You may enjoy the little anecdote Solzhenitsyn tells in the Gulag Archipeligo. Although banned in the Soviet Union, someone had smuggled into the camp a copy of Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' - in which is described in detail the conditions in the Tsar's jails. Just how many ounces of bread and meat and fat, and how many periods of excercise were allowed a prisoner by law.
Stalin's starving and frozen political prisoners in that particular camp passed those pages around and salivated. 'Oh, if only we were in a Tsarist prison' they said.
Like the people of the USSR, the Iranians are discovering the difference between a monarchy that propoganda taught them to hate, and the totalitarian system it replaced.
I have seen no record of teenage girls swinging from cranes by the neck nor women buried up to their armpits and stoned to death while the monarchy existed.
Sorry, but one book written by 'one of the Directors of SAVAK' won't convince me of anything. I have a good friend in Israel who made a telling comment recently. She said 'maybe if one is forced to live with animals for too long, one takes on some of their attributes' - therefor, just as Israel is fighting for its survival and right to exist, the monarchy was doing the same. What might be the alternative?
Give them your country? Well, we can see from Iran where that leads.
The bolsheviks assassinated the Romanov family, maybe the Shah and his family escaped a worse fate than exile.
Fred, there you go again... you shouldn't let your knowledge of historical similarities of revolutionary failures bleed into your “correctness” measure of decisions made by people struggling for a better life. It's tainted and easily reversible logic. Humanity HAS experienced revolutions against monarchy that have revealed great social progress. Armed with that knowledge, revolutionary leaders encourage their countrymen to take up arms to achieve a better life. Upon failure many will assert the entire effort to achieve a better life was ill conceived, but that’s wrong. It’s wrong because it arbitrarily associates the effort of “failing to achieve a better life” with the act of being “wrong”.
The essence of humanity is our struggle to achieve a better life regardless of our successes or failures. Those who are most “wrong” hold fast to social mechanisms that prevent individuals from achieving a better life. We can discuss those in depth if you like but that’s not the issue at the moment. Your assertion is that Iranians should’ve never sought to escape the frying pan because you know, in retrospect, only fire awaited them. To them, at that time, their effort was worth the risk of achieving liberty or death.
If you want to talk about historical mistakes, I say focus your attention on the vacillations of national leaders. The Shah was a notorious vacillator. Unfortunately we vacillated too. It was truly foolish of the U.S. Administration, in the lead up to the Iranian Revolution, to encourage the Shah to relieve pressure on dissent and then accept him in exile after the revolution. If the Carter Administration had not vacillated so wildly in its policies toward the Shah, U.S. relations with Iran would be entirely different today. Apparently the Shah was welcomed by Panamanian authorities after he was deposed; Carter should have sent him to Panama. I wish Iranian militants were yelling “DEATH TO PANAMA!” instead of “DEATH TO AMERICA!”
But that’s just as dumb a wish as wishing to trade life in the Gulag for life in “Tsarist prison”. Why would any sane person wish for one hell over another?