[Marxism] Delightfully impudent interview with the Shah's son

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Magazine, June 28, 2009
Questions for Reza Pahlavi
The Exile
By DEBORAH SOLOMON

You are said to be a leader of the Iranian exile groups working to 
overthrow the regime whose clerics and mullahs overthrew your father 
exactly 30 years ago in the Islamic Revolution and forced your family 
out of the country. What do you do on a day-by-day basis, exactly?
I am in contact with all sorts of groups that are committed to a 
secular, democratic alternative to the current regime. We believe in a 
democratic parliamentary system, where there’s a clear separation 
between church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.

q: Has the American government aided you?
a: No, no. I don’t rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.

q: But presumably you’re working with American agents in the C.I.A. or 
elsewhere who have been trying to destabilize the Iranian regime for years.
a: Your presumption is absolutely and unequivocally false.

q: How did you end up settling in Bethesda, Md., with your wife and 
children?
a: It happens to be circumstantial. To me, it’s a temporary place to live.

q: Why would you call your decades of living near Washington “temporary”?
a: Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.

q: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory over Mir Hussein 
Moussavi in an election that was widely condemned as fraudulent. What do 
you make of him?
a: The cry for freedom you hear in the streets of Iran right now is well 
beyond the fact of whether it’s one candidate versus the other. It’s 
about the fact that for 30 years they have been denied their most basic 
rights.

q: Many people believe that Moussavi would be more a more moderate 
president than Ahmadinejad.
a: The same argument was made during the Soviet era, where one would 
argue that one person would be supposedly more moderate than the other. 
But at the end, they all represented a Communist, totalitarian system. I 
think that anyone the Iranian regime prescreens would not be a true 
representative of the nation.

q: What do you make of Ahmadinejad’s rants against Israel?
a: Of course it’s troubling, and it’s connected again to the viral, 
violent message embedded in the ideology that was brought about by 
Khomeini himself at the time of the revolution.

q: Did you see the speculation from Iran that Ahmadinejad has Jewish 
roots? Do you think the claim is true?
a: Look, we hear a lot of things, but the big picture here should not be 
forgotten. If we say Jewish roots, aren’t we all the children of Abraham 
if you come to think of it?

q: What religion are you?
a: That’s a private matter; but if you must know, I am, of course, by 
education and by conviction, a Shiite Muslim. I am very much a man of faith.

q: What do you say to those who associate your father’s rule with the 
violation of civil rights? He ran a brutal secret police.
a: I leave this judgment to history. My focus is the future.

q: Some say the media clampdown in Iran and censorship of the foreign 
press are tactics Ahmadinejad learned from your father. You don’t feel 
obligated to acknowledge your dad’s misdeeds?
a: The current regime is, by any measure, the standard-bearer and global 
poster child for militancy, brute autocracy and corruption. If they are 
in fact students of my father, his ultimate act of refusing suppressive 
bloodshed in favor of exile should be their test.

q: When your father fled Tehran and went into exile, he reportedly took 
a lot of money with him. Would you describe yourself today as a billionaire?
a: Those are the recycling of 30-year-old propaganda by the clerical 
militants of the time. If you were to learn of my net worth, you would 
be more than surprised.

q: Do you feel bitter about not getting to be shah?
a: This is not a personal matter. This is not about me.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.


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