In this fantasy he wanted to be called Mohammad Reza Shah the Great. He had become so cocky he was calling Europeans "lazy." He would put women down in front of his wife on 60 Minutes. He would brag about ordering the execution of a dozen people for being Marxist Leninist. It never dawned on him that we loved those kids that he was killing more than we loved him, or even more than he loved himself. This was the time for a couple of good political moves; however, his majesty did the opposite.
His Majesty's Massive, Irreversible, Colossal Errors:
Home wrecking error#1:
In 1973, his majesty made the most significant, home wrecking error. He closed all of the superficial parties and turned the country to a one party system. That was diametrically different to what he needed to do. We were fed up with the police state; there was no need for a police state. The Shah needed to do something similar to what King Carlos did in Spain. He needed to take advantage of his total control and gradually permit new nationalist parties to gain power and delegate the power so that he would go into history as the son who finished what the father had started. But he was too paranoid to contemplate relinquishing control. His best friends were dead or gone. His Army had the same disease, competent and courageous generals were eliminated, and the Shah would only permit the most incompetent to get the stars.
His administration of the civilian sector was even worse. If the assistant secretary of agriculture wanted a week's vacation, he had to summit his request to the king rather than secretary of agriculture.
Home wrecking error#2:
Then he got the news that he had lymphoma with a life expectancy of two to three years. He kept the news as a secret, because of the fear that if Americans knew about it they might replace him. This was his most significant mistake, for if he had announced that he had cancer and was dying, there would not have been a revolution. Iranian people are far too traditional to rebel against an old dying man. We could have transferred the power to the nationalist groups and retained his son as a king like Europeans. He had the power, foreign support, and the army to do it with.
Home wrecking error#3: the story of my beloved Dr Shariati
Dr. Shariati was a sociologist. He received his doctorate from university of Sorbonne. He had a long history of anti-shah activities. He was a professor of sociology in university of Mashhad. He came to Tehran to teach Islamic studies in Hoseinieh Ershad which was a high-class mosque and lecture hall. Since this hall was only a couple of blocks from our house and I had many friends who worshiped Dr Shariati, I began to participate in his classes.
In all honestly, I was only a freshman in college and his teachings required a more developed brain. Gradually, I understood what he was talking about. I was lucky enough to get to know him personally through a mutual friend. Gradually, we got to know each other, or at least he was kind enough to pretend that he knew me, and the pride of my life was that we saw a movie together. Later on, I read just about all of his books and he had a profound impact on my thinking. He had the same impact on many others. He came up with a new interpretation of Shiite sect of Islam. He was against the clergy, the ruling class and billionaires in a country with poor people in it. His massage was that a good Shiite should rebel against all these forces of evil. The clergy hated Dr Shariati and some of the Ayatollahs his work was a blasphemy. A couple of the Ayatollahs had banned us from going to his lectures. One of the Ayatollahs called him "crazy boy."
We were all surprised that in an environment of terror, Dr. Shariati was permitted to hold public classes in which he was hitting everyone including the government. The last time I saw him was during his last speech in that temple. He talked about martyrdom; that caused students to get carried away and the lecture turned into a public protest. The next day the place was closed.
The recent declassified documents of the SAVAK show that Dr. Shariati had been able to convince the government that what he was doing was good for the Shah. After all, he was hitting the clergy and the communists. Ironically, all those supposedly intelligent people working for Iranian intelligence services did not realize they were being duped.
Even though Dr. Shariati did a magnificent job of shaking up the society, in the final analysis it all worked totally against us, because:
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