You want to know how it all started in Iran. Here is how.
Shah of Iran, Mohamed Reza, posing w. son Prince Reza & wife Farah wearing crown jewels & embroidered robes during coronation. Location: Tehran, Iran. Date taken: 1967. Photographer: Dmitri Kessel
Empress Farah wearing her new crown leaving coronation ceremony of her husband Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. Location: Tehran, Iran. Date taken: October 1967. Photographer: Carlo Bavagnoli
Crown Prince Reza marching in cadet uniform during ceremony attending coronation of his father Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. Location: Tehran, Iran. Date taken: October 1967. Photographer: Carlo Bavagnoli
(2L-R): Sweden's Prince Bertil, England's Princess Margaret, Iran's Prince Golam Reza Pahlevi, and Italy's ex-queen Marie Jose at civil wedding ceremony of Belgium's King Baudoin to Fabiola. Location: Belgium. Date taken: 1961. Photographer: Hank Walker
(fore L-R) England's Princess Margaret w. Sweden's Prince Bertil and (rear L-R) Italy's ex-queen Marie Jose w. Iran's Prince Golam Reza Pahlevi at civil wedding ceremony of Belgium's King Baudoin to Fabiola. Location: Belgium. Date taken: 1961. Photographer: Hank Walker
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re: mohammed reza pahlevi, shah of iran, holder of the peacock throne, 1967 in Life Magazine.
You have to contextualize the 1967 stuff.
In 1963, Iran was rocked by political turmoil, most of it stirred up by a cranky old priest named Khomeini who came out against the West, Israel and the Shah, and was arrested and deported to Iraq for his troubles. The Shah very nearly was toppled by the ferment. After than, SAVAK the secret police was strengthened, new limits placed on the political and religious expressions, and the Shah looked for ways to increase the loyalty of the population.
One was was to increase nationalist pride in the Iranian past by looking back to the Achaeminids and Sassanids, in short, to the pre-Muslim past of Iran. The Shah tried to glorify Iran's role as a great empire stretching back 2500 years, and to erase its muslim history with a pan-persian past.
That was why he has such fancy coronation–he wanted to remind his subjects of Cyrus the Great.
Pahlevi was always nervous about being overthrown. He'd spent three years waiting for the CIA to reinstall him during Mossadeq in 1951-53.
The bottom line to the US was he was a faithful ally in the region. 30 years without the Shah has been disastrous for the US in the Middle East, and lead directly to Afghanistan, the arming of the mujaheddin and the two gulf wars as well as the Carter and Bush doctrines.
–art kyriazis
Art, thank you very much for the history lesson. Particularly the connection between the first Afghan eruption and the Khomeini revolution is somehting that I never completely recognized. That Afghan eruption and the Iran Revolution was the key political events of the last 50 years. It lead to the accelerated collapse of CCCP, Carter to Regan succession, Regan economic revolution in USA. Iraq Iran war and 9/11. Both Israeli wars in Lebanon. This Afghan and Iraq war and now the potential nuclear eruption. Indeed the world would have been immensely better with the Shah.