Trump’s fantasy of regime change involves bringing the shah back

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born to inherit a throne, cared for to govern a nation, but ended up spending almost all his adult life as a pretender, a potential monarch in nursing ambitions in exile catering. The fate of Pahlavi could be pitiful if his political objectives were not so obscene. For more than a century, his family has been in the thickness of the imperialist intrigue and the coup attempts that have worked to deprive its native land of democracy and human rights. The current Pahlavi conspiracies to make him the sovereign of Iran put him in alliance with an inconsistent team of authorities led by US President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is this alliance that raises Pahlavi from a pathetic aspirant to a threat to peace in the Middle East and in the hopes of a democratic revolution in Iran.

As the royal dynasties leave it, the Pahlavis have reached. The founding father, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944), was a military officer who diverted a democratic movement to tame the qagar absolutist dynasty and transform the country into a constitutional republic. The Patriarch of Pahlavi turned off this dream in 1925 by consolidating centralized power as the newly crowned Shah. He was forced to abdicate in 1941 when his pro-German sympathies won the anger of the allies. His son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took power that year.

In 1951, another movement of democratization of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, again tried to limit the power of the monarch. Mosaddegh has also been pressure for the nationalization of the petroleum industry so that the profits can benefit the Iranian people. This was unacceptable for the imperial patrons of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1953, Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’etat orchestrated by the CIA. which had the desired effect of strengthening the Pahlavi rule as a compliant dictatorship. An internal history of the CIA of the coup, written in 1954, described the coup with a lyricism usually reserved for nostalgic reveries on romantic success: “It was a day that should never have ended. Because it is carried with him such a feeling of excitement, satisfaction and jubilation that it is doubtful that any other can get there. ”

The dizzy joy of foreign policy planners in 1953 turned into Bitter Gall in 1979, when the brutal dictatorship of the Pahlavi family was swept away in a revolution which was finally diverted by Islamic theocrats. The revolution ended decades of Western domination over Iran. For this reason, even the Iranians who despise the Ayatollahs rule and aspire to a more democratic regime hate themselves to make a common cause with the Pahlavi project of monarchical restoration, which are rightly considered to be vitiated not only by authoritarianism, but also by a record of subsistence to foreign powers.

Born in 1960, Reza Pahlavi already lived in the United States when the Iranian revolution broke out. He has not lived in Iran since 1978. Despite this responsibility, he offered himself the Savior of his country since the 1980s.

Pahlavi pretexts to management should now be taken more seriously due to Israel’s attack on Iran in June, which was informed by the Trump administration. Despite the explicit rejection by Trump of the change of regime in Iran and his frequent disavowal of an interventionist foreign policy, in practice, the administration of the president supported the fantasy of a restoration of Pahlavi.

Writing in the Boston reviewAnthropologist Alex Shams documented the institutional support for the Pahlavi restoration project has received from the United States and its allies in the Middle East:

The governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, alongside private actors, have spent millions of people more broadly building the feeling of pahlavi and change of regime while promoting attacks against those who oppose him or to Israeli attacks against Iran. The propaganda effort takes two forms. First, Pahlavi’s donors have provided funding on the monarchist Persian language sales outlets, where he appears regularly. Secondly, they built a digital network of social media accounts to spread disinformation and target pro -democracy votes on social networks – these Iranians, in the country and abroad, which oppose the regime but also reject the kings and the coups sustained abroad. Pahlavi supporters are mainly exiles, donors from Shah or their descendants, but with the help of royalist radiudiffusers, DC and online Trolls reflection groups, he acquired land among the desperate Iranians for an alternative to the Islamic Republic.

Shams convincingly distinguishes between pro-democracy organic movements in Iran, which aroused the strength of legitimate grievances against authoritarianism and misogyny of the Islamic Republic, and the Pahlavi project, which has all the signs of a manufactured manipulation program. Based on the donations of foreign governments to create an echo echo chamber, the monarchist cause is a mass movement of Potemkin. As Shams notes, having monarchists like the public face of the democracy movement only strengthens the hands of the Islamic Republic.

An easy way to judge the good faith of the monarchists is by the quality of their sponsors. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel have no credibility with regard to democracy. The United States has supported autocracies in the region for decades, finding them much more subordinate than democracies. Saudi Arabia itself is a theocratic monarchy fearing mass movements. Israel is a Herrenvolk The democracy that has repeatedly sought to consolidate its position in the region by destabilizing its neighbors. Currently, he leads a fierce slaughter of civilians in Gaza which is reinforced by attacks against many neighboring countries (including Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iran). Given the violence that the United States and its allies are already propagating in the region, the new push for the change of regime in Iran will only add fuel to the fire.

The Pahlavi project is far from being the first case of an exile movement with limited popular support presenting itself as a regime change and liberation agent. Shams quotes the example of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, whose manufacturing helped at the time – the propaganda campaign of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. A similar role was played by Cuban exiles during the bay of the invasion of Chinese pigs and exiles in Taiwan which claimed to represent the authentic government of Continental China.

In his classic work The history of England of James’ membership the second (1848), the Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had clarifying reflections on the illusions to which the Exile communities are subject. Macaulay wrote on a group of Whigs who had fled England under the reign of Charles II and plotted the unhappy plot of Rye House of 1683 to murder the king and his brother. According to Macaulay:

These refugees were generally men of fiery temperament and weak judgment. They were also under the influence of this particular illusion which seems to belong to their situation. A politician leads into the banishment by a hostile faction generally sees the society he has left by a false medium. Each object is distorted and discolored by its regrets, its aspirations and its resentments. Each little dissatisfaction appears to him to assume a revolution. Each riot is a rebellion. He cannot be convinced that his country does not plunge as much for him as he rushed to his country. He imagines that all his former partners, who are always dressed at home and appreciate their areas, are tormented by the same feelings that make life a burden for himself. The longer his expatriation, the greater this hallucination.

Of course, the model that Macaulay describes is not universal. There have been many exiles, ranging from Vladimir Lenin to Ayatollah Khomeini, who succeeded in revolutions while living abroad. However, Macaulay’s account sounds true for a particular type of reckless adventurer: the one who is detached from the experience of ordinary people and depends on the patronage of the imperial allies. The tragedy is that when it is supported by the Empire and the dictatorship, the hallucinations of weak men lead to assassinations and bombs.