White Revolution

Iran

“White revolution”

In 1960 Mohammad Reza Shah became a popular leader of a peasant revolution in Iran. The White Revolution began the beginning of the Iranian Revolution that will erupt in the later years. The Shah made promises then made the people believe in him. The shah gave Iranian people hope in the event of receiving votes for himself, in a run to be leader. “These points are new in Iran and revolutionary, but in 1963 the whole activity of the nation has been directed at the implementation of one or the other of these programs.” (Yahya 171).
In 1963, the Shah announced a package reforms as the White Revolution. “It’s an attempt to turn ancient despotism and its subjects into a modern country and a socially just nation.” (Yahya 4). It challenged to man verse land, modernization verses traditionalism, secularism verses religion, the settles verses the nomad, and the village verses the city. The White Revolution’s package includes privatization of state factories, female suffrage, land reform, and a literal corps of young educated people to address the problem of illiteracy in the countryside.
One of the controversies was land reform. The Shah wasn’t interested in the land reform but in the industrialization. What Mackey said “The clergy resisted the land reform all because of a threat to take ten thousand villagers that helped finance the clerical establishment and its religious mission, and second, because it hit land owning families from which a large percentage of the upper echelon of the clergy came.” (221).
 In The modern Nations in Historical Perspective, Yahya mentioned “the White Revolution never constituted a real revolution. It represented an exercise in political expediency dictated by the man who sat at the top of Iran’s social order. The old aristocracy, the [thousand families], opposed the White Revolution because land reform eroded their wealth and position. The middle class dismissed it as nothing more than a political palliative design to impress the Western press and an American administration.” (171-172). But the Shah ignored all of them as a regret. He dismissed the landowners in the shah’s new political order. He refused to placate the middle classes with real political reform, losing most allies. The White Revolution put the Shah and the guardians of Shiism over its two celebrated elements land reform and the initial steps towards the emancipation of women.
In the end, a boycott emerged by the National Front, a program broadening and augmented changes in the country. What the people wanted is what the promises the Shah made. If the Shah hadn’t lied to the people, none of the chaos and war would occur in Iran, people in Iran would be able to live a prosperous life with Shah as their leader.  

Works Cited

·         Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Basic, 2008. (242)

·         Armajani, Yahya. Iran. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Print. (171-172)

·         Mackey, Sandra, and W. Scott. Harrop. The Iranians Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation, with a New Afterword by the Author. New York: Plume Book, 1998. Print. (221)