From Iran’s Shah to ANC’s echo chambers – Lessons in political delusion

It’s unclear whether it was punishment for its collapse in the 2024 election. Or as an incentive to do better in next year’s poll.

Either way, ANC comrades in KwaZulu-Natal were recently given a lecture on historical materialism by former president Thabo Mbeki.

On the decision of the SA Communist Party to stand alone, and in opposition to the ANC in the local elections, Mbeki advised the gathering:

“In understanding that in the context of historical materialism I’m talking about, I think the comrades are correct to say once the democratic revolution emerged victorious politically in 1994, there was no reason why the Communist Party could not say to its allies, ‘We are the party of socialism and our historic task is to bring about the future of the socialist revolution’.”

Thus, Mbeki intoned, in an ideal world, the ANC should campaign as the party of “the national democratic revolution” and the SACP as the champion of “the socialist revolution”, then the contest will be OK. Or something like that, though why this distinction should matter is bewildering.

Cold comfort indeed for residents of Northern KwaZulu-Natal, where the decision of ArcelorMittal SA (Amsa) to close its long steel business will devastate employment in Newcastle, and the possible closure of Richard Bay Minerals will collapse even more jobs in Zululand.

“Historical materialism” might not work as a political slogan, but in his “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Marx gifted to posterity the famous Hegelian line, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”.

The idea of the ANC battling the SACP on the basis that one is the protector of the national democratic revolution and the other is the promoter of the socialist revolution is, precisely, farcical.

There has been nothing like it since the skit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the factional comrades are lost in an argument between supporters of the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – and the internal dispute cripples their real fight with the Romans.

Marx offered another compelling insight when he wrote about history’s tragic repetition of old ghosts reemerging under similar, though altered, circumstances: “the tradition of all the dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Cue here a timely and important new book on an event nearly 50 years back which has high impact on South Africa, the Middle East and the United States right now.

Scott Anderson’s King of Kings – the Iranian Revolution reads like a fast-paced historical thriller. The three principals, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his successor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and US President Jimmy Carter are all dead. But the “nightmare” they inflicted on current generations lives on.

The real clue to this extraordinary history and how it continues in changed circumstances and affects so many policymakers – both in that region and far beyond lies in the book’s subtitle: “A story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation.”

First, the leadership style of the Shah himself offers no end of lessons to others both in the region and in places far removed from Tehran (think of Pretoria or Washington DC today, for example).

Simply put, despite his 37-year tenure on the throne and bestowing on himself a raft of pretentious titles – “Shahanshah” (King of Kings), “Light of the Aryans”, and “Shadow of God on Earth”, Pahlavi at root was both weak and indecisive. At critical moments, he could arguably have saved himself but dithered on deciding what to do.

As Anderson writes, “[He] was a soft man masquerading as a hard man. Whatever his other faults, he simply lacked the easy brutality, the unswerving killer instinct of other despots in the region, like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Syria’s Haffaz al-Assad… He was a waffler, an equivocator, even something of a coward in that when dirty work was to be done, he looked for others to carry it out.”

Then there is the aspect, quite familiar to the less dramatic but depressing local circumstances, where, for example, South Africans and Americans find themselves today.

“The Shah made the fatal mistake of believing his own propaganda, of building and then inhabiting an echo chamber in which he was all knowing and all wise.”

And when the fictions of a grateful people who revered him were “rudely torn from him”, he stood naked and shocked and paralysed.

While he ran a dictatorship of ruthless oppression in parts, this walling off and cutting out of inconvenient contrary opinions and facts thrives today in many democracies.

Sterner stuff 

His principal opponent and successor, Ayatollah Khomeini, was made of much sterner stuff and was unflinching in his worldview even if it was owed to medieval theories and times not to the rigours of one of the world’s most wealthy petro-states, possessing the fifth-largest army on Earth at the time of his succession in 1979.

But Khomeini, whose brutal regime far exceeded, in quantitative terms, the worst excesses of the Shah and his sinister SAVAK secret police, started off by beguiling both his democratic supporters and wary Western interests, not least the Shah’s most important ally, the US. He landed up destroying both. (Or in Carter’s case losing his presidency).

But from his exile in France, the Ayatollah said, through his American interpreter, and then close ally: “I have fought to put an end to the [Shah’s] regime which tortures, terrorises and spills the blood of opponents. Do you think I would take over only to put on the same boots?”

The grim statistics offered show that the boots worn by the Ayatollah would soon wade in blood. Anderson writes that the human rights excesses of the Shah, SAVAK, and his army killed a precise 2 781 Iranians (dissidents and protesters etc). Within the first four years of Khomeini’s rule, no fewer than 8 000 Iranians were executed, usually after show trials often lasting no more than five minutes.

This deadly pattern lives on today in Tehran. In 2024, the Iran Human Rights Organisation (IHR) reported that 975 Iranians were executed by the regime, 31 of them women.

Yet at the dawn of 1979, the opposition in Iran, galvanised against the Shah, was a broad front, quite similar to the UDF here in the same era. It consisted of secular moderates, democratic Islamists and Western liberals.

Khomeini though wasted little time in imposing his narrow and authoritarian view and a constitution which accorded him (and his successor), not the democratic parliament, supreme power.

When you view today the hapless diplomacy of South Africa flying blind without diplomatic navigation in the trade fight of its life, consider the dire position of the US whose catastrophic misjudgements in the Middle East were even worse.

The Ayatollah’s true views on how he would govern Iran and his hatred for the West were freely available on cassette tapes of his incendiary sermons. Yet the US embassy in Tehran had few Farsi speakers, and the one diplomat who could speak the language was ostracised for disputing the administration’s view that the Shah was invulnerable.

South Africans will be familiar with a divided government. In the Carter administration, the policymakers were at war with each other – the State Department and the National Security Council, never mind the CIA, hid information and relentlessly leaked against each other.

But all factions in the White House believed that the Ayatollah’s implacable hatred for the left and communism offered an opening in the Cold War era.

In fact, it was the wrong lens to view the unfolding crisis.

And the man in charge, the now canonised President Carter? He, too, parked his human rights concerns to back and arm the Shah and then vacillated, after his fall, on how to handle the hostage taking of his own embassy in Tehran. It would cost him his re-election.

Based on the tragic repetition of history characterised by weak leadership, incorrect diagnosis of a crisis, and suppression of contrary views, there are, in far less bloody and dramatic circumstances, some definite echoes here.