OK.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Can you all hear me?
Yes.
Yes.
Great.
OK.
I think we can probably
do this talk in Persian.
[SPEAKING PERSIAN]
I just want to
start, first of all,
by thanking Professor Abbas
Milani and his colleagues
here at Stanford
for inviting me.
It's such a pleasure to be.
This is my second
time here at Stanford.
And you have to
understand, coming
from a British university
campus in the age of austerity
to Stanford is
quite an experience.
We don't have golf carts
driving us around our campus.
So it really is a pleasure.
I've been here.
I'm here for the week also doing
some research in the Hoover
Archive for this project in
the amazing new collection,
the Zahidi papers
that have been opened,
thanks to the hard
work of Professor
Milani and his colleagues.
And I just want to highly
recommend that to any of you
who are interested in
modern history of Iran.
It really is probably the
most important collection
that's been opened
certainly in the time
that I've been working
on this subject.
So my topic for
tonight is the question
of human rights and
human rights activism
and the origins of the
Iranian Revolution.
And I came to this topic in
a sort of roundabout way.
My background is in the
history of the relationship
between the United
States and Iran.
And I wrote my first book
really largely as a sort
of traditional diplomatic
history of that relationship,
focusing mainly on political,
military, and intelligence
issues in the relationship
between the US and Iran,
particularly in the 1970s,
in the era of Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger.
And as time went on,
I became more and more
interested in the social
history of the relationship
in that period, that
is, the relationship
between ordinary people,
between Americans and Iranians.
And of course, if you're
talking about the 1970s,
you're talking about a period
of intense political activism
on the part of many Iranians.
And I was very interested in
how what many historians call
the "human rights
revolution" of the 1970s,
this mushrooming of
human rights activism
in Europe and the
United States, did that
play any role in the origins
of the Iranian Revolution?
Is it just an
accident of history
that the Iranian
Revolution happens
at the end of the 1970s?
What's the relationship
between those two things?
And surprisingly, very
few people work on this.
Most of us who are Iranians
and historians of modern Iran,
we just study Iran.
And Iran's in a
hermetically sealed box.
And then my colleagues,
who are sort
of what you would call
international historians,
tend to focus on the
United States and Europe.
And so there's very
little work that
tends to kind of
transcend this border.
But what I'm trying to do is to
sort of break down these walls.
I'm trying to
internationalize the history
of the Iranian Revolution.
I'm trying to encourage
people to think
of the Iranian Revolution as
something that didn't just
happen in Tehran, but actually
something that happened here
in northern California, that
happened in Berlin, that
happened in Najaf, that happened
in Leipzig, that happened
in, I don't know, Cuba--
you name it.
There are very few
parts of the world where
you can't find people contesting
the Iranian Revolution
in the 1970s.
And so I think what
it really needs
is an international history to
complement the really excellent
work that already exists on
what happened in Tehran in 1978,
'79.
So that's my kind of
agenda in doing this work.
And as a historian,
all historians
are revisionists
because otherwise, we'd
have nothing to say.
So we all have to disagree
with those who came before.
That's very hard to
do in my position
because the people who
came before me are really
quite excellent scholars.
And I don't disagree with
much of what they've said.
So the best I can do is
to try to complement it.
There is a popular--
I would say not a scholarly
but a popular narrative
about the Iranian Revolution.
And that popular narrative
goes something like this.
The Shah was a brutal
pro-American Cold War autocrat.
He was an American puppet
who held on to power
until Jimmy Carter
was elected president.
Jimmy Carter placed a lot
of emphasis on human rights.
This undermined
the Shah's regime,
and this basically
forced the Shah
to make certain concessions
to the opposition, which
then began the whole process--
set in motion, basically,
the whole process
of the Iranian Revolution.
And in this kind of
popular narrative,
the Iranian
Revolution is sort of
imagined as a
revolution for rights.
So it's a revolution
by a group of people
demanding their rights
against a dictator denying
them their rights.
That's the kind of narrative.
But then at the very last moment
or let's say in 1978, 1980--
so this popular narrative says--
that revolution was hijacked.
It was hijacked by
Islamists who then establish
the Islamic republic, which
then perpetuates the same rights
abuses as the Shah's regime.
Such is the kind of
popular narrative.
I want to sort of
deconstruct this.
I want to question
this narrative and ask,
was the Iranian Revolution
really a revolution for rights?
Is that really
what it was about?
Maybe we've come to
remember it in that way.
But at the time,
in the 1970s, did
people think of it in
that way, the people that
fought the revolution?
The argument that
I'm going to make
is that the human rights
revolution of the 1970s
was profoundly damaging
for the Shah's regime,
that the issue of human
rights was instrumentalized
as a weapon by the
Iranian opposition
to use against
the Shah's regime.
I'm going to argue that--
and this is really the part that
I find the most interesting.
I'm going to argue
that the Shah himself
was acutely sensitive to
this human rights criticism.
And here's my novel argument.
Why?
Why is he so acutely
sensitive to this criticism?
Because, I argue, he saw
Iran, in his language,
as a great
civilization, [PERSIAN]..
And he imagined Iran, in other
words, as a civilized country.
And the official narrative
of the Pahlavi state,
the ideological agenda
of the Pahlavi state,
was to project
that image of Iran
to Iranians and to the world.
And the human rights criticism
undermined that narrative
of Iran as a civilized country.
So I'm going to try to unpack
this very problematic notion
of "civilized."
What does that mean?
Who gets to define what
does "civilized" mean?
Certainly, Jimmy
Carter's election in 1976
was very important
and influential
in convincing the
Shah to address
the issue of human rights.
But I don't believe that the
Iranian opposition's embrace
of human rights was
in any way sincere.
I think it was
purely instrumental.
And I think that the
opposition to the Shah
had just as little
concern for human rights
in any sincere form or shape
as the Shah's regime did.
In other words, both the
Pahlavi state and its opponents
are fundamentally illiberal,
and neither one of them
sincerely embrace the notion
of liberal human rights.
Rather, both are trying to
use a rights-based narrative,
a rights-based
discourse, to pursue
certain political
objectives, one to project
an image for the
state, to project
an image of a powerful Iran, a
Persian renaissance, a return
of Iran as a great
power, and the other
to project themselves as
the sort of heroic defenders
of human rights in the face of
the oppression of the Shah's
regime.
So in other words,
the Iranian Revolution
was not a revolution for rights.
I'm actually going to argue
that it was fundamentally
an anti-imperial revolution.
It's a revolution
founded more or less
on the ideology of
anti-imperialism more
than anything else and in
that sense wasn't actually
that different to much of
the anti-imperial movements
of the 1970s.
So if we take Iran out of
its hermetically sealed box
and we actually think
of what was going
or how the Iranian Revolution
was being fought in the 1970s,
if we think of it as part of
the global history of the 1970s,
we can say that
although there are
some aspects of the revolution
that are unique to Iran,
it is actually an
artifact of the 1970s.
It is a product of
the same forces that
are shaping many other movements
across the world in the 1970s.
So this is my argument.
So I don't know if any of
you are graduate students.
But for your benefit, this
is the kind of historiography
that you can engage with if
you're interested in this.
You have the work of
largely American historians
who have written about the
human rights revolution, people
like Barbara Keys, her very
important book, Reclaiming
American Virtue.
But these histories tend
to write about human rights
as American social history.
What they're really
interested in
is how the issue of human
rights shaped American society.
Why is it that America
suddenly became
concerned with human
rights in the 1970s?
They're not really
interested in what
the impact of that activism
is on places like Iran.
What does human rights
activism about Chile
actually mean for Chile?
What does human rights
activism about Iran
actually mean for Iran?
They're not really interested
in those questions.
What they're more
concerned with is really
an American political
debate about the sins
of American foreign
policy or the omissions
of American front.
But really, it's a debate
about America and Americans.
It doesn't really tell
you anything about Iran
or Iranians or
Greeks or Chileans
or whoever else you happen
to be interested in.
That's very-- David
Schmitz's book is a sort
of classic example of that.
And then you have
work like mine, which
does try to engage with Iran.
That's my book there,
but it doesn't really
address social history, which
is something I sort of regret
very much.
And I didn't really try to
address the social history
of US-Iran relations
in this book,
and that's what's
driving my agenda now.
So let's start--
where do we start?
If we want to understand how
the notion of human rights
seeps into the
Iranian Revolution,
we have to start
really in the beginning
of the 20th century, the
early 20th century in Iran,
when for most Iranian
intellectuals,
most of the Iranian political
elite, the future of Iran
was very much connected
with the West and Europe
and the ideas of the
European Enlightenment.
Pretty much across the
spectrum at the turn
of the century in
Iran, if you look
at most of the Iranian
intellectuals of the era,
you look at what they're
sort of saying and debating
during the
Constitutional Revolution
in Iran, most are looking to the
West as the kind of lodestar,
as the model, as the source
for Iranian modernity.
There are very few
Iranian intellectuals,
who are looking east,
who are looking to Asia.
Most are interested in
some sort of version
of European modernity, whether
it's Marxist, whether it's
liberal, whatever version.
And the classic example
is Hassan Taqizadeh,
Taqizadeh, one of
the great leaders
of the constitutional
movement who famously
called on Iranians to
embrace European civilization
unconditionally.
And that's an idea that's
extremely popular at that point
in modern Iranian history.
And parallel to
that, this is also
the time when we can see that
this narrative of civilization,
of "tamaddun," becomes
very popular for Iranians.
You have a whole series of sort
of early Iranian historians
who begin to develop
the myth of Iran
as a sort of lost
tribe of Europe.
The myth of Aryanism--
all of these ideas develop
in the late 19th century,
early 20th century.
And what they all
involve is essentially
a rejection of the notion of
Iran as an Islamic country.
So it's trying to take Iran
out of the sort of context
of the Islamic
Orient and instead
to locate Iran within
the European Occident.
Now, a lot of these ideas are
not particularly original.
They're basically borrowed
from European intellectuals
of the 19th century.
European ideas of
nationalism, they're
sort of borrowed
and internalized
by a lot of Iranian
intellectuals.
But by this point,
I would say it's
the period when sort
of Iranians fall
in love with the
West and westernism
and the idea of being Western.
And that idea, that notion
of Iranian nationalism,
sort of continues into
the mid 20th century,
really until we get
to the 1953 coup
in Iran, the coup against
Mohammad Mosaddegh.
And what happens is that with
the onset of the Cold War
and with the kind of trauma
that this American- and
British-backed coup
places on Iranians,
there is a sort of falling
out of love with the West.
In other words, for
a whole generation
of Iranians, younger
Iranians, they
begin to question
this idea that really,
the values of the West,
the liberalism, values
of the Enlightenment
are where Iranians
should look for their future,
as a sort of undermining
of that idea.
And instead, a new generation
tries to look elsewhere.
And in that sense,
they're not very
different to their
counterparts really
throughout the
decolonizing third world.
Beginning in the
1960s, the notion
of a sort of return to
an authentic Iranian self
becomes very popular.
And it's not an Iranian idea.
It's an idea actually that
comes from Frantz Fanon
and The Wretched of the Earth,
which I'm sure many of you
graduate students probably
had to read at some point.
I know I did.
So in the Iranian
iteration of that idea,
it comes out through the
work of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad
and the notion of "Qarbzadegi,"
"Westoxification."
So the idea is that Iranians
who are looking to the West
are "Westoxified."
They're seeking to
emulate the West.
And instead, they
should let go of that.
And they should return to some
sort of authentic Iranian self.
The problem is nobody
knows what that is.
Nobody knows what that
authentic Iranian self is.
So it has to be invented in
some way, shape, or form.
But the problem is that
that rejection of the West--
and here, I'm going to take
it back to human rights now.
Thank you for your patience
in this long preamble.
The problem is when that
rejection of Western liberalism
also means a rejection
of the values that
stand behind the
notion of human rights.
And human rights,
beginning in the 1960s
for many Iranian intellectuals,
for many Iranian opposition
figures, comes to be
synonymous with sort
of bourgeois liberalism.
Instead, what this new
generation is looking for
is not sort of reform.
It's not sort of moderate
ideas of constitutionalism
that, for example,
Mosaddegh represented.
Instead, what they're looking
for and looking towards
are far more radical ideas,
far more militant ideas
of revolution, that
sometimes involve
an embrace of European
modernity, for example,
by Marxists, but also
represent a total rejection
of European modernity,
for example,
in the case of Ayatollah
Khomeini and the Islamists.
And this is very
important if you
want to understand
how and why they
use the language of
human rights to fight
the Iranian Revolution.
How can someone who
fundamentally rejects
the values and ideas that
human rights is based on
at the same time take up
the banner of human rights
in order to fight in a
political cause or a revolution?
Why would they do that?
Well, they do that because
they understand the potency.
They understand the power
of this idea of human rights
in the context of the 1970s.
Now, I think if you
had to put your finger
on a specific moment
when this confrontation
crystallizes, in my
view, it's in Berlin
in the summer of 1967.
The Shah of Iran makes a
state visit to Germany,
to West Germany in 1967.
And he goes to Berlin, where
he's going to go to the opera.
I think it's The Magic
Flute, Mozart's Magic Flute.
And outside, tens of thousands
of Iranian students--
of course, there's a huge
Iranian student population
in Germany at the time.
The Confederation of
Iranian Students there,
in cooperation with German
students, German student
organizations, organize mass
protests against the Shah.
This photograph here
is from those protests.
And one of the German students--
well, he wasn't
actually protesting.
He was just in the wrong
place at the wrong time--
is shot by an undercover
West German police officer.
And what happens
is that that moment
is when the German student
movement is radicalized.
That student becomes the martyr
of German student politics.
And in fact, it's out
of those demonstrations
that the radical
Red Army faction,
the Baader-Meinhof
movement, begins.
Ulrike Meinhof, who was one
of the leaders of the Red Army
faction, had been very active
in the opposition to the Shah.
She was very good friends
with Bahman Nirumand
and had written an open
letter to Farah Pahlavi in one
of the German papers and so on.
And similarly, it's
the same moment
when you can see
the radicalization
of the Iranian student movement.
So the point I'm
trying to make is
that that's not happening
purely in an Iranian context.
These Iranian
students are becoming
radicalized in a
global context as part
of a transnational
movement that's
connected to German students.
And their struggle
is not a struggle
for constitutionalism in Iran
or rights or anything like that.
Rather, what they
see themselves as is
as the sort of Iranian
front of a global struggle,
of a global
anti-imperial struggle.
And their struggle is
no different to that
of the Chileans, to
that of the Vietnamese,
to that of the Palestinians,
to that of the Algerians,
to et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera.
That's the context you
have to understand,
I think the beginnings of
the Iranian Revolution.
It's that global
anti-imperial struggle.
Yet particularly here
in the United States,
they understand the power of
the human rights rhetoric.
Why?
Because it's a time when
the United States is
embroiled in the Vietnam War.
It's the time of Watergate.
It's an era when the Cold War
consensus is breaking down.
There is a global youth
counterculture that's rising,
and they understand that they
can use that as a battering
ram against the Shah's regime.
In other words, the sense of
guilt that many Americans felt
for Vietnam could be
projected onto Iran
because of the American
role in the 1953 coup.
And they couldn't
make sense of that.
That is why they're embracing
the rhetoric of human rights.
It doesn't come from some
sort of deep commitment
to liberal values
of human rights.
So this combination of, on
the one hand, Qarbzadegi,
return to an authentic
Iranian self,
on the other hand, activism and
a shaming of the Shah's regime
on its human rights
rhetoric, this
is a very powerful
and effective strategy
for confronting
the Pahlavi state.
And the Shah and
the Pahlavi elite
never really manage to come
up with a convincing answer
to this critique, to
this Qarbzadegi critique.
They do try.
They do try to develop
an official ideology,
but it is incredibly
contradictory and convoluted.
But I'm going to take
you through it, anyway.
What they do is they
come up with something
that I would call
"Pahlavi third worldism."
What this essentially
represents is an attempt
to co-opt the language
of Qarbzadegi,
to attempt to create an official
answer to the question of how
do we return to an
authentic Iranian self.
What is that authentic
Iranian self?
It's actually codified
in the late 1960s.
There are actual books published
with titles like Pahlavism,
which takes you through the
official ideology of the state.
And it revolves around, first
of all, the White Revolution--
so the series of reforms that
were introduced by the Shah
in 1963.
Later, it was referred
to as the "Revolution
of the Shah and the People."
That's the first
plank of Pahlavism,
the idea of this great
civilization basically
as a super welfare
state that would
provide for all the needs
of the Iranian people.
But there's also a global
projection of Pahlavism.
So it's not just
about what the state
can provide, in terms of
material benefits to Iranians.
It's about explaining
to Iranians who they are
and where they
belong in the world
and also projecting to
the world that identity.
And that is best encapsulated--
if you want to try to have a
mental picture of what that
looks like, it's best
encapsulated by the Persepolis
celebrations in
1971, which was--
the Persepolis,
they're much ridiculed.
And they were a source
of tremendous sort
of negative publicity
for the Pahlavi regime.
But if for a moment you take
them seriously as a propaganda
exercise, they were trying to
project a specific narrative
of civilization to the world.
The way I would describe them
is imagine hosting an Olympic
Games without the sport.
So you just have the
opening ceremony.
We had it in Britain
a few years ago,
and the opening ceremony
made absolutely no sense
to anybody who wasn't English.
They had something
about the NHS.
And I really think there was
something comparable there.
The message that was being
broadcast from Persepolis
to the world in
1971 was the idea
not only that Iran had arrived--
so not only that Iran
is this great power
that must be respected--
but that Iran had returned.
There's a reason
why that spectacle
was held at Persepolis.
It's the idea of a resurrection
of Iranian greatness,
of Iranian empire, essentially.
There's an imperial
kind of subtext there.
And that was supposed to be a
source of pride for Iranians,
and it was supposed
to project an image
to the world of
confidence and power,
as opposed to
dependence and weakness.
Of course, it was entirely
undermined by the fact
that very few
Iranians were actually
invited to participate
in the celebrations
and that all of the
expense of the celebration
went on essentially
providing French food
and lavish sort of French
finery for the Shah's
international guests.
But if you put that
aside for just a moment
and you think about what was
actually happening there,
there was the Shah of
Iran at the very center
of the global stage.
Virtually all the leaders of
the third world, pretty much
all the leaders of
the Communist world,
and most of the leaders of
the Western world were there.
And there was the Shah of
Iran in the center of it all.
And that was a pretty powerful
image to project to the world.
In fact, I think it's
almost unprecedented
in Iranian history to think
of another Iranian leader who
could assemble that number
of world leaders in Iran
and project that
level of prestige,
essentially, to the world.
But in any case, this
ideology of Pahlavism,
this notion of the great
civilization, the [PERSIAN],,
was also devoid of any
form of liberalism.
It also rejected the
notion of human rights
because in the Shah's view--
and he said it repeatedly
throughout the 1970s.
He very much took the view--
as did, by the way, many
conservatives in the West--
that Western civilization
was in decline.
And if you watch the Shah's
interviews from the time,
you can see that he actually
takes great pleasure
in berating Western journalists
by saying that he would refer
to the West as the
"permissive society"
and say that, well, if
you continue in this way,
your society is going
to blow up, essentially.
It's the same argument that
American conservatives made,
that American culture
is in decline,
that American youth
are all on drugs
and America has essentially
lost its sense of moral purpose.
So in other words, you have
a state and an opposition,
neither of which is particularly
enamored of liberalism--
in fact, both of which
reject liberalism.
But what's interesting
is that yet both of them
want to adopt a narrative
of human rights.
I told you about the
opposition's narrative
of human rights.
Well, the Shah had his own
narrative of human rights.
And it took shape
in Tehran in 1968
at the UN International
Conference
on Human Rights,
which Iran hosted.
It marked the 20th anniversary
of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
And the narrative of human
rights that emerged there
in Tehran in 1968 was what most
historians call a "third-world
narrative of human rights,"
which basically says,
political and civil rights
are all well and good.
But they're kind of meaningless
unless you enjoy sovereignty,
unless you achieve
the first right, which
is self-determination.
In other words, it's
a post-colonial notion
of human rights.
And it's a notion
of rights really
that emphasizes the
rights of the state,
not the rights of
the individual.
The rights of the state are
more important than the rights
of the individual.
And that's a very convenient
narrative for the Shah.
That's a very
convenient understanding
of human rights from
his point of view.
And then he projects on top
of that the idea of Pahlavism
by saying that actually, the
first charter of human rights
in history is the Cyrus
Cylinder of Cyrus the Great.
Actually, and the
Cyrus Cylinder,
which everybody
is familiar with,
becomes the actual symbol of
the 2,500-year anniversary
celebrations of Persepolis.
This is completely
anachronistic.
I don't think you'll find
any ancient historian that
will agree that the very, very
modern concept of human rights
can be projected back on
to the Achaemenid Empire.
But in any case,
it's interesting
that nonetheless,
the Pahlavi state
feels the need to develop its
own narrative of human rights.
So in other words,
the human rights
is becoming the
contested terrain
of Iranian politics between both
the opposition and the state.
And the state invests
a great deal of energy
and a great deal of
resources in this.
The Shah's twin sister,
Princess Ashraf,
becomes the Chairman of the
UN Human Rights Commission.
She becomes a very
prominent figure
in the sort of international
human rights sphere.
She's actually one
of the organizers
of the 1975 UN Women's Rights
Conference in Mexico City.
And she becomes a
very prominent figure
and advocate of this
third-world notion
of human rights, the idea
that self-determination,
that social and
economic rights precede
civil and political rights.
And it's part of this--
by the way, this
human rights agenda
is also part of an entire kind
of third worldist project.
It's an attempt on the
part of the Shah's regime
to project an image of the
Shah as a third-world leader,
in other words, as a third-world
nationalist because, of course,
the figure of Mosaddegh
looms in the background,
looms over the Shah.
And he can never really
crawl out from underneath it.
So he wants to project
this image of himself
as a third-world nationalist.
And he does it on a whole
series of issues, not just
human rights.
The most prominent
is, of course,
the issue of oil and oil prices.
The Shah projects a very
powerful image of himself
as the defender of the rights
of oil-producing countries
against the oil-consuming West.
But he also does it on a
whole series of other issues.
Iran, for example, is one
of the sponsors in 1974
of the very famous new
International Economic Order
Resolution of the
UN General Assembly.
And there, you have
Pahlavi Iran lined up
with Algeria and Venezuela.
They're not natural sort
of political allies.
And yet they find
themselves working together
to push forward this kind of
third-world economic agenda
at the UN.
Similarly, on the issue
of nuclear proliferation
and nuclear technology,
the Shah pushes the agenda
of proliferation of nuclear
technology to the third world,
in opposition to the control
of nuclear technology
by the Western countries.
There's a whole series.
On the Arab-Israeli
conflict, the issue
of the Arab-Israeli conflict
throughout the 1970s,
the Shah moves closer and
closer to the Arab position,
to the moderate Arab position,
particularly President Sadat,
and moves further and further
away from the Israelis.
So you can see that this
is all part of an effort
to project an image of
independence and of strength
to counter this narrative
of Qarbzadegi, of weakness
and of dependence.
And human rights is
a very important part
of that contested terrain.
Now, let me talk a little bit
about Amnesty International.
Amnesty International
plays a very important part
in the mobilization of
human rights as a weapon
by the Iranian opposition
against the Shah.
And they do so for the most
part rather unwittingly.
I'm not here to make the case
that Amnesty International is
responsible for the
Iranian Revolution.
That shouldn't be your
takeaway from this lecture--
far from it.
But what I do find
interesting and the argument
that I would make is that
Amnesty International
plays a role in essentially
legitimizing the human rights
claims of the
Iranian opposition.
Whereas those sort of criticisms
of the Shah's regime, when
they're coming from the Iranian
student movement, when they're
coming from Iranian political
figures can be dismissed,
they can't be so
easily ignored when
they're coming from an
organization like Amnesty
International, which
had a tremendous amount
of moral capital,
essentially, in the 1970s.
Of course, they win the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
So this is the important
role that they play.
Amnesty had been focused on
Iran since the early 1960s.
And nobody really paid
very much attention
to what they were doing.
Essentially, what they would
do is adopt political prisoners
in Iran and get members
of amnesty groups
around the world, mainly
in northern Europe,
to write letters to
the Iranian government,
calling for the release
of these prisoners.
And that kind of strategy was
not really very effective.
It didn't get very far.
One problem they had
is actually identifying
political prisoners, which was
quite difficult for Amnesty
because one of the
principles of Amnesty
is that they don't embrace
a political prisoner who's
used violence, who's
been violent in any way.
And that was very problematic
and difficult to ascertain
when it came to many of the
Iranian political prisoners
and dissidents.
And also, it was
just very difficult
for Amnesty's researchers
to actually get into Iran
and to be able to
talk to people,
to be able to do the
basic research which
they needed to do.
So this wasn't a very
effective strategy.
This all changes in the 1970s.
It changes because
Amnesty switches tactics.
It moves away from
letter writing,
and it moves towards the idea
of essentially publicizing
human rights abuses in Iran
through reports like this one.
This was the first report
dedicated specifically
to human rights abuses in
Iran in the late 1970s.
But this is a far more
effective strategy.
And really, what happens
is that these reports begin
to seep into the press.
They begin to seep into
press reports on Iran.
And you can see that from
the mid 1970s onwards.
The narrative prior
to that in the press
had really been one of the
Shah as the great modernizer,
the White Revolution, Iran
as this modernizing country.
But beginning in the sort
of early 1970s-- late 60s,
early 1970s--
you'll see that in the
articles in the British press
and the American press, the
French press, the German press,
there will also be a
paragraph that maybe talks
about human rights abuses,
quoting one of these Amnesty
reports.
Now, Amnesty has an archive,
if any of you are interested,
in Amsterdam.
The Amnesty International
Archive is there.
And it's fascinating
to go into that archive
and look at the
documents on Iran.
I was very surprised to see that
the Amnesty researchers were
very conscious of the fact that
the Iranian opposition wanted
to use them for their
own political purposes
and that they tried very hard
to prevent that from happening.
But it was very
difficult for them
to do that because, of
course, their primary source
of information for the human
rights situation in Iran
were Iranian political
dissidents, the Confederation
of Iranian Students and so on.
So they faced this
constant dilemma
of how to collect information
on what was happening in Iran
and present it in an unbiased
way, while at the same time
having to rely for
the Iranian opposition
for that very information.
And it all came to one
episode which kind of
detailed this very uncomfortable
relationship between Amnesty
and the Iranian opposition.
It was in 1970.
And in 1970, I think it
was actually the Austrian--
no, it was the German Amnesty
section sent a professor,
a man by the name
of Hans Heldmann--
he was a law professor--
to Tehran to try to
observe one of the trials
that was going on at the time.
And Heldmann had had a
longstanding relationship
with the Confederation
of Iranian Students.
And he took with
him as a translator
a young Iranian student by
the name of Hosein Rezai.
And when Heldmann
went to Tehran,
before he could
really do very much,
he was picked up by SAVAK.
And he was deported out of
Iran, and all his material
was confiscated.
But Rezai was arrested
and imprisoned in Iran.
And it quickly became apparent
that Rezai was actually
a member of the Confederation
for Iranian Students.
And this posed a huge
problem for Amnesty
because it completely undermined
Amnesty's claims to being
politically independent.
If they are using
an actual member
of the Iranian
opposition to carry out
their research in Iran, it
undermines their claims.
And it caused a massive
sort of introspection
within Amnesty as to
what to do about this.
And they produced-- now, part
of the reason this happened
was that you have to understand
the national sections
of Amnesty are
somewhat autonomous
from the international
secretariat
of the organization.
They certainly were
back in the 1970s,
when it was a fairly
amateur organization.
What I found really
interesting was
what Amnesty did is they
commissioned an internal report
on the Iranian opposition.
And this report, I have to say,
was one of the most insightful
and sort of prescient studies
of the Iranian opposition
in the 1970s that I've seen.
It was more accurate
in its understanding
of the Iranian opposition
than anything being
produced by the US State
Department or the CIA
or anywhere else.
It was incredible.
And basically, what
the report said
was that we have to be very
careful in our relationship
with the Iranian opposition,
because the Iranian opposition
has no sincere belief in
the notion of human rights.
And they want to use human
rights instrumentally.
And it went through
systematically
the various different
Iranian opposition
groups and interestingly said--
and you have to keep in mind,
this is the early 1970s.
It said, the group that is
most likely to come out on top
is Ayatollah Khomeini
and the Islamists.
And they are the least
committed to the notion
of human rights of any of the
Iranian opposition groups.
And this is in the
early 1970s, which
I found absolutely remarkable.
But it goes to show
that the freedom
to be able to say what you
want, to argue what you want,
is probably more important
than actual access
to classified
information and secret
contacts, which many of
these government officials
would have had.
In any case, this kind
of Amnesty activism
picks up throughout
the 1970s, this focus
on human rights in Iran,
particularly the issue
of torture.
Amnesty has a specific campaign
on torture, beginning in 1973.
And that is what really
takes Iran and the Shah
to the center stage of
human rights activism.
Until then, Iran hadn't really
been one of the really big,
big campaigns, in
terms of human rights.
It didn't have the same
status, for example,
that Chile had or Greece or
many of the other human rights
movements.
And there are a lot
of reasons for that.
We can discuss that later.
I think part of the
fact was that you
have to imagine, for
a European audience,
for an American
audience, their set
of expectations about
human rights in Iran
was far lower than
their expectations
for a European
country like Greece.
In other words, the idea
of terrible human rights
abuses in Iran
was not considered
anything sort of unusual.
And really, if we're
speaking historically,
it wasn't that unusual.
The Shah's regime was not
the first Iranian government
or ruler to abuse the human
rights of its citizens.
It's something fairly
well-established
in Iranian history.
But what happens is
that the stories of
torture that the sort of
testimony, the witnessing
of torture by Iranian
dissidents in the West,
people like
[INAUDIBLE] and others,
vividly brings this
issue to the fore
and really places Iran
as one of the kind
of preeminent
human rights issues
for a lot of human rights
activists in the West--
not just Iranians, but
all kinds of activists
and all kinds of groups.
And it's not just Amnesty
doing this kind of activism.
There's a whole series of
sort of nongovernmental
organizations, such
as the International
Commission for Jurists.
There's a whole sort
of slew of them.
But Amnesty's certainly
the most prominent
who are bringing to the
attention of Europeans
and Americans and others
the human rights abuses
going on in Iran.
Now, the point I
want to make is this
is not an agenda
that's being driven
by American and European elites.
This human rights agenda
is being driven from below.
This is ordinary people.
And what's really
quite fascinating
is that if you talk to a lot
of these human rights activists
from the '70s,
they're often people
who had no political involvement
whatsoever prior to the 1970s.
They weren't particularly
politicized people.
But what happens is that
because of this human rights
revolution of the 1970s,
they become politicized
into what some historians have
described-- some have described
this kind of human
rights activism
as a kind of secular religion.
You can think of it that way.
Samuel Moyn, who
some of you will
know is a very well-known
historian of human rights,
has sort of talked about
human rights activism.
He calls it "the last utopia."
In an era in the 1970s
when religion, socialism,
a lot of other sort of movements
that you could have been
a part of it had sort
of lost their appeal
for a whole variety of
reasons, human rights
stood out as an opportunity to
sort of be part of something
greater than yourself for a lot
of ordinary people in Europe
and in the United States.
It's certainly not
an agenda that's
being driven by Jimmy
Carter, contrary
to the popular narrative.
In fact, in the 1976
presidential election
between Carter and Ford,
Carter doesn't say anything
about human rights in Iran.
He only mentions Iran,
to my knowledge, once.
And that's in the second
presidential debate.
That's where this photo is from,
the second presidential debate,
in which he's asked a
question about Iran.
And his answer-- he
essentially says,
the United States is
selling too many arms
to Muslim countries, like
Iran and Saudi Arabia,
and not selling enough
weapons to Israel.
And that's it.
That's pretty much all he says
about Iran in that election.
But the perception by
the Iranian opposition,
by the Shah himself, by
Iranian political elites,
pretty much across the
board, is that Carter,
if he wins the
election, he's going
to make human rights in
Iran a very important issue.
And he's going to
make it essentially
a condition of a continuing
relationship with the United
States.
That's certainly the perception
of the Shah because, of course,
Carter is talking about human
rights in a general sense,
but not specifically
in the case of Iran.
What's very interesting
is that right
after this presidential
debate, the Shah
does his very famous interview
with Mike Wallace, which
you've probably all seen.
It's on YouTube, in which
he makes these comments
about The New York Times
being controlled by the Jews.
And if you want to understand
why he makes those comments,
I think it's in the
context of this debate.
It's in the context of this
perception the Shah has
that there is a pro-Israeli,
anti-Iranian agenda at play
in this election.
In any case, at the same time
as this election is going on,
this report by
Amnesty International
is published in
November of 1976.
So you can understand
how, in the mind
of the Iranian opposition,
in the mind of the Shah,
in this human rights
battle, in the context
of this presidential
election, the perception is
that the Shah is losing and
the opposition is winning,
that the agenda is
shifting against the Shah
and in favor of his critics.
And that's I think
not an accident.
The release of this report
I think at that time
was designed to garner
maximum attention.
And it's no accident
that it would
be released right in the middle
of a presidential election,
when a presidential
candidate is talking
so much about human rights.
It's hard to imagine an American
presidential election where
human rights was the main issue.
But in any case, the Pahlavi
state and the Shah respond
to this by hiring
a PR specialist,
a man called Yankelovich,
Daniel Yankelovich.
You can read about
this in Alam's diaries.
They hire this lobbyist,
K Street lobbyist,
who's recommended to
them by the Israelis.
Of course, it was in
the mindset of the Shah,
of course, that the pro-Israel
lobby, the Jewish lobby,
has so much power in Washington.
And therefore, they're
the best people
to ask for advice on how to
manipulate American politics.
So they ask the
Israelis for advice,
and the Israelis
recommend Yankelovich.
And Yankelovich does
a pretty good job.
He goes and writes a very
comprehensive and frank report
and says, you have a problem
with your human rights image
in the West.
And these are the perceptions
of Iran and so forth.
And if you read
Alam's diaries, you
can see that the Shah
is absolutely furious.
He's absolutely furious
when he reads this report.
And he says, what
is this nonsense?
Does this guy not
understand what
we've been doing in this
country for the last 15 years?
Does he not understand what
the White Revolution was about?
Does he not understand the
reforms that we have enacted?
And he basically just
doesn't want to hear it.
What he does do, however--
and I think it's in direct
response to this partly.
There are other issues, as well.
What he does do is, of course,
launch the liberalization,
the Shah's political
liberalization in 1977,
which some people dismiss
as a fake liberalization.
But there's a considerable
amount of evidence
that it really did
have an impact, as far
as human rights were concerned.
The conditions in
Iranian prisons
did substantially change.
Physical torture stopped.
And if you read the
International Commission
for the Red Cross, which came
in and inspected Iran's prisons
in 1977 and '78, they did report
on quite significant changes
that had taken place in
prison conditions in Iran.
Why would the Shah do that?
Well, my argument is
because of the activism
of groups like Amnesty.
It was this grassroots
movement in Europe
and the United States, ordinary
Americans, ordinary Europeans
putting human rights in
Iran on the agenda that
put that pressure on the Shah.
Yes, it was certainly
important that you
had a presidential election in
which the winning candidate was
talking about human
rights, certainly.
But there was no direct
pressure from Carter.
It was pressure that came from
American and European society.
And what did that
pressure really say?
What were they
really saying when
they were criticizing the human
rights record of the Shah?
What they were saying
is that Iran is not
the great civilization, that
Iranians are not civilized
because civilized countries
don't behave in this way.
They don't torture
their own people.
They don't have
political prisoners.
That is, by definition,
"uncivilized behavior."
And I think it's
because of that, rather
than any kind of
political pressure,
rather than any fear of
curtailing arms sales to Iran.
I think it's really that deep
desire on the part of the Shah
and on the part of
the Pahlavi state
to project this image of
civilized Iran, of a return
to a great civilization.
That's driving that
liberalization project.
That liberalization
is an attempt
to essentially buttress and
hold up that great civilization
image in the face of
this barrage of criticism
that's coming from
the grassroots
of European and
American society.
And of course, what does
that liberalization project
result in?
Well, it's not perceived
as civilized behavior
by the Iranian opposition.
It's perceived as weakness.
It emboldens the
Iranian opposition
and really is the
kind of match that
lights the flame of
the Iranian Revolution.
It begins the whole process
of open criticism, open revolt
against the Pahlavi
state that mushrooms
into mass demonstrations
throughout 1978.
So yeah, this is my
liberalization slide here.
We know that Parviz Sabeti, the
head of the internal security
for SAVAK--
there he is on the right there--
we know that he warned the Shah
against this liberalization
project.
He warned the Shah that
launching a liberalization
project in 1977 is
a disastrous idea,
because of the mass urbanization
that had taken place in Iran,
because of the social and
economic problems that
existed in Iran's
urban centers, because
of the very large
student populations
in Iran, that all of this
was a recipe for revolution.
But according to
Sabeti, the Shah
completely ignores his
advice and says to him,
oh, you don't understand the
progress that we've made.
This is not 1963.
This is 1977.
Iran has changed.
Poor old Jimmy Carter,
who's trying desperately
to fight this perception
that he is somehow
undermining the Shah's
regime, what does he do?
He invites the Shah
to the United States
for a state visit.
The Shah comes in
November of 1977.
But what happens?
There are mass protests
in Washington DC
in front of the White House.
The Washington DC police fire
tear gas at the demonstrators.
The tear gas wafts across
the lawn of the White House.
And the image that's
broadcast to the whole world
is of the Shah with tears
streaming down his face,
being publicly humiliated by
Jimmy Carter on the White House
lawn.
You can read the transcript
of the conversation that
took place right after
this happened, when
they go into the Oval Office.
And the first thing that
Jimmy Carter says to the Shah
is, I'm so sorry, Your Majesty--
sort of profusely
apologizes to him
for this sort of
public embarrassment.
But this image, I
think, perfectly sums up
the question of human rights
and the Iranian Revolution,
the unintended consequences
of making human rights
such a prominent
issue in the 1970s.
Here's a president
that didn't want
to undermine the
Shah, that wanted
to do everything possible to
support the Shah's government.
But instead, just by
raising the spectre
of human rights
in a general way,
not even specifically
referring to Iran, because
of that activism
that had taken place
by organizations like
Amnesty, literally brings
the Shah to tears.
Anyway, I think I
should stop there--
I've spoken for quite
a while-- and take
any questions you might have.
[APPLAUSE]
