Iran
“White
revolution”
Mohammad Reza Shah in 1960 became a popular leader amongst people in Iran. The
Shah made promises than made the people believe in him. They supported him by cashing in
their votes to have the Shah as their leader. Mohammad Reza Shah made promises and started
a program that included 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.
What the people didn’t know was all that the Shah promised, was a lie to gain power and
wealth. Shah ignored what promises he made and eventually chaos from the people of Iran
reign through the streets and the people went to war with the Shah. The poor and struggling
people became worse in struggling to live, and the richer became more powerful and wealthier.
This is how the “White Revolution started. In 1963, he announced a package reforms as the
White Revolution. This 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. “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.”
(Armajani, Yahya. 171-172). “But 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.”
(Armajani, Yahya. 171-172). Clergy resisted because the land reform threatened to take ten
thousand villages that helped finance the clerical establishment and its religious mission, and
second, as it hit landowning families a large percent from the upper echelon of the clergy came.
“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 did nothing less than put Muhammad Reza Shah and the
guardians of Shiism on a collision course over its two most celebrated elements- land reform
and the initial steps toward the emancipation of women.” (Axworthy, Michael. 242).
As a boycott emerges by the National Front, a program broadening and augmented changes in
the country. Under Mohammad Reza Shah the regime even attempted, in the late 1960s and
1970s (as part of the White Revolution program), to replace the traditional ulema with a new
religious structure of mosquitos and mullahs answerable to the state. 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)
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1joHIfmmIg45PWNe9v69_9jYvZlNWQl_mtiRBAAe-1y8/edit#slide=id.p
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