Word: reza
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...summer palace outside Teheran, tough old Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran listened intently to his radio. In London a BBC announcer was reading a famous Persian ballad, and through the spitting of static the Shah could hear an old story: how in the Middle Ages a heroic blacksmith named Kahveh killed a Persian tyrant. The poem ended, the announcer asked: "Where is Kahveh today...
...Since the 80-hour war ended three weeks ago, old Reza Shah Pahlavi, many of whose political theories seem to be concentrated in his good right toe, had locked himself in his palace at Teheran and put to shame the classic sulk of Achilles. It was reliably reported that a Cabinet Minister who ventured to pay a call on the Shah was flogged with the flat of the royal saber, then punted off the premises by the royal boot...
Victors in the fortnight-old, 80-hour Iranian War, the British and the Russians had at week's end not yet signed an armistice with Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran's King of Kings. Mootest point in the haggle was the expulsion or surrender for internment of Iran's large German colony. It was expected that the Shah would shortly come to terms...
...than another Oriental despot who has caused shoals of his enemies to be murdered, tortured, kidnapped, imprisoned. They claim he slaps Cabinet Ministers in the face, beats up priests, kicks irksome subjects in the crotch. (It is said that for tiresome gabbling he once booted even Crown Prince Mohammed Reza into a palace fountain.) Iran is ruled entirely by fear, they insist; bribery is still prevalent, taxation overpowering; Iran's 136-man National Assembly, the Majlis, and all Cabinets are solidly enstooged. By this time, they add, the One-Man New Deal has turned into a One-Man Corporative...
...unfair to apply Western standards to Iran, and then they point to some of the flowers of civilization which have blossomed in the West since 1933. They recall that, unlike Kamâl Atatürk, he had no elite of European-educated intellectuals to help him.‡ "Reza Khan made Iran out of nothing," they say and, knowing Persia and Persians, they insist that force was the only way. As for opium, 60% of the population smokes it. Descended from generations of opium smokers, it is said they are largely immune to its effects...