Word: pahlavis
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Despite his commiserative subtitle, The Fate of an Ally, William Shawcross does not allow the reader to forget that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, was a pathetic symbol of a corrupt and repressive regime. His fate was to be thrust, ill-suited by temperament or training, into the leadership of a nation whose strategic geography and petroleum resources dictated a major role in the 20th century. Publicly he professed a grand vision, a White Revolution that would modernize his nation. Privately he played the Oriental potentate, surrounded by toadies, pimps and the kitschy trappings of new wealth...
...Shah celebrated his reign with a $300 million extravaganza. The Pahlavi "dynasty" had just started its sixth decade, the outcome of a coup mounted by the Shah's father, Reza Khan, an army officer whom some regarded as the Bismarck of Persia. Flying high on his magic carpet, the Shah seemed out of touch with the forces gathering against him. Resentment of his Western ways was fanned by the Muslim clergy. Intellectuals, students and professionals thought the figure posing in Ruritanian uniform and a Disneyland crown was not Western enough. These dissenters frequently attracted the attention of the security police...
Iran's Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shahansha (1968), Germany's Helmut Schmidt (1979), Spain's King Juan Carlos (1984), and Sweden's Gustav Adolf (1938), Winston Churchill...
Television viewers in Tehran were startled last week to find the image of Reza Pahlavi, 25, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, speaking defiantly from their sets. "I will return," Pahlavi told Iranians. "Together we will pave the way for the nation's happiness and prosperity through freedom...
According to ABC News, the illicit broadcast was the work of an underground group called the Flag of Freedom. After videotaping Pahlavi in exile, the outfit apparently smuggled the tape and a transmitter into Iran, then overrode normal broadcast signals. Since the death of the Shah in 1980, Pahlavi has asserted his intention to return to his father's throne...