The Shah

 Now, in the midst of Trump's ongoing war in the Middle East, seemed like a particularly apt time to pick up Ryszard Kapuściński's classic book of reportage on Iranian politics, Shah of Shahs. 

The book convincingly and indelibly portrays the Shah's former regime as a nightmare state of total despotism, in which neighbors feared to confide in neighbors, lest they find themselves reported to the authorities, and the deadly Savak secret police exercised a reign of terror over the public. 

The potential take-aways from this historical portrait for contemporary politics are twofold—and they press in different directions. 

On the one hand, Kapuściński's book tells us why the idea of installing the deposed Shah's son as the leader of a post–Islamic Republic Iran—as was briefly floated during the widespread protests in the country at the start of this year—was almost certainly a terrible idea. 

Of course, the Shah's son tells us that he would be nothing like his father, and that he would forge a new, liberal democratic Iran. 

But Kapuściński's book is a powerful reminder of why there should never again be a person with the last name of Pahlavi lording it over Iran. 

On the other hand, one is struck by how many parallels there are between the Shah's reign of terror and the one the Islamic Republic installed in its wake. 

Kapuściński's book is in many ways a relentless chronicle of massacres under the Shah. The pattern is always the same: a protest, a mass demonstration, then the soldiers open fire—and families are left to show around photos of missing relatives to see whether they are dead or have been disappeared to secret prisons. 

The same thing occurred, of course, when protesters tried to demonstrate against the Islamic Republic authorities at the start of this year. Armed forces of the state mowed them down, killing thousands in massacres across the country. 

When dissidents or asylum-seekers return to Iran from abroad, they find themselves trailed and taken in for "interviews" with the police—just as they were in the Shah's time. 

The Islamic Republic, then, has lived to replicate all of the features of state terror and despotism of the regime it replaced. 

And this, too,  Kapuściński foretold. As he warns (reflecting implicitly, one suspects, on his own country), "those who have brought down a dictator often act, in spite of themselves, like his heirs, perpetuating the attitudes and thought patters of the epoch they themselves have destroyed." 

More than once it has occurred in history, Kapuściński writes, that a post-revolutionary regime "demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it may annihilate the ideals it called into being." (Brand/Mroczkowska-Brand trans. throughout.)

Kapuściński's book suggests, however, that no terror in Iran has ever managed to be so ironclad that it can suppress the people's spirit of "opposition." The Shah seemed at the very apogee of his power and impunity, after all, at the very moment public demonstrations brought him down. 

The same could happen again today. 

At the same time, the book gives us good reasons to doubt that an illegal U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against the country is going to prove a helpful catalyst or instrument of this change. 

As much as the Iranian spirit of opposition imposes a check on the country's rulers, after all, it opposes foreign domination even more. 

Kapuściński describes how the West reacted in the 1950s to Mossadegh's efforts to assert Iranian sovereignty over its own oil reserves: "The West proclaims a blockade of Iran and a boycott of the country's oil, which becomes forbidden fruit on the world market." (This being the British and U.S. effort to "pour water on troubled oil," as the ever-obnoxious Tory Bertrand puts it, in Amis's Lucky Jim.)

Even Iranian citizens who would risk their lives and freedom to oppose the tyranny of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards are likely to see in the U.S.'s current efforts to strangle the Iranian economy and cut it off from global trade little more than a recapitulation of this twentieth century imperial history.

Time and again, Trump's crucial mistake (and it was the Shah's mistake too) is to utterly ignore other human beings' need for dignity and self-respect. The U.S. cannot just ignore international law and openly pillage other nations without expecting a backlash—no matter how much people may suffer under the despotism of their own rulers. 

And so, Trump has created a situation in which any attempt to accede to U.S. demands in a peace deal will be seen as a betrayal. This is why it has proved so easy for hard-line factions in the Iranian regime to upset the efforts of the moderates to reach an agreement. 

 As Kapuściński describes the history of Shiite religion across the centuries: "A fanatical branch was always springing up to accuse the remainder of its co-religionists of atrophied zeal, of treating lightly the dictates of faith, of expediency and taking the easy way out. Once the split took place the most fervid of the schismatics would take up arms to finish off the enemies of Islam, redeeming in blood [...] the treachery and laziness of their backsliding brothers."

If anyone in the Trump administration is trying to figure out how they seemingly reached a memorandum of understanding with one part of the government of Iran, only to see it immediately undermined by the freelancing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard—they should perhaps look to that passage for enlightenment. 

But does this mean that history is destined to repeat itself and that Iran is simply doomed to fall under the sway of an endless succession of hard-line dictators? 

Hardly. 

I do think the U.S. invasion, bombing campaign, and war crimes against civilians are certainly not going to help matters—for reasons already stated. The procession of the faces of murdered and missing civilians—the "faces of people who no longer exist" (Kapuściński)—which the Shah left in the wake of his terror; and the Islamic Republic in the wake of its repression of protests earlier this year, has now been resumed by U.S. bombings of the innocent.

The democratization of Iran, if it happens, will have to come from its own people—not from the murder and mayhem unleashed by an imperialist foreign power. 

But that doesn't mean that everything will have to stay as it is forever. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of Kapuściński's study of the Shah's downfall is how suddenly and mysteriously the regime's end came. 

At a certain point, Kapuściński writes, the regime simply exceeded the limits of the people's patience. Knowing in advance when that moment will come is a great puzzle. It's a puzzle in our country, under our own would-be despot-in-chief as well. 

And when it comes, the moment may seem relatively small, and the provocation that brought it on trivial. "The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle known to history," Kapuściński writes. "Why did it happen on that day, and not on another? Why did this event, and not some other, bring it about? After all, the government was indulging in even worse excesses only yesterday, and there was no reaction at all." 

How are we to explain it? Let us quote William James: 

In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent.

To cite a line from Yeats (to which the great John Dolan has called our attention): this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, / Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme[.]

So that is why we should remind ourselves, with A.H. Clough, that if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, when it comes to the question of whether dictatorships will last perpetually or democracies spring up in their place: 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.