Persians of my class, was shocked and outraged at what these Western ways were doing to their children, culture, and what Iranians considered moral behaviour."
Farman Farmaian, Daughter of Persia

Iran was portrayed by the discontents within it as a unique society until assault from an alienating "machine culture" of the industrialized west trampled on its values. Iranian discontent led to the downfall of the Shah and his escape with his family for haven to the United States. While France disgorged the exiled fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini and the Iranian Islamic Revolution was born, with the Islamic Republic of Iran resulting.

Now, almost everything that the Shah of Iran had done has been reversed. From his benign dictatorship to the theistic totalitarian rule of the current Islamist government, where strict Islamist fundamentalism has replaced the Shah's Iran of interaction with the West, and female emancipation. And state enterprises that had been privatized have returned to the control and ownership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Republican Guard.

And the pot they are stirring is whirling centrifuges, the better to serve their aspirations of furnishing themselves with a nuclear arsenal, impressing their authority and power upon their neighbours and emerging as the world power they have always believed themselves to be.

Labels: Heritage, Human Relations, Iran, Islam

posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 18, 2013