Friday, 27 Aban 1384 (18 November 2005)
I read the article "Seyyed Zia, Hoveyda and Ahmadinejad." As always, it was delightful and well worth reading. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the views put forward in it, as a student of history I wanted to take issue with the article on one historical point: the popularity of the Seyyed Zia–Reza Khan cabinet and the reason for it.
Fourteen years after the Constitutional Revolution, the people had endured a great deal of misery and were truly at the end of their tether. They were sick of every deputy and minister there was. After the coup of 3 Esfand [21 February 1921], when Seyyed Zia wrote in his famous proclamation that these statesmen were the cause of the people's misery and began arresting them, the people rejoiced, while his opponents dubbed his cabinet the "Black Cabinet."
When Aref Qazvini wrote after Seyyed Zia's departure, "Come back, I would give my life for your Black Cabinet," he was not merely a romantic poet. In my view, he was giving voice to the nation. Aref was the poet of the Constitutional Revolution. In our country, because of the state-run economic system, the door to theft by plundering the public treasury has always been open. So whenever someone comes along and says, "Where did you get all this? I will catch the thieves and push the old crowd aside," it appeals to the people.
Even Mohammad Reza Shah resorted to the same tactic in 1356 [1977] when he found himself cornered. He threw Hoveyda and others in prison in the name of fighting corruption, oblivious to the fact that the people considered him the one responsible and the root cause, and would settle for nothing less than his own departure.
As for this Mr. Ahmadinejad, setting aside the fraudulent votes, if he managed to win over some sections of society to a modest degree, it was for exactly this reason. Especially once he was pitted against someone like Hashemi Rafsanjani, who in the eyes of many people was the symbol of all the ruin of recent years and notorious as a thief, this promise of catching the thieves and removing those responsible for the current situation became all the more appealing to the people. Of course, this gentleman too will meet the fate of most of the thief-catchers of the past hundred years. That is, since he will not undertake any fundamental reform of the country's economic system, he will merely deliver a new generation of thieves. And then, since he himself, with his bizarre statements and even more bizarre beliefs, resembles a joke more than anything else, he will naturally turn the Iranian nation's struggle ever more toward the root of the problem, namely the country's current structure and the Constitution.