by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2015
One of the criticisms of Iran's Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi prior to his overthrow in 1979 was that he was a puppet ruler supported by the United States -- and because he was a puppet ruler he was a weak ruler. (In the stories of history puppet rulers are almost by definition weak rulers.)
But this is another case where the facts and the popular historical stories don't always match.
In this case: What defines a weak ruler? This man ruled Iran from 1941 until 1979 -- 38 years. During that span he lived a lavish life, threw lavish parties for his supporters, and was consistently effective at suppressing his opposition. Hmm... hard to define that as weak rulership!
The moral: The difference between puppets and home selected leadership is not a difference strength and weakness in rulership, it is a difference in who is supporting the leader. This means the real weakness indicated when a puppet is ruling is not in the ruler, it is in the people being ruled -- they can't get their act together well enough to support a home selected ruler.
At the end of his rule the Shah's weakness rested on two related failures: The first was that he had not succeeded in persuading the people of Iran to transition into an Industrial Age culture -- he had tried, but they were still thinking and acting in tribal "Us versus Them" ways -- which support corruption and betrayal, not straight talk and cooperation. The second was, given that first failure, that he had not groomed a successor to be as ruthless as he had been. This lead to the chaos of the Iranian Revolution which happened when he sickened and died.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution is one more example of how unimportant primary documents are to the events of history -- what matters much more is how the documents are interpreted by current opinion makers. Prior to Khomeini many generations of Shia clerics had studied the primary documents of the Islamic religion and determined that clerics should not get involved in politics. Then... poof!... Khomeini comes on the scene as a respected Ayatollah and says (I paraphrase), "You got it wrong. Clerics should be involved." and the Iranian Revolution gets revolutionary in yet another way.
The moral of this is that the opinions of opinion makers contemporary with the happening of historical events, and the opinion makers subsequently writing the histories that get widely read, matter much more than what primary documents actually say.
The important thing to remember concerning this incident is that Iran was a chaotic place in 1953 -- there were many sides arguing over many issues. What this means is the CIA can be there, but they are a bit player, not the major mover and shaker that many histories told of the time claim they were.
In 1951, two years earlier, the Iranian parliament under Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. While the man-on-the-street Iranian was delighted by this, neither the British nor the Americans were happy, and they placed an embargo on Iran's oil exports. This brought on a recession in Iran, and by 1953 the people had been coping with hard times for two years.
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Some context in which these events where happening:
o 1951 was the height of the Korean War. The US and the UN had a lot of boots on the ground fighting the Red Chinese in a World War One-style trench warfare battle. The shooting was winding down in 1953, but the Keystone Kops negoiating cycle this war is also famous for was in full progress.
o 1956 was when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, so this Iran crisis is happening a few years earlier.
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Recessions cause dream changes. And in Iran in this time the dream changing was more turbulent than usual. Iran was trying to industrialize and doing some more democracy experimenting. Mossadegh was a populist, he campaigned that he was going to bring prosperity to Iran, and that was the purpose of this nationalizing. In the eyes of Mossadegh and his supporters it was a quick way to bring money into the government. But this nationalization scheme didn't bring about the prosperity he promised, so now, two years later, he was losing supporters right and left.
In response, he was searching high and low for new supporters. What worried the American intelligence service was when he started calling upon the Iranian communists.
After two years of economic crisis a coup happened... a couple of them, actually. Mossadegh survived the first attempt, but got ousted in the second.
The hotly discussed issue since that Summer Of Coups has been how much the CIA was involved. According to the Iranians, and many historians, and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the chief CIA covert operative in Iran at the time, a whole lot! But looking more closely at what is written in the Wikipedia articles on Roosevelt and Operation Ajax, a different story emerges. Looking at what happened and when it happened, this deep CIA involvement doesn't seem possible. One example of an inconsistency in this story is that Roosevelt slipped into the country in June, as a complete stranger to the locals (as in, someone you can't trust) and had the coup fully assembled by August -- just two months later.
Wow! Fast work, Kermit!
What this indicates to me is that urban legend is having a big influence in the describing of this incident. Kermit may have had some influence, but the root of the coup was the swirling chaos that was already in full flower before Roosevelt showed up. His influence was "butterfly wings flapping" influence, not major mastermind influence.
In my eyes, this is a fine example of urban legend history, not harsh reality history.
ISIS is a strange beast to Western political leaders and media. The brutality of the group is easy for Western media to depict and condemn, but the popularity is really hard to understand. Why do people from around Europe, around the Middle East, and to some extent around the world, flock to this violent cause.
One of the better explanations is a lengthy March 2015 Atlantic article, What ISIS Really Wants by Graeme Wood, in which the author explains a lot and interviews many people who are not part of the cause, but are close to it.
From the article, "We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world."
As I see it, the "end of the world" thinking is a key component to explain what is going on here. This end of the world feeling is an instinctive one, and it runs deeply in many people. I write about it my book Goat Sacrificing in the 21st Century. The source of the instinct is mankind's long history of being semi-nomadic -- in Stone Age times it was very common for a village to run out of an essential, pull up stakes, and move to some new location. When that happened it was "end of the world" time for the village. This went on for thousands of generations, so this evolved into instinctive thinking.
In modern times this instinct makes little sense, but we still have it. Because it is thinking that can't fit in well, it expresses itself every so often in crazy ways. Here are some famous earlier examples in US history:
o The Millerites -- Upstate New York in the 1840's was a thriving place for new religious ideas. One group that spawned there was Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Another was a group of people who started following William Miller who predicted the Second Coming would happen in 1843. The exact number of followers is not known, but tracts numbering in the tens of thousands were sent out routinely throughout the eastern US during the early 1840's. End of the World Dates were set, people would gather for them, nothing happened, and they would hope and set a new date. By the end of 1843 most were moving on. Some started the Seventh Day Adventist church.
o Y2K -- Y1K (in the year 1000) centered on the coming of Christ. Y2K centered on computers running amok as their internal clocks switched from year 99 to year 00. In the run up to the New Year's Day of the New Millennium there was lots of air time and print inches spent on speculating what kinds of catastrophes the world would face when computers stopped working. As with the Millerites, when the Big Day arrived, little happened, the world continued on just fine.
ISIS is yet another end of the world movement -- it is like the Millerites but with lots of AK-47's involved. This brings up another pattern of End of the World movements -- they all express their "celebration style" in a different fashion. It is as if the followers are saying, "Yeah! But this time is different!"
Another curiosity of these End of World movements is how unpredictable their popularity will be. There are prophets predicting all the time, but ninety nine percent of them are a single voice, or a dozen or so, crying out in the wilderness. Then, usually unpredictably, one of these voices suddenly gains a lot more popularity, as ISIS is demonstrating in 2014/15. (Once in a while they can be predicted. The Hong Kong Turnover of 1997 and Y2K of 2000 were both foreseeable as popular events.)
What does this mean for the future of ISIS?
Well... the end of the world isn't coming. So at some point in the life of each ISIS follower they are going to face up to this harsh reality, and come up with a Plan B. Based on the experience of the Millerites, those Plan B's will be quite individual. These people have experienced a deeply moving time together, but it can't go on. They will remember, but they will move on.
What they all move on to will be surprising, and some of it will be brand new ideas, such as the Seventh Day Adventist church was for the Millerites. But keeping in mind how distinctive each of these movements are, we also need to keep the Jonestown Ending in mind. "Drinking the Kool-Aid" was yet another surprising way of ending this special time in one's life.
How important to historical research is seeing the primary documents that are part of a history-worthy event?
I don't think it is very important. What is important is how these documents get interpreted -- both at the time they are issued and how that interpretation changes over time. This evolving interpretation has little to do with what the primary document actually says, so seeing the primary is going to make little difference. What is much more important is understanding the historical context in which these documents are produced, and then later interpreted and reinterpreted.
The most dramatic example of this are the founding documents for the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In all these cases the original documents are created many years after the historical events they describe happened. In all these cases committees of scholars have picked and chosen from among many competing documents to decide which are the real originals. In all these cases contemporary scholars must study the documents hard to try and figure out what they mean.
In other words, the religion practiced today in all these cases is based on the opinions of contemporary interpreters. And this means the documents themselves carry little weight -- what matters most are contemporary opinions. ISIS is just the latest spectacular example of this.
Religious documents are the most dramatic example, but secular documents face the same issues. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, one highlight of our Modern Middle East history class, has the same characteristics. Here is the full text.
"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
Without context this bunch of words is meaningless. Even in contemporary times (post World War One times) there was much arguing about what these words really meant.
In sum, accessing primary source documents is no sure way to add insight to historical happenings. What is much more important is to understand the context in which events happen, as in, what else is happening in the world around the particular historical event that is of interest?
--The End--