The Iranian Revolution’s trifecta of mythology

I have a book on my shelf with a very clever structure, detailing three of the primary versions of history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, that watershed process that forever separated the long 19th century from the short 20th, within two decades dividing the entire world into antagonistic imperial camps.

Edward Acton’s Rethinking the Russian Revolution (1990), which examines “blue” liberal, “black” anarchist and, naturally, “red” communist versions of what occurred in the violent tumult that lead to the creation of the USSR, affords a rare opportunity for comparative analysis in a single volume by a single historian alive to the very real divergences of how history is recounted.

Though Acton unfortunately excludes the “white” monarchists, his almost unique approach underlines the fact that revolutions are not only historicised almost exclusively by the winners, or that they devour their children, but that it takes careful investigation to unearth the vastly different interpretations of various losers.

Why the losers matter in all self-described revolutions is because the winners’ self-aggrandising and usually vastly sanitised version of their own roles in toppling their hated ancien regime plays a big part in the psychology of the post-revolutionary regimes established by the winners, and the nature of the ideology that they invariably attempt to export with missionary zeal to the whole world.

I am mentioning Acton’s approach because it would be enlightening to apply the same technique to what has been passed down to most of us as “the 1979 Iranian Revolution”, which toppled the CIA- and MI6-installed royal house of Pahlavi, which

is currently making a comeback, amid yet another violent popular uprising in Iran against the Shiite regime that replaced the shah.

As with the Russian Revolution, there are at least three main versions of the Iranian Revolution, a trifecta of mythology: “white” monarchist, “red” communist and, naturally, the winning “green” Islamist. As with Russia, they differ so substantially as to appear to be describing entirely different countries.

To an extent that is in fact true. No country is only a single, cohesive, homogenous entity, and far less so when it descends into civil strife that sharpens its inherent natural cleavages. And yet dominant nationalist narratives prevail. To this day, US history is largely still viewed through the lens of the triumphalist version of its own Revolutionary War, as critiqued in The Purpose of the Past (2009) in which the doyen of US historians, Gordon S Wood, interrogates his colleagues’ work.

Yet states that self-describe as revolutionary — and here, the US and Iran are strange bedfellows — have two salient characteristics: a strident claim that they wiped the slate clean of all but vestigal remnants of their original enemy, whose spectre is retained as a bogeyman; and a contradictory yet mutually reinforcing belief that they are exceptional creations of purist dedication and providence, and yet also inheritors of a universalist message of salvation to other nations.

This export is antique yet supposedly meritocratic “democracy” in the case of the US and antique yet supposedly familial “revelation” in the case of Iran. In both, the suppression of alternative histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) or Phillip Marshall’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Iran (1988), sustains “revolutionary” orthodoxy.

Of course, the West has a very troubled idea of Iran — and no, it’s not just about the oil discovered there in 1908, leading to the establishment of petrogiants like Anglo-Persian, or Tehran’s sponsorship of militancy and terrorism, or even its attempted nuclear weapons programme.

As with Afghanistan, it’s marked by a neocolonial nostalgia for a lost time of parties fuelled by long-haired girls in bikinis or miniskirts, rock ‘n roll and alcohol, which flatly ignores the tortures committed by the shah’s Savak secret police, and Amnesty International’s report that by 1975, perhaps 100,000 political prisoners languished behind bars.

Also forgotten is that from March 1975, the shah’s own Rastakhiz Party, in its early incarnation an emulation of the Spanish fascist Falange, was not only made the only legal political party in the Majlis, with membership obligatory for adults, but they were forced to pay dues to the outfit, which inflamed resistance.

Three revolutionary myths

The monarchist position, given new life today by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi throwing his hat into the ring from his exile in the US, promising to guide a transition to multiparty democracy if the mullahs are toppled by the current uprising, is no less rose-tinted: the shah was a benign constitutional monarch and his Savak were merely defending the country against Islamist and communist wreckers, killing far fewer than the Islamists’ armed squads did from 1979.

Persia’s first modern revolution was actually the bloody Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 in which the Qajar dynasty fought back against but was finally forced to adopt a constitution and institutional reforms such as the creation of the elective legislative Majlis. The Qajars were toppled in 1925 by the Pahlavis, who replaced Islamic laws with secular Western laws (sowing dragon’s teeth for the future) and renamed Persia as Iran a decade later.

But the monarchists fondly recall their own Iranian Revolution, referring to the “White Revolution” of 1963-78 in which the last Pahlavi shah modernised the country, notably by ending feudalism, with the state purchasing large landlords’ holdings and offering them at cheap prices and low interest rates to the peasantry, thereby transforming almost 90% of peasant sharecroppers, about 40% of the population, into landowners.

The “white” reforms also nationalised forests and water resources, gave the vote to women and opened the door to them serving in elected office, introduced social security, massively extended healthcare and free primary education and free food to indigent mothers, developed urban and rural infrastructure, ports, roads and railroads, and created a class of industrial entrepreneurs in whose enterprises workers were allowed to purchase up to 49% of the shares.

Despite an annual economic growth rate of 9.8%, it was the erosion of their traditional feudal power bases in rural areas and in education, and the empowering of women, that outraged conservative clerics and the landed gentry, while the communist left was angered by the shah’s one-party Rastakhiz state and his clear orientation towards the West and against the USSR and red China.

For the “green” Islamists, their Iranian Revolution, rooted in the 1920s resistance to Western-styled secularisation, could be said to have properly started with the exiling of leading Shiite cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, an ayatollah, meaning “divine sign”, an expert Islamic jurist, in November 1965 for his outspoken opposition.

The politicisation of the Islamist opposition coincided with a revivalist wave within the faith, which saw a growing sense of the universality of Islam and a return to fundamentalist values of sharia law as a rediscovery of cultural authenticity against what were seen as failed and toxic experiments with Western secularisation in the region.

But the Islamists are also guilty of airbrushing history, for occluded by the Shiite mythology of the clerical Iranian Revolution of 1979 was an actual popular “red” revolution that broke out against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, son of that Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was under house arrest in Johannesburg until his death during World War 2 because he was a Nazi sympathiser. (His Houghton Estate mansion is still maintained by Iran as a museum.)

As described in Marshall, the successful resistance to their forced removal in August 1977 by 50,000 slum-dwellers lit the fuse on the original Iranian Revolution. A police massacre of 40 religious protestors that December was followed in 1978 by a wave of strikes and industrial sabotage as wages dropped due to a sharp economic downturn. Ironically, revolutionary ranks were swelled by youths educated by the White Revolution but unemployed in the recession.

The shah imposed martial law and on “Black Friday”, September 8 1978, troops gunned down 89 protesters. In response, infuriated workers launched a wave of strikes that spread across the country like wildfire. Oil workers were on strike for 33 consecutive days, bringing the economy to a dead halt despite fruitless attempts to send troops into the oilfields.

On December 11, 2-million protesters marched in Tehran demanding the ousting of the shah, an end to American imperialism and the arming of the people. Soldiers began to desert, and on January 16 1979 the shah abdicated the Peacock Throne and went to Egypt, never to return.

In mid-February, there was an insurrection, with air force cadets joining forces with guerrilla forces — the leftist Fedayeen and the nationalist Mujahideen — in overrunning the military academy, army bases, the Majlis parliament, factories, armouries and the state TV station.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, who had returned from exile in Paris, cobbled together a multiparty provisional government of the liberal democratic Freedom Movement of Iran, the National Front of Iran coalition of social democratic, nationalist and neo-fascist parties, and the Islamic socialist JAMA. It seemed to many observers that a broadly democratic “blue” revolution would win the day.

But the people wanted more. Women’s organisations flourished, peasants started seizing the land and in some places established communal cultivation councils. Strikes were rampant, and workers seized control of their workplaces, arranging raw material sourcing and sales themselves, even setting prices in the oil industry.

A system of grassroots soviets — called shoras in Farsi and based on the old factory council idea prevalent in the Russian Revolution — sprang up in fields, factories, neighbourhoods, educational institutions and the armed forces. Armed neighbourhood committees — called komitehs and based on the old Muslim scholar networks — patrolled residential areas, arrested collaborators, ran people’s courts and prisons, and organised demonstrations.

An Iraqi friend of mine, who I shall name SB for security purposes, was a member of the underground Workers’ Liberation Group (JTA, but nicknamed “Shagila”, a girl’s name redolent of courage) of about 300 militants in Iraq when the revolution broke out next door. To the last man and woman, they crossed into Iran to defend these revolutionary gains.

But the independent proletarian movement had peaked that July, and the religious fundamentalists guided by Khomeini began to strike back. His new Iranian Republican Party (IRP) and its military, paramilitary and clerical allies squeezed opposition parties out of a succession of two provisional governments from November 1979 to October 1981. However, early IRP dominance on university campuses was replaced by the People’s Holy-warrior Organisation (MEK), a splinter of the Freedom Movement.

The Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran-e Enqelab), the political police that had replaced the Savak, forcibly liquidated shoras, purged komitehs and repressed ethnic Kurdish separatists and women’s organisations, while the Party of God (Hezbollah) was created as a strike-breaking force of thugs.

The IRP’s first reactionary social manoeuvre was to literally split the population in half so as to control it better. Despite widespread women’s protests, men and women were separated at social gatherings, and wearing of the hijab was enforced.

Shagila worked alongside a 500-strong anarchist-communist breakaway from a Maoist splinter off the Fedayeen called The Scream of the People (Faryad Mardam) — renowned Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścińśki recalled in his book Shah of Shahs (1982) encountering anarchists among the “opposition combat groups” active in Tehran in late 1979 — encouraging proletarian self-management.

But many leftist revolutionaries including the Faryad Mardam, Shagila, Fedayeen and MEK — but also liberals, monarchists, nationalists, ethnic and religious minorities, and dissident Muslims — wound up being wiped out by death squads, or driven underground or into exile. SB and several Shagila comrades were captured and imprisoned.

Executions

At least 3,500 people, more than 10% of them under 18 years old, were executed between June 1981 and March 1982 in an effort to “purify” the country of allegedly anti-Islamic elements during the “Iranian Cultural Revolution”, which closed the universities for three years and purged academic staff. Arbitrary detention and torture were widespread. With the guards in SB’s prison machine-gunning detainees in batches every day, he was extremely fortunate to manage to escape and go into exile.

By October 29 1981 the Iranian Revolution — in its leftist sense — had been comprehensively destroyed and a right-wing theocratic state established in its stead, the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a Majlis dominated by the IRP and a handful of military, paramilitary, clerical and independent “nonpartisan” supporters.

The current uprising to try to topple this almost half-century regime appears to largely be orientated towards a “white” restoration as the Marxist left’s initial alignment with the Islamists has so tarnished its reputation that the remnant MEK is unlikely to recover. By so thoroughly eliminating their opponents of varied political colours over the decades, the mullahs have enabled the possibility of a future of such uncertainty that it might completely reverse everything for which they ever stood.