[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[TeachESL]

In response to my saying that the moneys that were frozen should be unfrozen and given to the Iranian people, somebody on ICQ posted this: (Uni is me):
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I'm with Uni on this one. That money couldn't possibly belong to the present religious dictators there. It must be money that the Shah stole from the people.

Let it be returned to the populace in a controlled manner so that they can get rid of the Mullah and Imams that they obviously despise.
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What this person has said about the Shah having stolen money from the people - is that true? I'm really trying to learn.

[Immortal38]

This user (Immortal38) has been banned from the message forum!
Reasons:

(1).Consistent use of vulgarity

(2).Consistently Attacking (Insulting) Activist Compatriots

(3).Inconsistent claims - ie: professing to not be with the mullahs, while embarking on effort to pollute the message forum, cause deviation from primary discussion, and listing nonsense conspiracy theories.

<u>TAKE YOUR CONSPIRACY THEORIES ELSEWHERE!</u>

[phoenician]

[Immortal38]

I know she was just asking but i get angered when people disrespect a great king!
_________________
LONG LIVE IRAN......LONG LIVE SHAHANSHAH

[Spenta]

The Shah created Iran's first professional and educated middle class. Prior to the Pahlavi's, Iran had the royalty and clergy who owned all the land, and the serfs/peasants who worked it. The Shah gave the land back to the peasants from the royalty and clergy who owned it with the White Revolution in he 1960s, which also gave women equal rights. This marked the start of Khomeini's political career, he led the riots and fires that burned in Qom in protest to land reforms and equality for women which led to his exile. Khomeini meanwhile never showed such tolerance to those who opposed his evil policies and killed them by the thousands and even assassinated them in exile!

Rather than stealing from the people, he gave back to the people ( at great loss to his own holdings) the land and what was duly theirs. This is what got Khomeini so angered, and this is what started his battle agasint the Shah, the clergy's loss of wealth which was supported by enslaving the peasants.

Iran's middle class were neither royalty nor clergy, but people who had risen through hard work and merit. Like Europe in the 19th century the rise of this middle class ushered in modernism which was a threat to the clergy. But radical politics of the twentieth century were primarily anti bourgois, thus anti middle class. In Iran Islamo Communism ignorantly saw this bourgois class as the cause of all problems, and foolishly sought to destroy it in order to put the clerical oligarchs/Feudal Land Owners back into power.

The Shah as a monarch had wealth the same as any other. The last documented order of the Shah, shows who and what he was. he ordered a special fund to be set up immediately to send money to Iranian scholarship students abroad so that the chaos and government upheavals during the revolution would not result in them going hungry in the west. The amount that the Shah and his family took is a pitiable sum in comparison to the Mullah$ foreign investments as a result of their theft!

Under the Shah Iran had its wealthy, middle class, working class and the poor. Today Iran has the filthy rich, the working poor, and 80% below the poverty line! By all accounts the Mullah$ destroyed the middle class, and the Islamo Communists were successful in the destruction of the bourgoisie! Today each Ayatollah rules like a pasha and regional oligarch!

I would like to thank the US for freezing these funds because if they hadn't, like everything else the Mullah$ have stolen it would be gone!




The Shah personally handing the deed to the lands to the peasants who had farmed them all their lives!

This man did not steal from the people! The Mullah$ and their collborators did!

[Khorshid]

The Shah of Iran stole nothing. When he sent his son, Reza Pahlavi, to Texas for his studies he provided him with an appartment so small that when a working class family of 3 bought the place a few years ago they had to renovate it for a bit more room.

.

[TeachESL]

Thank you all for your responses. I see you are very emotional about the subject. But what about the Secret Police the West was told about that the Shah had? This was - supposedly - one of the reasons - I assume - that the West 'stood by' while the Revolution took place.

[Spenta]

At his peak the Shah had 3000 political prisoners, in a country of 35 million. Now that is not what I call a high figure. The majority of the dissidents under the Shah were alive and well, and became leaders after the revolution. The accounts of torture and exceution were vastly exaggerated, ad only after 1976 when the Shah ws diagnosed with Leukemia. I just wrote this in response to a question by someone on another board, so I will run it here:

Why did the West turn on the Shah?

The 3 main reasons as I see it.

1. High Oil Prices.
Some of you may not recall the crippling effect that high oil prices had on the US and European economies in the 1970s, it was devastating! The Shah had not only raised oil prices, but given his influence in OPEC was demanding that OPEC keep prices high. The Shah had eloquently pleaded that oil was a finite resource and that it would run out someday, and that OPEC countries should sell their oil at high prices to make as much money for their countries and to bring about progress as possible during this historic window of opportunity for oil producing countries. The Shah was not only responsible for the high prices but its number one cheerleader! Meanwhile the US and European economies were going bankrupt!

This was as serious as serious gets. Notice since the demise of the Shah, OPEC became a pussycat, and oil prices plummeted and stayed down so much in the last 25 years that the car industry abandoned its fuel efficient models in favor of the SUV gas guzzling behemoths that were unthinkable in 1976 given the vast oil shortages and high prices in the west! The Mullahs have kept oil prices at record lows for the last 25 years, which is why the west has left them alone and in charge in Iran despite all the terrorism and all their mischief for all these years!

2. The Shah was dying from Cancer & the Soviet Union was poised for takeover of Iran!

In 1976 the Shah was diagnosed with Leukemia. The US found out, altho based on other accounts the CIA knew but they never told Carter! Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act do show some debate about the plausibility of the Crown Prince taking over, but there were serious doubts about that, he was too young and the political atmosphere of the region too unstable especially with the Soviet threat. The Mojahedeen, Fedayan and other Islamist terrorist groups were blowing up banks and assassinating American and Iranian government personnel while training for guerrilla warfare and overthrow of the government in Libyan terrorist training camps alongside the PLO, the Soviet Union was plying the Tudeh party Communists in Iran with tons of cash and guns, and US intelligence had detected large troop deployments under the auspices of 'new bases' along the Southern border of the USSR. It looked disastrous to them, and remember the Soviets rolled the tanks into Afghanistan by 1979 so the west had pretty good cause for alarm here!

The solution: the Green Belt of Islam, or the Beard of the Soviet Union doctrine, which sought to block Soviet expansion with Islam. Remember they used Catholicism and the Pope in Poland, and "under god" was only added to the pledge of allegiance in the US under McCarthyism as a defense against Communism! Ultimately though, they decided to trash the Shah, because monarchist loyalists would have demanded a transtition to the crown prince which the west thought would be too vulnerable to overthrow, and even if he managed to stay in power would most likely continue to keep oil prices too high.

The Soviets had this mad vision of taking over all the oil producing countries in the ME in order to defeat Capitalism. Yeah I know what that sounds like, but the Soviets were nearly bankrupt, couldn't keep up with the US in weapons developement and knew it, and like the Mullahs the more desperate they became the more mad their plans got. Afghanistan was the start, Iran/Iraq would have followed. Soviet Union at the Persian Gulf, that was their vision. The world could have been on the brink of nuclear war, and there was no way the west was going to give them Iran! So they made friends with Socialist Saddam, initiated regime change in Pakistan, in Afghanistan (bad move) and then Iran to prevent internal Soviet sponsored revolutionaries from taking over with pro Soviet governments! And a year after Khomeini took over and no longer needed his Tudeh allies, he killed all the pro Soviet Tudeh and Communists in Iran. Something that the Shah had never done, but the west insisted on! Amazing how Khomeini just delivered on everything like a good little dog of the west, while he put on a show of anti Americanism for the world

Ashraf is right. The Shah went from being a great leader celebrated by the west to Amensty's Designation of the Worst Violator of Human Rights in the world in a matter of 1 year since his diagnosis of Leukemia. This is a world that had Pol Pot and the Khmer Rounge and their Killing Fields in Cambodia, Idi Amin the cannibal genocidal butcher of Africa, Pap Doc Duvallier and his zombie killers in Haiti, and the list goes on! Could anyone in their right mind compare the Shah to these bloodthirsty genocidal dictators or even claim that the Shah was worst? Amnesty found evidence of mass murder and torture in Iraq under Saddam (the west's favortie new leader) and no evidence of mass murder and torture in Iran under the Shah (on the west's 'get rid of him' list) and their conclusion was the Shah is the Worst Violator of Human Rights?! Its ludicrous, and I mean ludicrous to any sensible person examining the facts today or even then, that the Shah could be the worst violator of human rights in a world were a dictator like Pol Pot would kill 1/5th of the population as in Cambodia! But then again, back then Leftist US God Noam Chomsky claimed that the Oslo report of the Killing Fields in Cambodia was a fabrication and exaggeration. Later when the horrifying nature of this genocide became known, leftist god Noam Chomsky was forced to apologise publicly!

On another note, many people complained that the Shah appeared aloof, and disconnected which made matters worst. Well how would you behave if you were told you had Leukemia?! So unfortunately the disease effected him, his abilities and those around him and his western allies! I think Bahman 7 is right, had he told the people, Khomeini would not have had a chance.

3. War with Iraq to use up the weapons stockpiles.

There are many stories, some verified by Kissinger critics which are aplenty these days , that Kissinger had decided that the Shah had too great a weapons stockpile, which meant he no longer needed expensive weapons from the US. In fact the Shah had cancelled many orders for weapons from the US in his last years. So Kissinger is purported to have come up with the plan to have Iran and Iraq go to war to use up their respective weapons stockpiles. The Shah was presented with this offer, and the Shah refused because the loss of life and damage to the country was unacceptable to him. This became yet another example of the extent to which the Shah refused to listen to the west, something that additionally made him more dispensable to the west.

You will notice of course that right on cue, from the second he took power, Khomeini went to work attacking Saddam Hossein with words, demanding his overthrow in Iraq day and night enticing him to attack. After a year of daily threats, insults and enticements from Khomeini Saddam attacked. 2 years later Saddam offered peace, but Khomeini refused and continued the war senselessly for another 6 years! So once again something else that the Shah refused to deliver, that Khomeini gladly did! In addition to the October Surprise, Reagan got the added bonus of cash from the Mullah$ for Iran Contra in return for new weapons, and Iraq spent all of its oil revenues buying weapons from the west. Oil became dirt cheap and money poured into the west like never before with the economies of the US and Europe both slowly starting to rebound after the disastrous slump due to high oil prices of the 1970s. What else could you ask for ...

This why I laugh when I read people write ... the Shah was a US puppet. If he was, there would not have been an Islamic Revolution in 1979!

[Spenta]

Khomeini's regime killed more people in its first year than the Shah had in 30 years.

There were many demosntrations against Khomeini, but western press failed to report these far worst atrocities or demosntrations with the same zeal with which they had hailed Khomeini as a siant and demonised the Shah as a monster. Why is that?

The Mullah$ have stolen more and continue to steal more. The Mullahs' have many more political prisoners and they have killed over 130,000 political prisoners, yet the western press just sings the praises of democracy in Iran under the Reforms.

Doesn't anyone find this double standard that exaggerated everything under the Shah, and ignores the far worst atrocities under the Mullahs for the last decades as strange?!

[TeachESL]

Wow. This is an awful lot to digest. I am going to copy that and send it to myself for reading later.

[me]

[you]

[redemption]

Teach: You are truly an activist
_________________
IRANIANS UNITE
PERSIA LIVES ON!!
FREE IRAN NOW!

[Sourena]

if by secret police, you are referring to SAVAK, well that is a different story than why the west stood by. Firstly, yes, the Shah did have a secret police called SAVAK. It was set up and trained by who else than the CIA and Her Majesty's Intelligence. As for why the west stood by and did nothing...that is a long story. Not many of you may know this though. I heard it from my grandfather who was a Sar-lashgar (Maj. General) in the army.
Basically what happened is that the US and England actually sparked off the revolution. It was their foreign ministers and ambassadors that advised the Shah to flee Iran. It is believed that when Khomeini was in exile, he was approached by the US and a trade made. The US would help Khomeini in his revolution, and he would give them an oil monopoly. But what happened was, Khomeini, being the ba***** that he was, betrayed the US. Not only did he not give them an oil monopoly, he asked for money from them. You see, the US had money that belonged to the monarchy of Iran. They said that since the Islamic Republic was not the monarchy, they would not repay the money. Khomeini got mad and took hostages. Anyway, the US tried to get back at Iran by supplying Sadam with armaments and funded Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Later, they got betrayed by Sadam who invaded countries in the PERSIAN Gulf, and blah blah blah. So basically you see that all these events are a maze of the US striking deals with shady characters and getting betrayed.

[Sourena]

so you see as it was posted by Spenta earlier, the US and Britain betrayed the Shah because he would not give them an oil monopoly.