Ruzbeh Saadati – March 11, 2019
“Hegel, at one point, pointed out that all great events and figures in world history appear, so to speak, twice; he forgot to add that the first time is as tragedy, and the second time as a ridiculous spectacle.” [Marx; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]
Mohammad Reza Shah embodied this Marxian notion in a Janus-faced way: both tragic and comic. When his royal destiny was set, he was only 22 years old. Yet his youth did not prevent him from burning Turkic books or sending tens of thousands of people in Azerbaijan to the slaughter. December 12th in Azerbaijan marked only the beginning, as a few years later he would deploy five thousand agents within a terrifying organization called SAVAK, tasked with killing and suppressing all opposition. This inhumane disposition of Mohammad Reza Shah was the inherited cruelty from his father.
Reza Shah was an unparalleled despot. The editorial of issue 1170 of Setareh newspaper paints a horrifying picture of his reign. It vividly reflects the era’s oppression: the “Cave of Ministers” as the final abode of prisoners, the “Deed Room” for signing property deeds forcibly handed to the “Great Shah,” “Alim-od-Dowleh” for those awaiting injections of air from “Dr. Ahmadi,” and cells infested with lice and typhus, preparing a perfectly “natural” death for free people. It is said that when hardened prisoners survived these conditions and reported to the Shah, he would ask: “Is he still alive? Ten years aren’t enough to kill him? Haven’t I built a guesthouse?”
Mir Jafar Pishavari spent eleven years in the worst conditions, without trial, in one of these guesthouses, only to witness a Shah who openly sought to emulate Nazi racial ideology. A few years later, fifty-three intellectuals, writers, and politicians suffered the same fate. Pishavari of those years was a leftist journalist. Add to this the remarks of Azerbaijan’s governor under Reza Shah, Abdullah Mostofi, who called the Tabriz census a “donkey census,” and the statement of Mohseni, head of Azerbaijan’s cultural department, who said: “Anyone who speaks Turkish, put a bridle on his donkey and tie him to the trough.”
These are fleeting images of the era of the great dictator, Reza Shah, a man who forcibly seized control of land, language, clothing, and every other aspect of life.
Mohammad Reza Shah, however, combined the despotism inherited from his father with absurd and comic traits. He called the August 28 coup a popular uprising to preserve the monarchy. In a television interview, he openly deemed women less intelligent than men, and when asked whether the Queen could govern the country, he preferred to remain silent. Addressing his hypothetical ancestor “Cyrus,” he said, “Sleep peacefully, we are awake,” yet the sound of a single firecracker could unsettle him and send him fleeing the country. He literally worshiped the West and considered Iran’s position in the Middle East a mere “geographical accident”—a nationalist delusion he suffered from. Occasionally, he would use Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as a pretext to boast of Aryan moral virtues to Westerners. He embodied all these traits at once: despotic, foolish, delusional, egotistical, and astonishingly cowardly—the Janus-faced figure Marx described: both tragic and comic.
The third Pahlavi, however, has not yet displayed his despotic side and remains, for now, a prince who simply provokes laughter. An Aryanist clinging to myths like the Phoenix or Farshgard, illiterate yet confident in his royal genes and supported by his patrons, claiming authority and leadership. With millions of dollars plundered, he speaks of justice. It is unclear what he has been doing these past forty years, as he seems oblivious even to the most basic human rights. He is incapable of understanding the linguistic diversity around him. His recent remarks regarding mother-tongue education expose the absurdity of this comic figure:
“I still do not understand the logic of education in the mother tongue. For example, imagine a multilingual country where suddenly it is decided that everyone can study in their mother tongue. Every country’s education system has a key language, and as far as I remember, in Iran this language was Persian… How can a country manage a multilingual education system?”
The grandfather and father of this prince wielded power and quenched their Aryanist thirst with murder and suppression; the prince, for now, is limited to denial. Yet this denial, given the conditions and obstacles that exist, should not make us ignore the ongoing absurdity.