1924: A poet is murdered for his verses, silenced by a rising military strongman.
1941: A monarch abdicates on the orders of a foreign power, leaving behind a fortune stolen from the peasantry.
1953: A democratically elected prime minister is toppled in a coup to restore an absolute ruler.
1975: A king declares a one-party state and tells dissenters to leave the country or rot in jail.
To claim pride in this timeline is not to honor a nation’s history, but to endorse the very machinery of its oppression.
For years, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, has carefully cultivated the image of a soft-spoken democrat. Living in exile since the 1979 Revolution, he has presented himself as a unifying figure—a “coordinator” for a future democratic Iran. However, during a series of recent media appearances in Stockholm, the mask of the modern democrat slipped, revealing a deep-seated devotion to the authoritarian methods of his father and grandfather.
On April 13, 2026, at a press conference in the Swedish capital, Pahlavi was asked if he had any grievances with his father’s record. His response was deflection and historical revisionism. “I do not know why you are so fixated on something that happened decades ago,” he told reporters, before pivoting to a defense of his heritage. “I am in fact very proud of it… proud of this generation that has never even seen my father with their own eyes yet has fallen in love with him.”
One day earlier, speaking to the Swedish state broadcaster Agenda, he was even more explicit: “Regarding my family background, I am proud of my heritage and I support their actions.” By framing the Pahlavi era as a lost golden age of “progress,” he effectively dismissed the decades of systemic torture, corruption, and political suppression that defined his family’s rule.
To understand why these statements are so alarming to human rights advocates, one must look beyond the nostalgia and examine the documented record of the Pahlavi dynasty. The legacy Reza Pahlavi “proudly represents” began with his grandfather, Reza Shah, who rose to power through a military coup and spent his reign consolidating personal wealth and crushing dissent. By the time he was forced to abdicate by the British in 1941, he had forcibly seized 44,000 real estate properties from Iranian citizens, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world while his subjects lived in poverty. His reign was marked by the deaths of thousands; at Qasr Prison alone, an estimated 24,000 people—mostly intellectuals, ethnic minorities, and activists—were killed.
When his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took the throne, the methods of control became even more sophisticated. Following the 1953 CIA-backed coup that ousted Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, the Shah transformed Iran into a surveillance state. At the heart of this system was SAVAK, the National Intelligence and Security Organization.
According to Amnesty International reports from the 1970s, torture in the Shah’s prisons was a “national pastime.” The methods described by survivors and international observers are harrowing: prisoners were whipped, burned with hot irons, subjected to electric shocks, and had their nails and teeth pulled out. In 1975, Martin Ennals, then the Secretary General of Amnesty International, noted that the Shah maintained a “benevolent image” despite having the highest rate of death penalties in the world and a history of torture “beyond belief.”
Reza Pahlavi’s current rhetoric often emphasizes “freedom” and “human rights,” yet his father’s record on these issues was one of open contempt. In a 1973 interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Mohammad Reza Shah ridiculed the very concept of democracy, dismissing it as a system for “five-year-olds.” By 1975, he had abolished all political parties in favor of a single entity, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. In a televised address that year, he gave the Iranian people an ultimatum: join the party, go to prison, or leave the country.
The misogyny inherent in the Pahlavi court is another historical reality that Reza Pahlavi’s modern rebranding attempts to obscure. While the Shah’s supporters often point to the “White Revolution” as a period of women’s liberation, the Shah’s own words suggested a deep-seated belief in female inferiority. In a 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, when asked if women were equal to men, the Shah paused and replied, “On the average, no.” He told Fallaci that women only counted if they were “beautiful and graceful,” and famously asserted that women had never produced a Michelangelo, a Bach, or even a “great cook.”
When Reza Pahlavi tells a modern audience that he “supports their actions,” he is supporting a regime that held between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners at its peak. He is supporting a system where, in the slums of Tabriz, there was only one school for 100,000 children, while the royal family funneled billions into the secretive Pahlavi Foundation.
The danger of Pahlavi’s recent comments lies in their dismissal of the “lessons learned.” He claims that Iranians want to “resume that good path once again,” but the “good path” he refers to ended in a popular revolution precisely because it was built on the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few. By refusing to condemn the crimes of the past, Pahlavi signals that his vision for the future is not a democratic departure, but a restoration of the status quo ante—a system where the monarch’s “mystical force” and secret police take precedence over the rule of law.
For a political figure who seeks to lead a movement for “freedom,” the refusal to acknowledge the victims of SAVAK or the corruption of the Pahlavi estates is a disqualifying omission. A true democrat does not evade questions about state-sponsored torture by calling them a “fixation” on the past.
As Iran stands at a crossroads, the need for a clear, democratic alternative to the current theocracy is undeniable. However, history suggests that replacing one form of autocracy with another—especially one that refuses to repent for its previous crimes—is a recipe for continued instability. Reza Pahlavi’s pride in his family’s legacy is a warning. It suggests that if the Pahlavis were to return to power, the “lessons” they have learned are not about the value of liberty, but about the necessity of more effective rebranding. For those who remember the screams in the cells of Evin and the absolute silence of the one-party state, “pride” is the last thing this legacy should evoke.
