Iran History Revisited: Part 6

(See parts 1-5 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

“The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

“Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

Yet most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

In response to growing anti-British mass nationalist pressure in Iran during the 1930s, Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime agreed to annul one of its previously agreed to oil concessions to UK imperialism in Khuzistan on November 27, 1932. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime then began to pursue a more nationalist policy; and some reforms were also introduced by Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime during the 1930s which Westernized Iranian society somewhat and provided public school educational opportunities for the children of Iran’s middle-class families.

Political repression of Iranian left intellectuals continued, however, during the 1930s by this regime. In April 1937, for example, Dr. Taghi Erani and 52 members of his Donya magazine discussion group were arrested by the Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime and charged with conspiracy to violate the Anti-Communist Act of 1931. At their subsequent November 1938 trial, Erani attacked the constitutionality of the regime’s Anti-Communist Act of 1931 as a violation of the right to freedom of expression. But all 53 defendants were convicted. Ten of the convicted Iranian left defendants were then sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment.

The leader of the Donya journal circle, Erani, died in an Iranian prison, however, on February 4, 1940--apparently as a result of deliberate negligence by the Reza Shah Pahlavi regime’s prison hospital authorities. But in September 1941, the other imprisoned left intellectuals of the Donya circle were granted amnesty and released, after Reza Shah Pahlavi’s authoritarian regime--which was seen as too politically supportive of Nazi Germany--was overthrown by a joint military invasion of Iran by the foreign troops of the Soviet and UK governments. The released Donya journal circle prisoners then joined other Iranian leftists in establishing the Tudeh Party in October 1941.

One reason that Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime was pro-Nazi Germany in its politics in early 1941 was that between 1933 and 1941 Nazi Germany had helped this regime modernize and industrialize Iran and had become Iran’s largest trading partner. Between 1929 and 1941, for example, the number of Iranians who were urban workers rather than peasants jumped from 300,000 to 600,000; and the size of Iran’s middle-class and intelligentsia also increased.

Despite Reza Shah Pahlavi’s nationalism and his regime’s pro-Nazi, pro-German political orientation during the late 1930s, in 1933 his government added another 60 years to the term of the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s lucrative oil production concession. In 1935, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s name was also changed to the Anglo Iranian Oil Company when the name of the country was officially changed from “Persia” to “Iran” during that same year. (end of part 6)

Iran History Revisited: Part 5

(See parts 1-4 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

“The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

“Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

Yet most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

In 1927 a second congress of the repressed Persian Communist Party [PCP] was held and PCP activists decided to work underground for the following aims in Iran:

1. elimination of Iranian monarchy and rejection of an Iranian “bourgeois” parliamentary republic;
2. national rights for all nationalities within Iran;
3. a new army of workers and peasants for Iran;
4. confiscation of all installations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iran;
5. abolition of foreign concessions in Iran;
6. establishment of agricultural lending banks;
7. surrender of all Iranian religious endowments and Iranian big estates to Iranian peasants;
8. confiscate the property of the Shah of Iran, the Iranian aristocracy and Iranian tribal chieftains; and
9. abolish all debts owned by the Iranian peasants.

The following specific political demands were also made by the Second Congress of the PCP in 1927:

1. full freedom for Iranian labor unions and Iranian political organizations;
2. Iranian government recognition of labor unions;
3. free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and the right to strike be established in Iran;
4. collective bargaining and contract rights for labor unions in Iran;
5. establishment of a minimum wage in Iran; and
6. housing be provided for Iranian workers in the oil and fishing industries.

Two years after this 1927 PCP Congress, oil industry workers in the Khuzistan area of Iran went on strike. But by 1931, Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime had formally outlawed even more extensively the PCP and the PCP’s front groups under the June 1931 Anti-Communist Act. So by the end of 1931, around 150 Iranian communist activists were being held in the Reza Shah Pahlavi regime’s prisons. Yet between 1933 and 1937 a discussion group of left intellectuals in Iran, led by Dr. Taghi Erani, was still able to start and publish abroad, in Europe, a theoretical journal, titled Donya (‘Universe”), to promote the democratization of Iranian society. (end of part 5)

Iran History Revisited: Part 4

(See parts 1-3 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

“The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

“Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

Yet most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

On July 31, 1920 a National Committee for the Liberation of Persia was set up by the non-communist Jangali leaders and their Persian Communist Party allies, and in mid-August 1920 the revolutionary army of the National Committee for the Liberation of Persia marched on Tehran. The UK imperialist-backed Iranian central government’s army, however, was able to defeat this revolutionary army.

On February 26, 1921, the Soviet government then signed a friendship treaty with the pro-British Iranian central government to withdraw all Soviet troops from northeast Iran by September 21, 1921. Once the Soviet troops were gone, Reza Khan Pahlavi’s Iranian central government then was able to more easily decrease the Persian Communist Party’s political influence in Iran by the end of 1921.

At the end of 1921, however, there were still 10 labor unions or guilds in Iran, with 10,000 members, that represented bakers, printers, telegraph workers, tailors, street cleaners or government employees. The newspaper that expressed the political goals of these Iranian unions, Haqiqat (‘Truth’) promoted the following four demands during the early 1920s:

1. lift martial law in Iran;
2. amnesty for all Iranian political prisoners;
3. confiscate and distribute the lands of those who had abused Iranian peasants’ rights; and
4. distribute Iranian state land among Iranian peasants.

By 1922, worker membership in Iranian trade unions had increased to 15,000, with 12,000 of the unionized Iranian workers living in Tehran. Around 1,000 Iranians were also still members of the Persian Communist Party in 1922. But by 1924 the number of Persian Communist Party members had dropped to 600.

And after Reza Khan--backed by the Iranian landlords, the Iranian Army and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which ruled southern Iran—became the Iranian monarch in 1925, he then both suppressed the Iranian trade unions and began to outlaw the Persian Communist Party. (end of part 4)

Mark Rudd's `Underground' Book & Imprisoned Columbia SDS Founder David Gilbert's `No Surrender' Book

If Mark Rudd’s autobiographical book about the 1968 Columbia University Student Strike and Weather Underground that Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins firm just published (Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen) interests you, then you might also be interested in checking out David Gilbert’s No Surrender: Writings From An Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner that the anarchist Abraham Guillen Press published in 2004.

In his book, the still-imprisoned Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] co-founder and former Weather Underground member Gilbert, for example, wrote the following in reference to the Weather Underground Organization [WUO]:

“In a society where every single movie and TV program showed that the FBI `always got their man,’ the Weather Underground eluded capture and sustained armed action for six years…In a world where `legitimate’ governments bombed villages and assassinated activists but decried any armed resistance as `terrorist,’ the WUO carried out more than 20 bombings against government and corporate violence without killing anyone or so much as scratching a civilian.

“…The WUO was not formed as a narrow conspiracy but instead was a focal point within a much broader surge of anti-war militancy, as thousands of military buildings and Bank of America branches were burned to the ground, and as hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations that broke government windows, disrupted meetings of bigwigs, and resisted arrest.

“Weather’s exciting breakthroughs coexisted with costly mistakes. The earliest and most visible came during the first six months (late ’69 to early ’70), while we were still aboveground: our sickening and inexcusable glorification of violence, which grievously contradicted the humanist basis for our politics and militancy…To this day, almost all `history’ about the WUO makes the mania of those six months the whole story, without looking at our correcting of that error and the ensuing six years of solid and humane anti-imperialist action…

“Early Weather’s grave sins of commission were glaringly visible. The opposite movement sins of omission, which usually aren’t even noticed, can be even more lethal. The terrible passivity of most of the white Left to the early attacks on the Panthers gave the government a signal that it would not face widespread political costs for proceeding with its full-fledged COINTELPRO campaign, which killed scores and jailed thousands of Black, Native, and Latino activists.

“Weather’s militarism culminated in March 6, 1970, when a frantic bomb-making effort, including anti-personnel weapons, resulted in an accidental explosion in a safehouse (known as the townhouse explosion) that killed three of our own beautiful young comrades…

“…Our middle-class background meant that we did a poor job at outreach to more working-class sectors of youth.

“There were related problems in our internal life…

“To me, a crucial lesson is that activists must consciously grapple with the powerful pull of ego that can lead us to put our own position and leadership above advancing the interests and power of the oppressed…

“Despite these serious weaknesses, six years of impressive successes resulted from what was right about anti-imperialism. Contrary to the spy movie mystifications that are all about sophisticated techniques and technology, our survival underground was based on popular support from radical youth and the anti-war movement. That was the key to solving needs such as ID, money, and safehouses. There were moments when the FBI hunt was breathing down our necks, but popular support meant that information was kept from the state and instead flowed to the guerrillas.

“Our stage of struggle was `armed propaganda,’ with no illusion of yet contending for military power. Instead, the purposes of actions were to (1) draw off some of the repressive heat concentrated on Black, Native, and Latino movements, (2) create a leading political example of white solidarity with national liberation, (3) educate about key political issues, (4) identify the institutions most responsible for oppression, and (5) encourage others to intensify activism despite state repression. We also provided examples of non-armed struggle (e.g. spray painting), pursued dialogue with the above ground movement by writing to and reading responses in radical newspapers, and even created our own underground print shop. We wrote and published the book Prairie Fire, a well-developed statement of the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism…

“The FBI never broke the WUO, but in 1976-1977 we imploded from our own weaknesses…”

Iran History Revisited: Part 3

(See parts 1-2 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

"The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

"Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

But most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t even require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

Between 1941 and 1978, the Tudeh Party was generally the most mass-based Iranian left-wing party to oppose the Shah of Iran’s U.S.-supported dictatorial regime. Yet prior to the Tudeh Party’s founding in 1941, there had been previous attempts by people in Iran to politically and economically democratize Iranian society.

During the Iranian Revolution of 1905 to 1911, for example,, equal rights under the Constitution of 1906 had been obtained by Iranians of Jewish background. In April 1918, a group of Iranians, the Adalat Group, had also been founded to politically oppose the Iranian monarchy, the Iranian clergy and the privileged Iranian landholding aristocracy.

During the Russian Civil War that followed the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, Soviet military and naval detachments that were pursuing the anti-revolutionary White Russian troops temporarily entered Northeast Iran on May 18, 1920. Aided by these Soviet troops, a non-communist Jangali movement, led by Kuchek Khan, then sought to liberate Iran from its oppression by UK imperialism, its anti-democratic Iranian clerics and its anti-democratic Iranian feudal landholders. And the Jangali movement proclaimed the establishment of the Gilan Republic in Northeast Iran on June 4, 1920.

Influenced by pro-communist and left sectarian Iranian activists, however, the Gilan Republic then began to distribute anti-religious propaganda in the small area of Iran it controlled and closed 19 mosques. It also prohibited religious instruction in its schools and decreed that Iranian women should be forcibly unveiled. Predictably, the Islamic clergy opposed such measures and the still religious Iranian peasants were alienated by the Gilan Republic’s anti-religious policies-- despite the fact that the Gilan Republic’s land reform decrees would have benefited these same peasants economically.

On June 23, 1920, 37 members of the Persian Communist Party (which had been created by members of the Adalat Group) then held their first congress and proposed the following political and economic democratization reforms for Iranian society:

1. overthrow of British imperialist domination in Iran;
2. confiscation of all foreign enterprises in Iran;
3. recognition of the right of self-determination of all nationalities within a unified Iran;
4. confiscation of all the land of big Iranian landowners and its redistribution to Iranian peasants and to the soldiers of an Iranian revolutionary army.

(end of part 3)

Iran History Revisited: Part 2

(See part 1 below)

Democratic Party politicians now control the U.S. Congress and the White House. Yet the U.S. military-industrial-media complex’s troops and private contractors have still not been immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Israeli government allies of the Democratic Obama Regime also may still be threatening to order the Israeli War Machine to use U.S. government-provided weapons to eventually attack Iran before the November 2010 U.S. congressional elections.. Yet most people in the United States know little about the history of people in Iran since foreign imperialist powers began illegally and undemocratically intervening in Iran’s internal political and economic affairs in the late 1800s.

During World War I, an increased number of Czarist Russian army troops occupied Iran in the north, while an increased number of UK troops occupied Iran in the south. Following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, Russian troops were soon withdrawn from Iran. But in 1918, British imperialist troops occupied all of Iran, created a puppet Vosugh al-Dauleh government on August 6, 1918 and forced the puppet government to sign an even more exploitative Anglo-Iranian Treaty than the ones that previous feudalist Iranian governments had signed.

In reaction to these moves by UK imperialism in Iran, Iranian tribes in rural Iran, predictably, began an uprising between 1918 and 1922 in which they attacked British occupying troops. By early 1919 the anti-imperialist Iranian mass uprising had forced the Iranian puppet regime to revoke its Anglo-Iranian Treaty; and by 1920 some Iranians had even formed the country’s first communist party.

After the now-deceased Shah of Iran’s father, Reza Khan, pulled a coup in February 1921 that overthrew the previous puppet government of UK imperialism in Iran, the anti-imperialist revolt in Iran began to wind down. A constituent assembly in Iran was then established and, by December 12, 1925, Iran’s constituent assembly had stripped the Qajar royal dynasty members of their royal family privileges. Reza Khan was, instead, then proclaimed “Shah of Iran” and renamed “Reza Shah Pahlavi.”

Reza Shah Pahlavi ruled Iran between 1925 and 1941. During his reign, workers and peasant movements were persecuted and, in the 1930s, strikes of Iranian workers at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s refineries were suppressed by his regime. After Soviet Union troops and British government troops both marched into Iran during World War II in August 1941, Reza Shah Pahlavi was compelled to abdicate because of his previous expressions of support for a Nazi Germany military victory. His son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (who wasn’t considered as pro-Nazi), however, was allowed to replace him as the new Shah of Iran. For most of the years between 1941 and early 1979, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would rule Iran as a dictator, with the bipartisan support of the U.S. White Corporate Male Power Structure’s government. (end of part 2)

Iran History Revisited: Part 1

Democratic Party politicians now control the U.S. Congress and the White House. Yet the U.S. military-industrial-media complex’s troops and private contractors have still not been immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Israeli government allies of the Democratic Obama Regime also may still be threatening to order the Israeli War Machine to use U.S. government-provided weapons to eventually attack Iran before the November 2010 U.S. congressional elections. Yet most people in the United States know little about the history of people in Iran since foreign imperialist powers began undemocratically and illegally intervening in its internal political and economic affairs in the late 1800s.

By the early 1900s, Iran (which was then more commonly known as “Persia”) was pretty much a semi-colony of the UK and Czarist Russia. A government controlled by the Qajar royal dynasty of Iranian feudal landowners had handed out telegraphy, railroad and other commercial concessions to British and Russian business people during the late 1800s, after the British imperialists opened the Shahanshah Bank in 1889 and the Russian imperialists opened the Discount-Loan Bank in 1890.

In the early 20th century the British imperialists received what would turn out to be its most valuable concession from the Qajar dynasty’s government: a concession for the exploitation of Iranian oil. By 1909, the British company that exercised a special influence in Iranian society for much of the 20th century, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, had been founded. By the early 1900s, foreign advisers had also been put in charge of Iranian customs and finances by the subservient feudalist Iranian government. The southern part of Iran was by then dominated by UK imperialist interests and the northern part of Iran by Russian imperialist interests.

Not surprisingly, in reaction to increased domination by foreign imperialist economic interests, nationalist consciousness began to grow in Iran in the late 19th century and various secret anti-government societies were formed by Iranian intellectuals who sought democratic reforms and an end to Iran’s semi-colonial status. By 1905, the Iranian Revolution of 1905-1911 had begun.

The demands of the revolutionary movement were anti-imperialist and anti-feudalist; and, during this revolutionary period, there was an uprising in the Iranian city of Tabriz in 1909. But both the Czarist Russian government and the UK government decided that their special imperialist economic interests were threatened by the Iranian Revolution of 1905-1911. So at the end of 1911, the Czarist Russian troops and the British troops that were stationed in Iran united with their reactionary Iranian domestic allies and suppressed by force the Iranian Revolution of 1905-1911. (end of part 1)