Titans of History

He now launched his White Revolution, a modernizing program of high technology, land reform, female rights and suffrage, diminishing of Shiite clerical control, education, and industrialization. When the Shiite ayotollahs resisted this program in a series of riots between 1961 and 1962, the shah appointed his closest ally Asodollah Alam prime minister and allowed him to use the army to suppress the rebellion. This success over the clergy gave the shah and his top aides the illusion that they had triumphed over the ayatollahs.

Meanwhile he built up a formidable military machine, funded by America, to become the self-appointed guardian of the Gulf and a Near Eastern military great power. At home, he used his secret police, SAVAK, to keep the communists, nationalists and the clergy under control but human rights abuse and routine torture, made the regime unpopular. Worse, the rise in the oil price had given the shah endless revenues to pursue grandiose schemes and buy more American arms, even starting a nuclear program. The oil riches brought rampant corruption and ostentatious decadence. The Shah himself dominated every decision and every part of Iranian life but the imperial family were notorious for their corruption.

As a young man he had married Princess Fawzia, sister of Farouk, last king of Egypt, but this had ended in divorce. He then married a young Iranian-German girl named Soraya who was perhaps the true love of his life but she was unable to have children. Thirdly and happily the Shah married Farah Diba, a pretty Iranian student with whom he had a son and heir as well as several daughters. But his own secret love life became notorious. As the diaries of his minister of court (and sometime prime minister) Alam reveal, he regarded his sexual adventures as essential to his well-being under great stress: he was never without an array of mistresses and the beautiful courtesans of the Madame Claude agency of Paris were regularly flown in for his pleasure.

But the Alam diaries also reveal his increasing megalomaniacal delusions as he was spoiled by international success, domestic flattery and oil wealth. In 1971, in a £100 million folly of imperial hubris and French catering, he chose to celebrate not the Persian relationship with Islam but the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great: these Persepolis parties damaged his reputation further. However the shah—now at the point of his greatest power and success—was actually secretly suffering from cancer. Furthermore, the very success of his reforms—in education, in the economy, in land reform—had planted the seeds of his destruction: a poverty-stricken middle class with educational pretensions but resentment of imperial cronies and their corruption; students and liberals tortured by SAVAK; thousands of ex-peasants who had moved to Teheran to enjoy the new boom only to be forgotten in vast slums, where they were co-opted and cared for by Islamic preachers and organizations; and a determined and organized movement of Islamic Shiite fundamentalism under the control of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. The inept Jimmy Carter undermined the shah further with his comments on human rights in Iran. When the riots and protests intensified in late 1978, the Shah was oddly listless and distracted, lacking the will to order a full crackdown: he simply did not wish to shed any more blood. In early 1979, as he lost control of the streets, the shah flew away “on holiday,” never to return. Pursued by the new Iranian regime, betrayed by the Americans and forced to move from country to country as he died of cancer, his end was a Shakespearean tragedy. The shah had appeared magnificently powerful and secure. His rule was clearly flawed both in his personality and his repression but his intentions were good and compared with the monstrous brutality of the Islamic Republic that came after him, he was a paragon.

JOHN PAUL II

1920–2005

His name became part of our history, his thoughts will be an always present inspiration to build … a more peaceful world for all of us.

Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, on the death of John Paul II

In 1978 the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian pontiff for 455 years. During his long tenure, he became a hero of the struggle for freedom over tyranny. He was a champion of liberty in eastern Europe, particularly in his native Poland, and a supporter of oppressed people all over the world.