A 44 year old South End Boston man took a 38 calibre hand gun and at 1:30 in the morning fired a fatal shot into the side of his head. Having lost his fiancée a couple years ago to a scuba diving accident and his own sister to suicide a decade ago, and his father and country at the age of thirteen, Shahpour Ali Reza Pahlavi was all too familiar with loss.
Apart from the tragedy of this suicide, what is now even more unpalatable is the crude reaction of the complex ridden, pseudo-intellectual, guerrilla fighters of yore, who have offered nothing but churlish asinine statements which more often than not point out the wealth of the Pahlavi family and how their wealth or ‘thievery’ should somehow be comforting them at this time. From associate professors to armchair latte sipping revolutionaries, all have weighed in on their reasons as to why this family does not deserve our sympathies or condolences. Some have even gone as far as calling Mohammad Reza Shah a “cowardly wimp“.
Moreover, some have even gone as far as asserting that without the help of the CIA and British M16 in 1953 there would not have even been a Shah or an Ali Reza Pahlavi to have to contend with; one of them being the jock author and quarterback of the football team who went Coup Coup, Stephen Kinzer. This spotty and deductive reasoning used by Kinzer and other Coup Coup’s is, at best, just bad history, and at worst, utterly distasteful and cruel.
This base interpretation of a man taking his own life is indicative of the residual politics that surrounds the Pahlavi family and the reality of the fact that the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 remains a still born movement that never achieved any of its goals and instead developed into a fascistic Islamic theocracy complete and replete with the spectacle of public hangings and stonings.
Another adjunct professor, whose name I will not mention because of her propensity for self-promotion, thought it best to instruct the Empress Farah Diba on her mothering and then had the audacity to accuse the Pahlavi family of trying to capitalize politically from the death because they had fit Ali Reza’s passing within the wider context of other Iranian families who have lost a loved one. How dare they! How dare the Pahlavi family view itself as being Iranian! How dare they try and situate their own lives within the lives of their compatriots! How dare they grieve and expect others to grieve with them! How dare they expect a little humanity from us!
Although the above mentioned unmentioned professor professes that she is a mother herself, all she offers us in her insipid and trite tirade, from beginning to end, is an oft noted disclaimer that is repeated ad-nauseum by the likes of these bitter sanguine individuals: “I am a staunch anti-monarchist and critic of the Pahlavi’s.”
Well congratulations to you all and I hope that none of you ever lose a child, a father, a fiancé, or a country.
