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Wednesday
May 2, 2001

Ignorants brought mollas, not Reza Shah

In response to Peerooz's second letter, "Aftermath of dictatorship", I am not missing any point here. Some 57 years of Pahlavi rule did not bring on the molla government, ignorant people like Peerooz did and now they are trying to blame others.

Peerooz says, "The only hope is to break this cycle by self-education whether it takes 50,100 or 200 years". Well, I don't understand why he doesn't try to educate himself. In his previous letter he said that Ataturk never killed and stole. I wrote back and said that as well as killing and stealing he drank and womanised. I never said that drinking and womanising are punishable crimes, and I am the one who likes Ataturk and Reza Shah anyway. He is trying to twist my word to cover his own ignorance.

But the main point that a lot of people are missing is this: Democracy and rule of law are very good. And every nation should try and educate itself. But the main question is what should a backward and uneducated nation do? I have got bad news for you. People who see Khomeini's face in the moon are uneducated. People who beat their head and chest at every Ashura are uneducated. Men who don't shake hands with women are uneducated. Chadori women are uneducated. Mollas are uneducated. Smart asses who don't know anything about history are uneducated. And this is the beginning of the 21st century. Just imagine how bad things were at the beginning of the 20th century.

Reza Shah could not wait for 1,000 years for these idiots to "self educate" themselves. He had to give them a kick start! If you like education so much, Iranians were getting a lot better education in the Pahlavi era than they are getting today.

Pahlavis were not perfect by no means, but at least we were living in the 20th century and were having a modern education. Democracy is good but it is not the only thing. Modernism, secularism and economic progress are as important for us as democracy, and these were much better provided during the Pahlavi era.

Just look at some other countries which were similar to us in the 1970s that did not have an Islamic revolution: South Korea, Taiwan, Latin American countries, Greece, Turkey, (you can also consider Franco's Spain). All these countries were pro-Western dictatorships in the 1970s, but its people did not follow a reactionary molla. Educate yourself and compare them with Iran today, in terms of democratic and economic progress and education.

Babak Babakan

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