Part Two: The First Shah of Iran

Robert discusses what Reza did with power once he ascended to the Peacock throne, and how he ultimately lost everything. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst history in all of people, or people in all of history, whichever is accurate. I don't know. I randomly put words together based on a predictive text algorithm, much like an LLM, except for I use this collection of bones with runes inscribed on them. And that's how the podcast comes to you every week, thousands of bones with runes inscribed on them that I pick at random.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Great.

• 0:38Robert Evans?

  Kaba, how would you like me to read some random bones that might be about the Shah or not?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Let's do it. Let's roll the bones.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  But first, do you want to-

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  Also, welcome back to the show, Kaba.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, Kaba's here.

• 0:50Robert Evans?

  Sorry.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you again for having me. My name is Kabe Hoda. I am a physician. I'm a gastroenterologist, and I'm also the host of a podcast called The House of Pod. It is a humor-adjacent little medical podcast. We look at wellness grifters, we look at what the Maha community and the administration is doing to our current healthcare, and have a little fun when we can with it. So you should check it out anywhere you get your podcasts. After this, listen to this. This is more important than afterwards. Listen to me, you'll probably like it, or your money back.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Have you done an episode about our mutual enemy yet?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Which one? I feel like we have a number. RFK Jr.? I've done a number on RFK Jr.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. Our mutual enemy that we talk about on the side often.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  We did talk about, can I say his name? Is that okay?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  I don't like to give him more airtime than he needs, but Vinay Prasad.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  I like him. I like him. He doesn't like me. I have no problem with him. But he's been involved in a lot of aspects of medical, our medical care recently in the country that I've disagreed with. And we actually did talk about him recently in our, one of our more recent episodes. So yes, you could listen to the podcast. And here are, the episode is Influence vs. Evidence. And we talk about

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Kind of what's happening out there right now in our current healthcare administration.

• 2:11Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Not a fan of his.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  It's mostly good, right?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, 99% great.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Everything's fine.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Everything is great. Everything is really, if you're really into communicable diseases, things, this is a good time.

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  Excellent. I love communicable diseases and my favorite communicable disease is knowledge.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  I was gonna say it. I swear to God, I was gonna say it.

• 2:36Robert Evans?

  Let's spread some together. Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 2:46Speaker 04

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• 3:16Robert Evans?

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• 3:51Robert Evans?

  So in the four years after the October Revolution in Russia, Persia had been the site of bloody and constant conflict between Britain and Russia. Again, there's this brief period in World War I where they're kind of fighting together against the Ottomans in Persia as opposed to fucking with each other. And then we've got our revolution and the Bolsheviks are fighting the whites and Britain goes right back to fighting Russia, right? Now, I guess it's a little different in that they also have allies who are Russians in this case, too. So they're not fighting all of the Russians, just most of the Russians. And basically, the kind of broad strokes of this conflict are the Brits see Persia because they've already got a good base in the area and they get resources there. They have interests there. They have a lot of forces.

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  That they can get there. It's a great springboard. It also borders Russia. So it's a great springboard for them to use as a base from which to support the white army and the Russian civil war. Right. The Soviets, meanwhile, don't want Britain doing that because it's bad for them. Right. So the Soviet Union annexes chunks of northern Persia and they create a the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic. Right. There's like a, I mean, it's more complicated than that. Right. There's, and obviously there's local and like, like within like Persians who are communists, who are part of this and like want to, there's partisans and stuff. It's much more complicated than all that. But broadly speaking, you've got the Brits and the area they control in Persia that they want to use as a base to support the white army and Russia.

• 5:20Robert Evans?

  And then you've got this chunk of northern Persia that is aligned with the USSR that is itself, at least nominally Bolshevik, that the Bolsheviks are using as a base. Right. And there's fighting betwixt the two.

• 5:34Robert Evans?

  Now, the, the, the quajars are still like that shahdom, that, that line of shahs is still in control technically. At the point at which all this is going on, but they fail to exert, they can't, they don't have any power. Right. Like the shahs are useless in this conflict. They don't really have any ability to influence what the Russians are doing. Because the Bolsheviks had just killed their czar. So they're sure as hell not going to listen to some Shah in Persia that they never respected to begin with.

• 6:03Robert Evans?

  Meanwhile, the Shah, like personally, like the guy who was Shah now is that dude who was like 12 when he came to power. And has been ruled like a regent was running things. And there's like a triumvirate of guys who aren't the Shah, who are mostly running things in the Persian central government. And so during this period after World War One, the central government's like bleeding provinces. And big chunks of the army just kind of disappear into comical puffs of smoke because they didn't really want to be in the army. And when push came to shove, they're like. Nah, I'm going back home. No, no, thank you. Um, so the only meaningful force opposing the Soviets are the Cossacks and the Cossack Brigade

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  and their British backers. Uh, again, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the broad strokes. Uh, now-

• 6:52Speaker 02

  But the Cossacks at this point, the Cossacks are not reporting back?

• 6:57Robert Evans?

  Yes and no.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So that's the part I don't understand.

• 7:01Robert Evans?

  Here, well, it's weird because again, Russia's not, not everyone in Russia is a Bolshevik. There's a, there's a civil war, right? So you've got a bunch of Russians or white Russians who support at least not the Soviet Union happening, right? Um, generally they support some sort of return to the, the monarchy or whatever, right? Um, so the, you, you, and a lot of like Cossacks support the white Russians, like because the Cossacks had been the Tsar's shock troops, a shitload of them wind up in the white forces, right? And when, during this period of time, the Cossack, the Persian Cossack Brigade is still led by a Russian officer, like it's still a Russian Colonel who's in charge of the Brigade, but that Russian's a white, right? So he's siding with the British in their efforts to help

• 7:46Robert Evans?

  the whites against the Bolsheviks. These are very messy wars. Does that make sense?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  You know, as someone who is currently living through the Iranian diaspora, dealing with the Iran war, I think I can understand a little bit of the complexity of this. And this is all starting to make sense in a historical context to me.

• 8:05Robert Evans?

  It's, it's fucking messy. This whole period, because it's not just Britain that's intervening in the Russian civil war, like the United States has forces too. Like there's a whole allied intervention force. This is, number one, barely talked about anymore, but really complicated everything that's going on in this period of time. Um, I'm, I'm really smoothing the edges down just because we can't get into too much detail about all of the shit that's going on. But right, that's why the Cossacks are on the side of the Brits here, you know? Um, so this is not 1919, 1920, 1921. This is not when like domino theory doesn't really exist in the form it's going to exist. But conservative reactionaries have already started sussing out the basic tenets, right?

• 8:48Robert Evans?

  They're already, they're already telling people, well, look, if Persia falls to communism, where will it stop? Right? Now, obviously, Great Britain's real interest here is that if Persia falls to communism, they're not going to get cheap oil anymore for the navy. And that's a real problem, right?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Love that oil.

• 9:05Robert Evans?

  Their other problem is they have to keep troops in Persia during this whole period of time, like their own guys. The Cossacks alone can't hold shit. If they want to know that that oil's safe, they have to have their own dudes there, and that costs a lot of money. So in 1921, Great Britain's two main interests in Persia are stop it from falling to the communists, and if we didn't have to keep our soldiers here to do that, it would sure be great, right? Those are their, their primary concerns. Now, I want to take you back in time. I know I just was talking about the Russian Civil War era to talk a little bit about how things within like the oil company working in Persia evolved over like the early 1900s up to 1921, right? Because we didn't really talk about that so much in the last episode, and it, it does matter.

• 9:50Robert Evans?

  So in 1909, that entrepreneur, Darcy, and the company that he partnered with had transferred their rights, basically had gotten in bed with another company because they needed more money to do the infrastructure necessary to get oil out of Persia. And this new company is called Anglo Persian Oil, or APOC, A.P.O.C. Remember these names. You're going to be, it's going to be real interesting what happens to Anglo Persian Oil in the modern era. Now, the way in which APOC functioned from 1909 to 1921 does a good job of showing how dysfunctional the central government of Persia was by this point, how, how bad the, the Quayshar monarchy is at actually like governing the country. Because APOC doesn't deal with Tehran at all. They don't talk to the Shah.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  They ignore the capital completely because their oil wells and shit aren't near the capital. And their oil wells are in the territory of a bunch of like, there's a mix of like sheiks and Bakhtari khans, which are like different, like basically tribal level leaders who actually control the territory where they're drilling for oil and transporting oil. And so the oil company is like, why would we talk to Tehran? They don't have any power here. They can barely keep the capital. I'm going to make deals with these local guys. They have the guns and the labor force, right? The, the capital's not going to do anything but take bribes from me. Fuck them. Yeah. So that shows you how weak the government is at this point in time. As a matter of fact, when the deal between APOC and these different tribal groups was concluded

• 11:18Robert Evans?

  in 1910, the company illegally imported a thousand laborers from India without talking to anyone in the Persian government. They take a thousand Indians and make them work in Persia, and they don't ask anybody in the fucking government. It's like, they don't talk to the first, there's no visas for these motherfuckers.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  They just don't look, they don't, they never do, they never look at Persians as real people. They just, they can't, this colonial mindset in, doesn't, is so, never goes away. I mean, I mean, maybe now it's gone away, but like, it was so intrinsic to who they, right, intrinsic to who they were as people, that they just couldn't see the people living there as being worthy or warranting even that kind of discussion.

• 12:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's fucking nuts. And it's really like, so as an idea for like how messed up their attitude towards like Persians is, period. They, part of the agreement with these like local sheiks and khan's is we'll hire a thousand locals to work in the oil plants, right? But they illegally start bringing in a bunch of Indian workers to do most of the work. Like, they aren't gonna hire any more than the minimum they have agreed of local people, right? I want to quote again from that piece Shereen Bricehak wrote for the World Policy Journal. "In what became a chronic grievance, APOC gave Britons and Indians the best jobs, relegating Persians to menial roles. Foreigners occupied the best houses, claimed membership in the exclusive Persian club, and sent their children to

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  schools in segregated cantonments. There were even fountains marked 'not for Iranians', feeding the cycle of enduring resentment that was to characterize subsequent relations."

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  Basically, they're not giving, like, they'll, they'll let you like, transport shit, but they don't give you anything. They're not getting like the most dangerous jobs, but they're not getting good jobs either. They're not getting anything that pays well. And in the areas where the company is activated, there's segregation against the indigenous people who live there, like-

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And they're, they're so smart, they're never gonna let the Iranians that are there-

• 13:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  -get to higher positions where they can actually learn the oil industry, where they can actually learn how to do this, because heaven forbid, if they were to-

• 13:29Robert Evans?

  Cause then they could run it.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they would run it themselves. So purposely keeping them in the dark.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  And then imagine there's segregation in your country because a guy came in last week and is like, nah, you don't get to use the same like water fountains because we're getting oil out of here now. Like if it's just, if it's just a thing that happened a week ago, like how that would like piss you off? Like what? You guys just got here? Like?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  We are so easily offended. So people, I have to tell you, this is like-

• 13:59Robert Evans?

  Anyone would be in this. This infuriating.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I've, I've seen Iranians get pretty offended for much less than having a segregated water fountain. So this is nuts.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Okay. Cause some fucker just comes in a week ago and is like, oh no, this isn't your place anymore. There's oil here. This is British property. Um, so as I noted in the first episode, in 1914, the British Parliament had, had voted for a proposal pushed by Churchill to fuel the Royal Navy with Persian oil. As part of this deal, the British government purchased 51% of Anglo Persian oil, ensuring it would remain an all British company, which is again them saying, we're not going to let the locals run anything. We won't even let them know how to run anything. This is always going to be our shit. So by 1921, northern Persia is a Soviet satellite and guerrilla fighters are advancing on Tehran,

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  which basically can't defend itself without foreign help. There are the Cossacks, which are primarily made up of Persian soldiers and they are functional, but the government can't even pay them. Right? Like the Cossacks are being paid entirely by Great Britain by this point in time. And Great Britain has to send her own soldiers to occupy large tracts of Persian territory in 1918, just to stop a total Bolshevik victory in the area. Now, one of these Cossacks getting paid by the British in 1921 is our friend Reza Khan, who at that point has been promoted to Colonel, right? This is Machine Gun Reza.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Machine Gun Reza. From stable boy to machine gun Reza.

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  That's right. Still can't read, but he can shoot people.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  He can shoot that gun good.

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  Khan and his men and about 5,500 British colonial troops are holding the line against the communists, right? While British Foreign Secretary Kerzon drafts what becomes known as the Anglo Persian Treaty. This authorizes the stationing of British veterans to build a functional army for the central government. Basically, Britain's going to send experts so that the central government can build an army that actually works, right? That's not just the Cossacks. We want there to be a functional army here, so we don't have to keep ours here. So we're going to send experts in. And we're also going to put a bunch of investment money into Persia to build railroads and reorganize the economy. All of this is to keep the oil flowing. None of this is for the benefit of regular Persians.

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  The army and the railroads and the economy are also, this is a stable place for the Royal Navy to get its fuel from, right? Now, this plan is to be paid for by a £2 million loan issued by Great Britain, who would collect customs duties to pay the loan back directly from Persians. In effect, British tax collectors are now directly taxing Persian citizens to pay for the things that they're doing in order to make sure Great Britain has continued access to basically cheap oil, right?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  It's wildly insulting. So insulting.

• 16:50Robert Evans?

  It's really insulting.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  I'm so angry. The more I learn about this history, the good thing I know, it's a good thing I love your colleague, James Stout, so much, because sometimes I learn about the things the British do and I get so mad. But he's so lovable, then I remember, okay, it's okay, it's okay.

• 17:13Robert Evans?

  We are Americans. It's not like we can get, we don't have that much of a leg to stand on these days.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  True. I'm so confused. I'm torn between two groups of terrible things.

• 17:24Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. It's the, it's the Team Jacob, Team Edward of colonialism. So, yeah, Great Britain's taxing Persia directly. And if it's not, if, if the British aren't directly running the government, most Persians sure as hell think they are at this point in time, right? At the end of World War I, the Bolsheviks had published a bunch of documents that they'd seized from the Tsar's palace, revealing secret wartime pacts. And one of these secret wartime pacts was Britain offering Russia the Dardanelles in exchange for giving Britain Persia, right? So this comes out and people in Tehran, educated Persians are obviously like, oh, so like they, they just bought us, basically. They bribed the Tsar for us and they think they

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  own our entire ass country now. And this helps spawn massive resistance to this treaty that Secretary Kurzak has put together. Initially, Kurzak is not all that concerned. He states, "The case will be settled by cash." And then he proceeds to organize 131,000 pound bribe to the three man triumvirate governing Persia on behalf of the Shah. These three guys agree to the bribe and Kurzak, being a genius, is said to have declared the treaty "A great triumph and I have done it all alone." Like-

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Great branding.

• 18:42Robert Evans?

  He's like, "So we're gonna, we're gonna tax these people to build an army to protect our oil, basically, and to keep them oppressed." And the people are like, "We don't like that." And he's like, "But I bribed three men, solving the problem forever, all on my own. Perfect." Unfortunately for Kurzak, that damned free press I mentioned earlier got to work and they reported on the fact that Persia's growing triumvirate had sold the country for a song. Next, per Bryce X. article, "The treaty was brocked by the Majlis and three successive Persian prime ministers fell." So basically, three successive governments failed to gain whatever they need to do in the parliament to be able to govern as a result of resistance to this treaty, which

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  gets blocked in Tehran. Now, this causes chaos because the British are, this is fucked up of them, but also British money and guns is the only thing propping this government up at the time, right? So when the treaty gets blocked, things aren't just like, good, you know?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  They could sell, they could sell some of the stuff from that Peacock throne.

• 19:44Robert Evans?

  Maybe they could sell the Peacock throne. It looks like it's worth some money. Yeah. Yeah, so chaos envelops the Capitol city. And back home in London, the Lords of the Admiralty are really, have real reason to fear that they might lose their hookup to cheap gas. Now, Curzon had basically been like, the fuck around and pretend we care about international law guy. Like, he's bribing these dudes, but he's trying to frame it as like a legal treaty and an agreement between states. And since Operation Bribed Three Guys failed, all eyes turned to one of the top ranking generals in the Royal Army, Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, who was referred to as "The Lord Ironside," a name George Lucas would laugh at you for giving to a

• 20:29Robert Evans?

  character in a fictional story. Like, "The Lord Ironside"?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  It's over the top. You're like, okay, we get it.

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  It's a bit much. He was also nicknamed Tiny. William Tiny Ironside?

• 20:41Speaker 02

  That makes it a lot better.

• 20:42Robert Evans?

  That's really funny.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Tiny Ironside. That's pretty amazing.

• 20:45Robert Evans?

  It's gotta suck, too, being born with that cool a name and like, knowing you're going to be a military leader, but also being a little guy. Like, because people are gonna call you Tiny. Like, Tiny Ironside is just less cool than The Lord Ironside.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  With that name, your options are limited. You're like, if you're an Ironside-

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  You can only be in the military. You can't blame him for joining the army.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Or you could be an actor from Starship Troopers, and that's it. Those are your two options.

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  That's it. That's right. And unfortunately, Starship Troopers had not quite been invented yet. We had barely harnessed the technology to create Paul Verhoeven at that point, you know? He was still gestating, I believe. So, the best way I can describe The Lord Ironside physically, if you're not looking at, you know, the video version of this, because most people listen to it because it's a podcast, the best way I can describe him is that he had the face of a man who didn't understand why other nations beside England should exist. Like, that's how I, like, look at this guy's face. Like-

• 21:49Robert Evans?

  That is a face of confusion that there are other countries in the world.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Oh, what are they doing? Look at them with their browns and the

• 21:57Robert Evans?

  Why other countries?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  The smells coming off their food. Oh, what is this seasoning I'm tasting in the food?

• 22:04Robert Evans?

  My god, it's not whole mores there?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  My British accent was going everywhere there. Slightly, slightly.

• 22:11Robert Evans?

  I think you're more consistent than me.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  He's, he's got, he's got Lord Mountbatten energy.

• 22:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, he does. He has strong. The IRA should have blown up a boat. This guy was on energy. That's what I'll say about this fucker. Although he has bad luck with planes, not boats. So Ironside had been made commander of the Allied Intervention Force in Northern Russia during the Russian Civil War. And he had been reassigned to Persia in 1921. And basically, as soon as he arrives in country, he sees Colonel Khan, uh, or Reza at the time, right? And he spots this guy and he's like, this dude looks like a good person to charm and put in position as like a military strongman. That might be what happened, or Reza might have looked at this guy and immediately been like, all right, this is the British dude I need to charm, right?

• 22:57Robert Evans?

  I don't actually know which is truer. There are two different versions, one of which is that Ironside manipulates Reza because he needs a guy. The other is that Reza manipulates Ironside because it gets him what it wants. I think probably both are true. Both guys see each other as useful, right? That said,

• 23:14Speaker 02

  The typical narrative about Reza Khan is that he was not extraordinarily bright, not well read, as you mentioned. But he did, he did have a sense for power and

• 23:26Robert Evans?

  He's really good, yes.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he could root out sort of a little bit of, oh, this dude seems to be like a good, you know, ship to hook my, you know, whatever. I don't know the saying. Hook my ship to or whatever. What's the word again? Sail to? I don't know.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  A good guy, a good guy to like hitch his, hitch his boat to or whatever.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  That's right. I like that.

• 23:46Robert Evans?

  Tie his horse to, I don't know. But this, I think this is good. That is a good point about like, I, I try to make this point often about what intelligence is. Cause there's a bunch of climate scientists out there and any one of them is smart. Smarter than Donald Trump in a million ways. But Donald Trump is smarter than all of them at how you acquire power in a democratic society and use it for your own benefit. Now, part of why he's smarter at that is that he has absolutely no moral scruples whatsoever. But he's completely negated many people's lives work who are much smarter than him because he has that kind of intelligence. And Reza Khan is also that kind of guy. He can't read. He's not super bright in that way, but he's incredibly intelligent socially. And he is very good at making every British guy he meets love him.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  And that's all that matters in Persian politics at this point in time.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Hitch my wagon to. Hitch my wagon to.

• 24:38Robert Evans?

  I can't believe none of us could fucking figure that out.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. Sorry.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  And there is evidence that the Lord Ironside Tiny is charmed by Reza. He describes him upon meeting him as, quote, "A man and the straightest I have met yet, the real life and soul of the show." He doesn't mean that in like a sexual sense, but it is funny to be like, "That's the straightest man I've met yet." Almost is like, "And I've been fucking my way through this country too, so I can tell a straight one."

• 25:06Speaker 02

  It's funny too, because like, you know, when Reza Khan is raising his son, Mohammed Reza, which goes on to be the Shah that people think of as a Shah in modern times.

• 25:17Robert Evans?

  People say the Shah. They're talking about this guy's son. Yes.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  When he's raising him, he is, he, there is like no emotional connection there of any kind.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  Absolutely not.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  He doesn't, he treats him as a subordinate because he was one of these old school dudes who was under the belief that showing your son affection would make them gay. That was like, that was his whole bag.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Well, and again, to be fair, his mom abandons him after her husband dies when he's eight months old to be like, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna try again with a new family. Sorry, kid." Good luck.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  His uncle probably wasn't great either. And if we're like, I'm sure his uncle was not like a super enlightened guy, you know?

• 25:52Robert Evans?

  This kid's first healthy relationship is with a machine gun. Like, it's not shocking. He becomes the man he is. You know who else had a healthy relationship with automatic weaponry?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  HelloFresh, I hear they are.

• 26:10Robert Evans?

  Yet they love them. Oh, my God.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Can't get enough of them.

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  They own a lot of machine guns, a shocking number. Why? We can't tell you. Buy their products.

• 26:21Speaker 05

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• 26:52Robert Evans?

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• 27:51Robert Evans?

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• 28:33Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So we just let that happen, huh? Okay, cool. So, uh, yeah, good stuff. Um, so Reza Khan, as we've noted, was, you know, not a bright guy in a lot of ways, but he's very well-liked by British people, particularly by the Lord Ironside, who promotes Reza to Brigadier General and makes him Commander of the Cossack Brigade in 1921. He sits down with the newly-mented general and the British officer acting as paymaster for the local Persian forces, and he tells both men, "Britain won't stop him if he seizes power." Basically, he sits down with these guys and he's like, "Look, if you want to take control of the country, we won't do anything as long as you don't depose the current Shah,

• 29:17Robert Evans?

  right? That guy's technically our friend. So I'll keep Ahmed Shah is the current Shah's name. Keep Ahmed Shah the Shah, but you can do anything else you want," right? Basically. And Reza's like, "Hey, bro. Sounds cool to me, you know? I'll take that deal any day of the week." And he takes that deal, right?

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Is that the 12-year-old? Is it that Ahmed Shah is the 12-year-old Shah? Are we on to a different Shah now?

• 29:39Robert Evans?

  I mean, he starts as 12. He's not 12-year-old anymore.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  I recognize that people don't stay the age that when you meet them, you know?

• 29:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but yes, he is that kid. That's how he gains power initially, right? Um, yeah. So Ironside is like, "Hey, man, if you want to be in charge, just don't depose the Shah. We'll back your play." And then he like goes, claps his hands together, wipes them off, and leaves the fucking country for Egypt. He's just gone, right? He sets up the dominoes and he fucking bounces. So not long after he leaves, on February 20th, Reza marches a column of 600 men, 600 Cossacks, towards the undefended capital. All other military forces and the local police were ordered to stay inside and keep their goddamn mouths shut. And the coup that follows isn't totally peaceful, but it's like a fairly minimal amount of bloodshed for a coup d'etat, right? But it is a coup d'etat.

• 30:32Robert Evans?

  Now, depending on which historians you you like best, Reza Khan is either a bold opportunist who executes his own coup with a little help from his British friends beside their promise not to intervene. They don't do much other than not stop him. And the other way to look at this is that Reza is a total pawn of the Brits, a chess piece maneuvered into position by the Lord Ironside to block the Reds and keep the Royal Navy fueled. I'd never want to argue for a reduced British culpability in all of this, but if Ironside was the mastermind here, he was a very hands-off one, because as soon as he leaves Iran for Egypt, he's grievously wounded in a plane crash. And he's like recuperating in the hospital while the Khan overthrows the government and takes power, right? Princeton historian Richard Olman writes, "It is idle to speculate upon whether or not he would eventually have come

• 31:16Robert Evans?

  to power had Ironside not singled him out, but it is clear that Ironside and his British colleagues were largely instrumental in placing Reza Khan in a position to bring about the coup d'etat." And I think that's accurate. Reza Khan doesn't need much help from them other than backing out, right? He's got the guys and the guns to do this, and he has a skill for building an army. He's going to very effectively get more guys and more guns, because he doesn't have enough at the start of this to control much more than the capital, right? Once he takes power in the capital, he still has a lot of shit to do. And there's a years-long road before he becomes the Shah. He's not the Shah after this coup. He's technically the War Minister for Persia, which is a new position that makes him the

• 31:58Robert Evans?

  Commander in Chief of the military, but also lets him basically pick his own Prime Minister. And here's how he looks at the time, by the way. This is like how he looks when he's Minister of War for the country. Great mustache, it must be said.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Great hat.

• 32:12Robert Evans?

  Everyone was wearing hats like that back then. I don't know why, but they do look that one does look comfortable.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  I love it. I love a hat.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Pretty baller, Cossack hat. Look at that.

• 32:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, those like shacos or whatever don't normally look that cozy. Like his looks like it's knitted together out of wool.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  He does this. He's got this like sneer sort of thing down pretty good, like smirk.

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  The sneer of Cold Command, that Ramses look. Yeah, yeah, he's got it knocked down.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  I love that hat. Stunning.

• 32:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  My people's eyebrow game has been strong forever.

• 32:41Robert Evans?

  It, yeah, those, those brows, power. Facts. Um, so all Reza needs to do now, at this point, is end the war with the Soviets and defeat his numerous local rivals, most of whom are major tribal leaders who had gotten, these are the guys that the oil company, APOC, is paying, right? Like, those local leaders are his, now his main rivals for power, as well as like the, the Soviets. Um, so Great Britain sends him a friend, right around this time, to help him out, you know, now that he's newly the Minister of War. And this friend is a British diplomat, Sir Percy Lorraine. Now, Persia is not seen as a great place to be a British diplomat at this point in time. It's kind of like a career death sentence, because things have not gone great for a couple generations of British diplomats here.

• 33:26Robert Evans?

  It's been messy for them. Percy's not the empire's best. He is smart, uh, but he's also awkward, and he's bad at being social, or at editing his own dispatches down into something people would want to read. His coworkers nicknamed him Ponderous Percy, which is a huge, huge burn for British people. I love it. So, basically.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  These names, these names are so British.

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  Ponderous Percy and Tiny Ironside.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  They just get more British as the story goes along.

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  Right. So this shy bookworm dude is supposed to be like the liaison to Reza, and he immediately falls for this handsome and heroic seeming fucking machine gunner who's just made himself the Shah in all but name, right? Just like Ironside. Reza sums this guy up and charms him immediately. And Lorraine writes back to his boss, Curzon. "He gets straight to what he has to say and does not waste time in exchanging the delicately phrased but perfectly futile compliments so dear to the Persian heart. An ignorant and uneducated man, nevertheless, he betrays no awkwardness of manner nor self-consciousness. He has considerable natural dignity, and neither his speech nor his features reveal any absence of self-control." So that's how he's described by Lorraine.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  I have to say, he is in some ways so atypical for a Persian man. From like not wanting to show his kids love to like not using flowery poetry, like especially this age, every and like every older Persian man fancies himself a poet, like they, the language itself is so flowery. Like you say, like, instead of saying, I miss you, you say, my heart tightens for you. Instead of saying like, uh, you know, we wish you were here. It's, we kept the space for you. It's empty. You know, we have all these like flowery little bits of language in this. This guy is so like the opposite of that. That's what's so interesting about him. He's so atypically Persian.

• 35:19Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's both because, I mean, partly he's, he's only half Persian, right? Like his mom is Caucasian.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  All it takes is one drop, Robert.

• 35:26Robert Evans?

  Probably Armenian, right?

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Is one, and we claim you.

• 35:28Robert Evans?

  Sure. But he's, he's probably, he's not raised the way like, I mean, he's certainly not raised in a traditional Persian family at all. He's almost basically an orphan, right? Like he's, he's, so he doesn't have, and I think part, one of the things that results in is that unlike a lot of other people who have stuff like art to learn and culture and family that matter to them, all he thinks about is power. It's the only concern in his mind his entire life is gaining and taking power.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  And guys like that tend to be the ones who gain and take power in situations like this because it's all they think about.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  Cool. Good stuff.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Just like the podcasting in medical school.

• 36:08Robert Evans?

  Yep, just like podcasting. Yeah. Um, so Lorraine uses what influence he has to convince his superiors to advance Reza enough money to fund an army of 18,000 men. He also argues that Reza should be the one that the British back over several local sheiks and khans who'd previously worked with Anglo Persian oil. General Ironside also helped his friend Machine Gun Reza filing a report with the British War Office that promised Reza would, quote, "Solve many difficulties and enable us to depart in peace and honor." Basically, if we let this guy be in charge, he'll build an army that works and we won't have to, we can leave and we won't have to be ashamed. We won't like leave like we did Afghanistan, just like getting beat out. Right? And we can keep getting R O L. Right? That that that's the argument Ironside's making.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  So it takes about two years of fighting in the heartland of Persia for Reza to take a hold of this chaotic situation to beat back his, his, his rivals and to restore a form of order or take, I should say, power, right? Over the rest of the country outside of the capital. Now, the pretense of a constitutional regime still exists, but Reza's prime minister is like, well, now that you're the commander in chief, that's a civilian job. You have to retire from your military job and leading the Cossack Brigade, right? And Reza's like, no, I'm going to keep my private army. Obviously, you never give up your private army. You never give up your uniform if you want to be dictator, right? That's a bad idea right there.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Keep that sucker on. More medals on it. More and more medals.

• 37:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, and once this happens, basically everyone in the government realizes like, well, this guy's the Shah in all but name, you know? So after he returns in like 1923 to the capital at the head of an army that had at least been semi victorious, Khan was appointed prime minister himself. Now he's still bound by a pinky swear not to overthrow Ahmed Shah, but somehow Ahmed got the idea that life in Persia might not be safe for him with the Reza in charge.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  This six foot four looming monster.

• 38:05Robert Evans?

  Machine gun lover. Yes.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Right?

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Standing around.

• 38:09Robert Evans?

  So he flees to Europe where he spends the remainder of his life in exile. Right? Now Reza has at this point, they've basically made a kind of peace, you know, that things have been settled enough with the Soviets that they're not worried about that taking about like communists taking over the rest of Persia. And Reza sits down with the parliament and says basically, hey, have you guys noticed I have all the guns? And parliament says, you sure do, Reza. How do you like to be dictator for life? And he says, that sounds dope. And in October of.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Just dandy.

• 38:38Robert Evans?

  I'm smoothing some things over, but in October of 1923, he was appointed his serene highness and king of kings, although again, he's not the Shah yet. In fact, Reza debates briefly after this point, what kind of government should he impose upon his newly won land? Per the World Policy Journal, Reza Khan had toyed with proclaiming a republic, following the example of Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish soldier reformer he sought to emulate. The king of kings claimed to be a reluctant monarch, only agreeing to ascend the throne at the urging of the Ulama or Mullahs, who thought that conservative Persia would fare better with a Shah than with a democracy. At the time, royal titles were very much in the desert air, hence King Faisal of Iraq. So he chose the peacock throne, right? So he

• 39:20Robert Evans?

  picks being a king as opposed to being like a president who would have been the same as a Shah. He wouldn't have actually given up power, but he decides, well, I'll just make myself basically king, right? So he's, yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  It is interesting that he, he goes and he tries to connect with the Turkish leader and is seeing what's happening in Turkey at this time because.

• 39:41Robert Evans?

  Loves Ataturk. Yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I'm sure he sees like a strong guy who's maybe modernizing Turkey at that point.

• 39:48Robert Evans?

  That's exactly what he sees.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  And he wants to do that, but it seems like, and you'll know better than me, but I feel like he's not the politician to do that. He's not the, the leader to, to do it the same, with the same sort of clarity that the Turkish Ataturk would do.

• 40:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, and he's, he's not nearly as, as bright. Ataturk was interested in actually building a functional state, right? The Shah is primarily interested in getting as much out of Iran of like, he wants to rob it blind, right? Like, that's why he's in the, he wants to be the Shah. And it takes him about a year of badgering parliament, but he can, he succeeds in convincing them to formally depose the old Shah and make him the new Shah. And almost as soon as, as that becomes his job. And we'll talk about the actual process of crowning him. Reza Khan changes his name to Reza Shah-Pahlavi. Now, this is an auspicious change during the ancient, as you, as you noted, during the, the Sassadid Empire, which dominated a lot of the Middle East and North Africa, except for the bulk of the land.

• 40:47Robert Evans?

  Mass of the Arabian Peninsula, it's like a lot of the coast. The language by most that most Persians spoke, they was called Palavi, right? Like that's was the term for it. And Reza changed his name, like he does this. Like, the reason he does this is is what Mehdi Alavi and Atul Singh, writing for the Fair Observer, call a very clever public relations stunt. He's basically making a nationalist pitch to like Persians, saying like, hey, or I mean, specifically to like Iranian Persian, saying like, I am going to be your leader and this is going to be your country, as opposed to in these other groups of people who currently live here, right? Like, that's the pitch that he's making.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Palavi was great branding. This whole thing was great branding.

• 41:30Robert Evans?

  Palavi, yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, changing the name. Then he goes on to, I mean, his son actually goes on to change the name of the Anglo Iranian or Anglo Persian oil company to Anglo Iranian.

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, we'll talk about that, yes.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Great, good brand, they're good at branding, especially the father.

• 41:46Robert Evans?

  They're solid branding, yeah. It's, yeah, it's lasted to this day, some of the branding they did. And there's, there's a lot of this stuff. So in their book, The Shah, Abbas Malani writes that prior to obtaining total power, Reza began playing at piety in front, or really, we talked about this a bit. He'd always kind of been like the enforcer, like religiously, that had he'd been, he'd gained a religion, like a reputation for that. He likes being in good with the Shiite clergy. And he really ups that during the years when he's like, you know, in charge, but not yet the Shah. Quote, "He participated in religious mourning processions and like the most pious of the mourners, he beat his chest and brushed his forehead and the top of his head with ashes of sorrow and grief. Not long after he was crowned, Reza Shah would change course and begin a carefully planned

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  policy of limiting the power and role of the clergy in Iran." So he's, this is going to be a pattern for him. The people that he needs to get to power, he's going to fuck over fairly quickly. And that does include the clergy and there will be Titanic. You can tie the fact that the clergy are in charge in Iran today to his decision to fuck the clergy and some of the things he does as a result of that, right? We're going to talk about all of this. There's really long reaching consequences to this. But nobody calls his bullshit at the time, right? Everyone's fooled by, well, not everyone's fooled by Reza's charm, actually. Alavian Singh, noting their piece for The Fair Observer, "Not everyone bought into Reza Shah's sham. Four courageous legislators opposed the new Shah.

• 43:14Robert Evans?

  One of them was Mohammed Mosaddegh, who would go on to become prime minister years later. The British managed Reza Shah's coronation, using the coronation of King George V as their guide." So you do have people who oppose him, including Mosaddegh, who will talk, I mean, Margaret should talk about it in an episode on her show, actually.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So it's pronounced, I'll give you the two versions of it, the easy one. And by the way, again, apologies, because my Farsi is garbage. Mozadek is probably the easiest way to, with more of a Q sound, but I think it's pronounced more Mozadek. It's one of these sounds that's hard for Americans. Mozadek is a GH at the end. Yeah, that's, that would be a perfect, perfect person. I mean, he had some flaws, I mean, but he was like, he was one of these heroes that's held up in secular Iran.

• 44:04Robert Evans?

  I heard his name for the first time mispronounced in songs that were angry about the CIA overthrowing him, about our government's role in its overthrow, right?

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I'd love to hear that.

• 44:14Robert Evans?

  But yeah, we're not going to talk about him much more in this episode, but I did want to note that, like, not everyone is fine with what Reza's doing. There is resistance, there's very brave resistance. So, when he is coronated, as I noted here, the British used, like, that quote said, "the British." I'm going to go into a little more detail about what that actually means, when it says the British used Reza Shah's coronation, like, used the coronation of King George V as their guide. I want to talk about, like, what that means. So, one of the British people who's in Tehran at the time is a writer named Vita Sackville-West. She's a prominent author, and she's a good friend of Virginia Woolf. And she happens to be in Tehran for the coronation because her husband is a British diplomat.

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  And she kind of inveigles her way into helping to plan the coronation, which Reza sees as both a way to show his continuity with Persia's grand past and to sell Celebrate the coming new modern regime. Now, Sackville West is not a fan of Tehran, which after a decade of, nearly a decade of war and starvation, isn't in great shape, right? She calls the city squalid with, quote, "few pretentious buildings and mean houses on the verge of collapse and little else." Which is not nice, given that like, your government really helped with the famine that killed like, half the people who lived in the country. Like, yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Contributed to that.

• 45:32Robert Evans?

  London wouldn't look nice if 40% of British people died in a famine. I'll bet that much.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I can take a lot of criticisms, but like, when they come from the imperialist forces.

• 45:45Robert Evans?

  That's not a fair one.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  That's just not a fair one.

• 45:47Robert Evans?

  Nope. So, Vida and the wife of the head of the British legation literally sit down with books about the coronation of King George V. Because Reza's like, and Reza's people, I should say, are like, "We gotta figure out how to coronate this guy." Because this is kind of a new thing, because he's not being like the rest of the shahs. How should it look? And they leave it to the British people. Because they're like, "Well, you know how kings and queens are supposed to take the throne, right? You figure it out." And so, these two women sit down with these books about the coronation of King George V, and they make notes about, "Oh, there's all these symbols of power that they handed them. There's all these swords and scepters and crowns and precious stones that mean all these things, and have these fancy names that are part of this whole process." And they, they kind of make their own version of it for the coronation of the shah.

• 46:31Robert Evans?

  I want to read you a quote about this whole process of planning the coronation from "A Very British Coup" by Shereen Bryasak. But as I read all this, I need you to remember that, again, seven years earlier, about half the country died of famine, when we're talking about how obscene the display of wealth that this represents really is. As Vida Sackville West recalled, "The linen bags vomited emeralds and pearls. The green baize vanished. The table became a sea of precious stones. The leather cases opened, displaying jeweled scimitars, daggers mounted with rubies, buckles carved from a single emerald, ropes of enormous pearls. Then, from the inner room came the file of servants again, carrying uniforms sewn with diamonds, a cap with a tall aigrette secured by a diamond larger than the mountain of

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  light." Crowns like great heretic tiaras, barbaric diatoms, compose a pearl of the finest orient. We plunged our hands up to the wrist in the heaps of uncut emeralds and let the pearls run through our fingers. We forgot the Persia of today. We were swept back to Akbar and the spoils of India. Soon, orders went out to shops throughout Europe, but after the intercession of Lady Lorraine, Vida was given authority to order china, glass, cutlery, and stationery from London's royal purveyors. She commissioned red liveries for the palace modeled on those worn by the British legation servants. Apropos of the coronation, Vida Sackville-West writes to her friend Gertrude Bell, "She and Louise Lorraine have been very busy painting the throne room pink."

• 47:58Speaker 02

  It's like, I'm envisioning, I'm envisioning the scene from the cartoon movie Aladdin. Where he comes in as Prince Ali Ababwa. And I wish we could talk about that movie for a long time. I got, I got thoughts. I got thoughts.

• 48:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, boy.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  It's so opulent.

• 48:17Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. Yes. And this, this, this, all this wealth that like could have been used during the famine years to maybe help with the famine, wasn't used for that. And also, there's an opportunity here in this capital that's been devastated of like, well, we need a shitload of cutlery and stationery in China and glass. You could have a lot of that made by people in Tehran, by people in the greater Persian area. No, we're sending off to London. We're sending money out of this starving country to bring in stuff from London. It's just better, you know?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Be a job creator, if nothing else.

• 48:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this pisses some people off too, right? Oh, really? Now, I want to, yeah, I want to talk about how the Shah gets coronated. And here's how the biography of the Shah describes the one, Reza stepped into the hall where he would be coronated. And he's arrived, he's known as a very punctual man. In fact, he's accused often angrily of bringing like the concept of punctuality to Persia. That like Iranians didn't give a shit what time it was before Reza. Like, is a thing you hear people say.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  I'm calling you out, LA. I'm calling you out, LA Persians. Sorry.

• 49:24Robert Evans?

  But so it's noteworthy, he shows up late as like a power move because he can, right? Quote, "At last there was a stir. The doors were opened and the six-year-old Mohammed Resa-- that's his son, appeared in the hall. Behind him walked the procession of the 22 political dignitaries led by the prime minister. They were carrying the many royal accoutrement necessary for the coronation: three different crowns, a scepter, three swords belonging to past kings, and even a diamond-studded royal bow and arrow. One of the swords belonged to Nader Shah, a powerful king who united Iran and was reported to have been planning limits on the powers of the clergy. Nader Shah was also alleged to have attempted a reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis, and he was Reza Shah's great hero." So he's kind of signaling some of what he's going to be trying to do, right? Sure.

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  By what stuff they pick for this. So the Shah's son, after he's crowned, Mohammed Reza Palavi, was pronounced Crown Prince. Initially, now that Reza's the Shah, he promises a reign free of religious influence or internal strife. And he promises, quote, "European-style educational institutions, westernized women active outside the home, and modern economic structures with state factories, communication networks, investment banks, and department stores," in the words of historian Eravand Abrahamian, right? He's saying, "We're going to be a modern country like all those European countries," right? And, you know, there's a lot of good stuff that sounds like in those, in those promises. Right. You know, cut the power of these religious tyrants, let women do more stuff. Sounds

• 50:52Robert Evans?

  great, roads, sounds good. A lot of that stuff will in fact happen. Now, first off, it's always debatable how much of this is actually, how much of the good stuff that happens has anything to do with the Shah, or is it just stuff he takes credit for? But the other thing that's important to know is that like, what he does, he does by instituting the most direct one-man rule possible. And this means cracking down on, in many, and in many cases eliminating, all of the local leaders, the tribal leaders, who had previously been friends to his British patrons. And in it, doing so in a very brutal way. Ending internal strife means ending any fiction that Persia is a nation of many peoples. And so it was Reza Shah who officially-- changed the name of his country from Persia to Iran.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  Per The Fair Observer, Reza Shah's de-tribalization and Persianization led to ethnic cleansing and genocide. William Douglas, a noted American judge, had the following to note about one community that fell fall of Reza Shah. "Lur after lur," that's the group of people, that's the ethnic group, like the tribe that he's going after, "lur after lur was beheaded again and again. The plate was heated red hot and slapped on the stump of a neck. The colonel started betting on how far these headless men could run. Every man, woman, and child had been killed. Not a living soul was left."

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  This is the kind of shit his soldiers are doing to wipe out any other groups that might be a threat to his power.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:14Robert Evans?

  Like, they're beheading people and cauterizing the bodies and then, like, seeing how far their headless corpses will sprint.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Fucking dark.

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  Like, this is a brutal, dehumanizing crackdown on everyone else. That's a big part of what the Shah does.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 52:30Robert Evans?

  Have we had two ad breaks, Sophie?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:32Robert Evans?

  Okay, great. This is a good time for one.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  No, it isn't, but let's do it anyways.

• 52:41Speaker 05

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• 53:10Robert Evans?

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• 54:10Robert Evans?

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• 54:50Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, the new Shah also put a violent end to what had at that point been some 80 years of increasing press freedom. Over the course of his reign, he grows increasingly obsessed with the way Mustafa Kemal is doing things over in Turkey. Aping him, Reza bans traditional clothing. It was now illegal for Iranians to wear anything but Western dress. Now, this is something that gets missed a lot when you see conservatives or other people post pictures of Iranian women in headscarves next to old photos of the second Shah in this line of like women during the reign of that Shah in Tehran dressed like Westerners, right? Looking like women in Western cities, right? And it's always framed as like, and it is fucked up that people don't have like freedom to choose what they wear on their head.

• 55:33Robert Evans?

  But what is not talked about is how those pictures came to be. And so I want to read you a quote from a Lobby and Singh's article about why you have those pictures of women without headscarves in Tehran. If they did not do so, give up their traditional dress, they were beaten and even taken into custody. This policy caused a massive rupture with tradition. In small towns and villages, people ignored the Shah's edict. In cities, people suffered, especially the women. Many women stopped going to public places to avoid harassment and became involuntary prisoners within their own homes. This is not a nice process. He's not freeing people. He's saying you'll be beaten if you do this thing that you've been doing your whole life still.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  This is, this is the point where I have to say two things. There's two things I have to mention. One, and this is for all the aunties out there who might be listening or hear this episode. Please no angry emails. We can accept two truths are happening or have happened, which is one, the Shah, the Shahs were repressive and fascist, and also the mullahs are repressive and fascist. And, and I would argue they're worse. And I would say most Iranians would say it's worse, but it doesn't mean that what they were doing was good.

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  This is not a nice time.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  It is not a nice time. And also, it probably led long-term to some of the conflicts that we had down the road with the mullahs and those, that fascist, Islamo fascist regime. Another thing I will have you note, when this meme was popularized, where it's like they show like the picture of like the women that this was Iran in the seventies and now look their animals, sort of, always has a weird vibe to it. I posted, one of my more popular tweets when I was on X or Twitter, was a picture of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. And it was him dancing with the full-on dance thing you can imagine where he's like on the dance floor, it's all lit up. And I said, this is an actual picture of my father in pre-revolutionary Iran, dancing. And to be fair, it does kind of look like

• 57:34Speaker 02

  my dad. And it does look like the kind of dancing he would do. It looks extraordinarily Persian. In fact, there's never been a more Persian-coded picture than John Travolta dancing in that. And it was very popular. And up to everyone who thought that was real, I apologize. I'm sorry.

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  It's important to know that, like, again, there are much better ways to, yeah, it's bad to tell people they have to or can't wear a certain thing. You can do that without saying it's now illegal to wear what you were wearing before, and you'll get beaten in the street if you do it. The Shah could have just said, "You don't have to dress like the clerics want you to anymore. Do whatever." And doing that also probably would have caused a lot less of the kind of resentment that builds up in the... Right. Like, it's, it's just, he's a dick about everything. He's a huge asshole. That's, that's Ressa Shah, basically. So Iran does modernize a lot during Ressa's time in power, and early in his reign, there are other people who are doing hard work and, and good work, who are like competent political

• 58:34Robert Evans?

  figures and allies who is able to entrust to execute and create policy, right? And this is part of why there's a lot of development in the country. Each of these men, though, grows too powerful and popular for Ressa's liking. He is not a guy who is good at trusting. The encyclopedia of the world of Islam notes, "They were gradually eliminated from the political arena, and most of them were murdered humiliatingly at his behest." So, not a great dude to work

• 58:58Speaker 02

  God, I don't like that sentence. Murdered humiliatingly. That is very haunting.

• 59:03Robert Evans?

  Bleak. Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 59:05Robert Evans?

  Oh. I mean, he likes cauterizing stuff, so we know that there's some fucked up shit going on here. By 1931 or so, the Shah is about as close to a total despot as one could be. But as cruel as he was to his own people, he was deeply aware of how fragile his hold on power remained. He had seen in action how little effort it took the British to help him onto his throne. Over the years, though, he'd also grown increasingly paranoid about their plots. At the same time, he was terrified of the USSR, and he actually gives the Soviet Union a big chunk of what's today Turkmenistan in 1933 to try and buy them off and keep them happy. And he does the same to British oil interests. He gives them, like, concedes

• 59:47Robert Evans?

  a bunch of Iranian soil. He does this a few times to, and I think he does this to Turkey as well. He gives away a sizable chunk of his country in order to preserve his reign and try to, like, make friends with these foreign powers that he's hoping will help keep him on his throne. And this obviously pisses people off. He's literally giving away the country. Public authorities in the media were ordered to describe the Shah as a reformer who would modernize the country. He was given credit for reforms instituted by other past leaders like Amir Kabir, while his secret police punished anyone who spoke out about the darker side of the regime. Per Shereen Bricek, Reza Shah's whim was absolute, his memory extraordinary, his thirst to avenge proverbial, his skin gossamer. No elective constitutional system

• 1:00:31Robert Evans?

  was allowed to grow roots under the Palavis. Another break from Ataturk's example, to the untravelled Shah, the concept of a free press was unfathomable. When Reza discovered that Iranians were still using postage stamps bearing the portrait of the deposed Ahmad Shah, he sent his troops to seize the entire supply. For some weeks, Iran remained stampless, and since the newly minted ones with Reza's portrait were slow in arriving from Holland, the old stamps had to be retrieved and circulated, albeit with the exiled Shah's effigy blacked out. That's a bit.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  Somebody had to go through each one of those stamps and just write it out.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Like millions.

• 1:01:06Robert Evans?

  You just had a temper tantrum. He's like, all the stamps, confiscate them all. And they're like, well, no one can use the mail. Hey, hey, boss, we got kind of a problem here. And he's like, you got Sharpies, don't you?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  And, and I'll have you know, this is where, this is the, the corner of the show in which I talk about Persian contributions to the world, the postal system. You like the postal service? Persians came up with that. You like that?

• 1:01:33Robert Evans?

  Love it.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  That's something, that's, that's our thing. One of our things.

• 1:01:36Robert Evans?

  And he fucked it up.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Fucked it up. It's our thing, man. And you fucked it up.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's been your thing. It's been your thing for a while.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  So when the Great Depression hits, oil revenues from Great Britain dry up sharply. Again, the British are nominally supposed to pay quite a bit to Iran for the oil that they take out. But like during World War I, they stopped paying because they're like, why, why would we pay? Times are hard. And during Great Depression, oil revenues also dry up sharply. And they're finding ways to fuck with them. They're still selling oil. They are often lying to the Government because again, APOC has never cared about the government Tehran. So they're often they're like the government Tehran doesn't usually know what the British Navy is paying for oil. Right? Like, that's all kept in a black box from them.

• 1:02:24Robert Evans?

  This pisses off the Shah. There's years of ongoing arguments with the Shah and renegotiations of that contract with Darcy. Where the Shah is like, you're fucking us. And they are. The Shah is not wrong. He's being fucked here.

• 1:02:38Robert Evans?

  So it is still APOC, the Anglo Persian Oil Company. At the time, though, it will eventually be renamed, as you noted, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, or AIOC. And just in case you're all curious, it's renamed one more time and it still exists today. Kaba, do you know what APOC slash AIOC is today? I bet you do.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Famously known for taking care of the environment, they are now known as BP.

• 1:03:01Robert Evans?

  Wonderful company.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  British Petroleum.

• 1:03:03Robert Evans?

  British Petroleum. That's right, baby. That's these motherfuckers.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  They were bad from the beginning. It's so funny.

• 1:03:10Robert Evans?

  They were always evil, always evil as fuck.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Even when they weren't killing like ducks and stuff.

• 1:03:17Robert Evans?

  No, no, there's never been a leader of that company who didn't deserve to be flung into the sun.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  So the fact that Great Britain's fucking him and that the oil company is fucking him really wears on Reza. And resentment over this builds at the same time is an awful lot. So in the 20s, up to the 30s. He's getting increasingly angry at Great Britain and increasingly paranoid at Great Britain. And at the same time, a lot of Germans start coming to Iran. And like a lot of tourists come and a lot of like vacationers.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Nice. We like this.

• 1:03:51Robert Evans?

  German investors.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  These kebabs you have. Yeah, we're looking to this kebab business you have here.

• 1:03:58Robert Evans?

  No, to not very German regime.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  Very nice. Then, you know, a guy gets elected in 19, you know, in the 30s, who's not as nice. But who Reza Shah finds himself actually in agreement with a lot. That guy, his name is Adolf Hitler. And Reza Shah is like, this Hitler guy, he's saying a lot I agree with about how the British are evil and untrustworthy. He's saying a lot of other things that Reza agrees with too.

• 1:04:26Robert Evans?

  Stuff on genocide that Reza might not be against. And Germany, this is actually one of the most successful, like, German. It's a mix of like a spying and like an economic influence effort that like the Nazi regime like carries out over this period of time, which is that by 1940, nearly half of all Iranian imports come from the German Reich. And 42% of all Iranian exports are entering Germany. So by the time World War II starts, Germany is kind of more important for the Iranian economy in a lot of ways than Great Britain is. And Reza Shah has come to believe that like, well, I've got these Germans who were good allies, right? Like, these guys will be good friends to me. And he started, he hates Britain and Russia.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  Both pretty much the same at this point in time. And he kind of, at the start of World War II, he makes a bet that like, I bet Hitler's gonna win. I bet this, I bet things are gonna keep going well for Adolf Hitler.

• 1:05:23Robert Evans?

  This goes wrong for him almost immediately. For, first off, he's shocked at the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, that like the Soviet Union and the Nazis have a detente and invade Poland together. Because he's like, wait, but I don't like Russia. I thought that we were on the same page about that Germany, right? And when World War II starts, he's like, Iran's neutral. Trust me, neutral. We want not, we're not siding with the Germans here. But when the Germans invade the USSR, that makes Russia and Great Britain allies. And they're, the British are increasingly unhappy with this guy who seemed very sympathetic to Hitler being on the throne. And to make a long story short, the Shah is forced to abdicate.

• 1:06:08Robert Evans?

  He tells his son, I cannot be, and this is because like Russia and Britain like, or primarily Britain like sends soldiers into Persia, right? They basically take the country because they need the oil for the war that they're fighting with the Third Reich. And they don't want this guy who's untrustworthy to be able to cut off the Royal Navy's fuel supply, right? It's a part of why there's a conference in Tehran during World War II. Conference. It's a big deal. And the Shah, yeah, Reza is not a fan of any of this. He abdicates, telling his son, I cannot be the nominal head of an occupied land to be dictated to by a minor English or Russian officer. His son, who's 21 years old at this time, Mohammed Reza Palavi, is immediately proclaimed Shah by

• 1:06:52Robert Evans?

  the Majlis right after this. And yeah, that's, that's more or less the end of this guy's story. Reza, the former Shah, gets put onto a British boat. He goes to Mauritius first in the Indian Ocean, but he doesn't like the climate and he eventually is taken to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he stays under house arrest, dying from a heart attack in 1944. And that's the end of his life.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  That, that's fascinating. First of all, when, when I heard that we were doing the Shah, I had the wrong Shah in mind. So this is fascinating because this is the Shah I know the least about. So that's really interesting to get all this background.

• 1:07:29Robert Evans?

  I thought this was all going to be the first, like, two pages of a script on the other Shah. I was like, this is just the context we need. And I just found it so interesting and worth telling. And I like, especially once I hit the fucking great Persian fam and I was like, well, shit, this like, I need to refocus these episodes.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. And I, and I do think it's so important because it lays out the groundwork for what happens next.

• 1:07:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Really importantly, and it makes it so much easier to understand what happens next. I was under the impression that he had flirted with the Nazis just because he hated the British so much.

• 1:08:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  I didn't, I didn't realize he was quite so sympathetic.

• 1:08:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  It sounds like the, the Allies had their, their fears, which may or may not have been grounded, but it makes sense as to why they went in and, and deposed him. It's always weird to me, that dynamic, like, I, because like, what is that? I mean, as the son, how do you stay behind? And that's just so weird. I guess you have to, you feel like it's your duty in the best case scenario.

• 1:08:28Robert Evans?

  You get to be the king. Your dad's never been that great. You're 21, probably always figured you could do a better job.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm curious because at this time, I think the 21 year old Mohammed Reza Shah, the son was just out there in like Europe, hanging out like with like B grade celebrities and actresses and, and partying hard. So I didn't, I'm curious to know where he was at in this stage in his life, but um, we'll have to get to it at some other point. Three more episodes, please.

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, don't worry. We will, friends. We will. Um, but we're not going to do that today. Today, we're going to do something else. We're going to end the episode with you plugging your pluggables.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Wow. Beautiful.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  You're very good at this. Uh, so if you like this show, I think there's a very good chance you're gonna like my podcast, The House of Pod. It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. I have on a rotating, uh, crew of co-hosts and I try to mix up medical expertise and people who are just fun and I like to be around like Robert and Sophie, for example, and we'll talk about important medical topics. We'll talk about medical grifters. Um, and you know, I guarantee you it's more fun than it sounds. So check out The House of Pod, anywhere you get your podcasts. Our most recent episodes include influence versus evidence, which is a lot of what we talked about earlier today. It's

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  a lot of looking at how we decide what happens in our healthcare now and how we're drifting away from evidence. So anyways, you'll like it. I promise.

• 1:10:02Robert Evans?

  Well, everybody, that's been Behind the Bastards for this week. Check back next week. We'll talk about someone else who sucked, you know, someone different.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:10:48Speaker 07

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• 1:11:18Speaker 05

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• 1:11:47Speaker 06

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