The Bloody Crown

Torture as Statecraft in Pahlavi Iran

©Mohammad Ehsaei

Introduction

The good old times. The “golden age”, the splendor, the normalized place in the so-called global order. The benevolent, eloquent monarch, women roaming around Tehran in miniskirts, modernization reforms, gender equality. That’s the nostalgic image of the Pahlavi era, complete with a glamorous sepia filter and romanticized anecdotes. What if I told you it was all a perfidious lie created by Western security apparatuses?

What if I told you that the nostalgia itself is an intelligence project?

What if I proved it?

Follow me on the journey of unveiling (pun intended) the horrors, crimes and human rights violations of this usurper Western-backed government, so that you can hopefully form a critical eye for any Western rhetoric calling for their return. It’s merely a ploy to recolonize what was lost, make no mistake.

The Pahlavi regime’s ostensible modernity was not a liberatory project, but a theatrical performance to mask structural terror. This was a dictatorship sculpted in imperial molds: engineered surveillance, systematic torture, and forced confessions underwritten by Western intelligence: CIA, MI6 and the Mossad, who played a significant role in the “torture education” of the Imperial Iranian secret police, SAVAK. Ervand Abrahamian (whom I’ll quote ad nauseam so you might as well read the book if interested) meticulously exposes SAVAK’s sadism: from psychological deprivation to rape threats used as interrogation tools. These practices were integral, not incidental, to statecraft.¹ Even Amnesty International’s 1975 reports document hundreds of political prisoners subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and mock executions. We’ll get into this in great, abhorrent detail in the next sections, so the reader beware: there will be disturbing content.

We can not accept the sanitized “golden age” narrative peddled by diaspora monarchist channels and Western nostalgia industries. That industry thrives by complicitly erasing the blood on the Pahlavi sash. Fed by fantasies of a “modern” Iran, it transforms colonial violence into dusty museum relics. This essay will excavate that lie, centering survivors and victims; women and men tortured, silenced, and rendered politically unappealing. We refuse passive survival or mere retelling; this is an act of militant remembering.

Manufacturing Fear – SAVAK & the Logic of Control

The SAVAK Blueprint

Established in 1957 with CIA and Mossad assistance (in the background of the 1953 Western coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Mosaddegh), SAVAK was never internal security. It was a colonial secret service built for political extraction, torture and silencing. It penetrated every university dorm, factory union, cultural salon. It was, to borrow Abrahamian’s framing, a “thought-police” with carte blanche to break bodies and minds.¹

Nematollah Nassiri (the psychopathic general who introduced the practice of beating pregnant prisoners until miscarriage, executed by firing squad in 1979), SAVAK director from 1965–1978, and Parviz Sabeti (the Butcher of Evin, still cushy in exile in the US, with occasional TV appearances on Manoto TV), head of its internal security division who personally orchestrated torture as public policy. Under their leadership, the brutalization of activists was routine, part of a terror strategy to ensure political passivity.¹

As Abrahamian writes: “General Nematollah Nassiri was not merely a functionary; he turned SAVAK into a machine that converted fear into obedience. Torture under his watch was no longer incidental—it was institutional.”
—Tortured Confessions, p. 165

Scale of Repression

In 1975 alone, Amnesty estimated between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners in Iran—a staggering figure that dwarfs common understandings of state violence. Public executions numbered in the hundreds; torture methods included falaka (beatings on the soles), electric shocks, mock drownings and rape threats.² These were not lapses—they were operationalized state violence.

AI 1976 report, excerpt

Torture as Political Theater

Prison narratives from Evin and Qasr reveal a calculated choreography of coercion. Detainees were taunted and hyped with sleep deprivation and forced standing, then suspended by wrists or scorched with electric cattle prods. Abrahamian summarizes the regime’s logic: "Torture was used … in attempts to induce enemies of the state to become supporters."¹ It was control through terror.

Knowledge as Weapon

Televised trials—like that of Marxist poet Khosrow Golsorkhi—were no aberration. They were spectacle, a mainstreamed lesson in obedience. SAVAK's show trials performed the theater of remorse under duress, then declared the moral authority of state execution.^1,8

These televised trials served to sow fear and make an example out of the captured.

Flesh and Blood: Individual Lives Torn

Shirin Shariati

When the 20‑something activist Shirin Shariati (not a relation of Ali Shariati) was arrested in 1972, her body became the battleground for the state’s cruelty. According to her courtroom testimony, she endured twelve‑hour falaka sessions on the soles of her feet, was suspended by her wrists, beaten nearly unconscious, and threatened with rape. All in front of other screaming detainees.¹ She was kept awake for three days, collapsed multiple times, and emerged unable to walk for weeks.¹ Yet on record, she recanted the coerced confessions, refusing to baptize her oppression into the Shah’s propaganda. Her defiance shattered SAVAK’s theater of control and left indelible cracks in its narrative of supremacy.

Her body was not just tortured. It was a site of epistemic defiance.

In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon taught us that the colonial apparatus does not merely aim to break bodies. It inadvertently manufactures the conditions for resistance by exposing its own brutality. In Shirin Shariati’s case, torture sought to silence her into submission, but instead it forged a new subjectivity: one marked by the refusal to internalize the oppressor’s narrative. Her coerced confessions, later recanted, broke the choreography of power the regime depended on. The body marked by violence became, in Fanon’s terms, not a passive site of victimhood but the crucible of insurgent consciousness

Khosrow Golsorkhi

A Marxist poet and intellectual, Golsorkhi stormed the televised military tribunal in February 1974 with unflinching clarity.⁸ Declaring:

“In the glorious name of the people… The more you attack me the more I pride myself… Even if you bury me…and you certainly will, people will make flags and songs from my corpse”.

He tore open the sham:

“My crime is not conspiracy… but my views… I accuse the court… to witness this stage‑managed farce”.

When told to shut up, he responded:

“Don't you give me any orders… I doubt if my voice is loud enough to awaken a sleeping conscience here”.⁸

He embraced co-defendant Daneshian with a dignified calm before execution. He refused the blindfold in a final gesture of valor. His courtroom became moral amphitheater exposing SAVAK’s terrifying theater as the charade it was. Hooman Majd aptly calls him a “Che Guevara‑like figure for young Iranians”.⁸

Golsorkhi’s oratory performed an act of militant speech, a Derridean testimony in the face of state violence. His voice ruptured the opacity of power, refusing to submit to legal theatre invented by colonial autocrats.

Bijan Jazani & Hassan Zia‑Zarifi

Intellectual giant Bjian Jazani was arrested in 1968, subjected to severe torture and years of solitary confinement. On April 19, 1975, the state’s theatre of death came full circle: Jazani and eight others, including Hassan Zia‑Zarifi, were shot. The official story was so stupid not even Amnesty International bought it; they officially died during a supposed mass “escape attempt” from Evin.⁴

But Amnesty International’s Volume V No 6 (1975) newsletter explicitly names Afsar, Chupanzad, Jazani, Kalantari, Sarmadi, Soorky, Zia‑Zarifi—all tortured, transferred, and killed under the same pretense. AI condemned the “shot while trying to escape” narrative as an attempt to cloak torture deaths.⁴

These mass killings expose necropolitics in practice. Agamben’s “bare life” becomes literal: prisoners reduced to bodies disposed of under legal pretext, often in unmarked graves. This is the final stage of dehumanization, in this case of supposedly one’s own people. The "escape" story is a euphemism for state murder and these men were not exceptions but examples of normalized political killing. Many, many more were killed in an extrajudicial fashion, many disappeared without a trace, without their families knowing of their fate or given the grace of closure. Their resting places remain unknown.

Amnesty International. Monthly report, Vol.5 No.5 July 1975

Interweaving Voices & Theory

Each of these lives torn illuminates a refusal to be erased. Their struggle and oppression make remembrance a moral imperative. Their voices: Shariati refusing coerced demonization, Golsorkhi’s voice in the courtroom, Jazani’s death performed as spectacle of escape persist as insurgent memory. The Pahlavi state tried to obliterate them; instead, it forged them into specters of truth. Everlasting symbols. As Hartman would argue, genocide and torture are not only bodily harms but ontological crimes against possibility. They kill not only the person, but futures they would have lived, potential women’s literary traditions that might have existed. Erasure is violence at a metaphysical scale. To fully understand the machinery of memory erasure and manufacturing consent we must look at the feminist angle of the torture operation in relation to the women’s movement.

Imperial Feminism: Cosmetically Masked Violence

The Pahlavi dynasty delighted in a performative kind of woman’s liberation. But beneath the veneer of progress (public unveiling, women in parliament, Family Protection Laws) the state enforced a brutal, gendered violence that crushed dissidents and erased genuine feminist movements. This was imperial feminism: a colonial masquerade, more cosmetic than emancipatory.

The Family Protection Law (1967, Expanded 1975)

The Family Protection Law offered superficially radical legal rights:

• Raised the female minimum marriage age to 18.

• Empowered women to initiate divorce and limited polygyny, requiring judicial approval.

• Shifted child custody from automatic paternal control to civil oversight.

• Granted women the right to inherit property equally, to run for office, and to access legal recourse in family matters.^6,7

Public perception in the West was in ecstasy: Iran was lauded as the shining example of progressive Muslim statehood. But that was a very reductive view of the situation.

The Co-option of Feminist Energy

Behind the legal façade sat coercion and too often, violence:

• The Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI) was state-led, helmed by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, tethered to the monarchy rather than grassroots feminist agency.⁸

• Leaders like Mehrangiz Manouchehrian (Iran’s first female lawyer and woman holding public office) drafted these laws but were met with official backlash. Her feminism was tolerated, her politics denied to the extent of personal danger⁷

• Public unveiling became propaganda; reform language became justification for surveillance. Women’s liberation was reduced to a PR photo-op. A brown woman in a miniskirt, as opposed to one with extracted fingernails or a forced unsanitary curettage as a form of torture.

Disjunction Between Law and Life

These reforms were largely inaccessible to most Iranian women:

• The law’s urban bias meant rural and working-class women remained untouched by its provisions⁷

• Lawyers, judges, the police, mostly dominated by conservative men, neglected or sabotaged women’s legal claims.

Violence Against Feminist Dissidents

While laws publicly advanced, private repression intensified:

• Activists like Shirin Shariati even though her activism aligned more with Marxist ideology suffered sexualized torture (rape threats, electrocution of the breasts witnessed by male jailers, beatings until stillbirth, forced unhygienic curettage) under the same regime that praised women’s liberation.¹

• The state didn’t liberate women. It liberated westernized images of women. A woman could win the courtroom in theory; in practice, she could be beaten or in shackles.

Imperial Feminism and Theoretical Reckoning

Imperial feminism weaponized gender advancements as shields for deeper violence. It drew parallels with Spivak’s critique: "white men saving brown women from brown men": the Shah saved women by crushing their bodies.

In Pahlavi Iran, the monarchy played this logic to perfection: women’s rights were not advanced through grassroots struggle but paraded as evidence of a modernizing despot’s benevolence. The Shah’s regime conscripted feminist imagery to mask its authoritarian grip, silencing the very women it claimed to liberate. The unveiled woman, smiling on magazine covers, became a colonial exhibit while her sisters’ screams echoed in torture chambers. This was not emancipation; it was the subaltern being spoken for, against her will, in the language of empire.

This “feminism” was state-directed, shallow, selective and complicit in colonizing women’s bodies for public relations. The violence didn’t stop with legal erasure; it co-opted women’s traumatic silencing as evidence of liberation.

1975-1976 AI report

Nostalgia as Necropolitics

There is nothing innocent about nostalgia. No longing for the Shah’s “golden age” is apolitical or simply misguided. It is necropolitical. It is the soft face of forgetting. And forgetting, in the context of torture, is not absence of memory. It is violence.

In the plush living rooms of exiled monarchists and the sleek studios of Manoto TV and Iran International, a fantasy is broadcast daily: Iran as a lost paradise of Westernized women, cosmopolitan nightlife, and gleaming avenues. And it is precisely that fantasy—slick, consumer-friendly, drenched in denial that re-traumatizes the survivors and silences the ghosts of the tortured. This narrative does not “remember differently.” It actively unremembers, and in doing so, aligns itself with the machinery that electrocuted female breasts and threatened women with rape for asking questions.

These channels (backed by foreign funding, with links to intelligence agencies and intent on regime change) serve as imperial memory factories, laundering the image of a man who ruled through fingernail extractions and executions. Their producers don’t interview women like Shirin Shariati or the surviving family of Bijan Jazani. They parade ex-princesses and court jesters in exile. They present Ashraf Pahlavi, the Shah’s sister and head of the state feminist propaganda machine, as a champion of women’s rights—while women bled out from internal bleeding or forced curettage under torture, and while the other Ashraf (Dehghani) was repeatedly raped and tortured in prison.¹⁰

This is not nostalgia. It is evil disguised as longing.

And it serves empire, again. The sanitized Shah becomes a rhetorical device for Western powers who justify sanctions, regime-change fantasies, and military adventurism by contrasting “modern” Pahlavi Iran with the current government. This isn't about justice. It’s about whitewashing autocracy to justify assaulting a country and extracting its resources. The Pahlavi regime was a buffet for Western imperial interests, resource extraction and oppressive politics. Torture was an instrument of hegemonic control by the native informant, that is the usurper dynasty. The bones of the tortured are used as levers of empire.

To forget torture is to repeat it. To erase testimony is to support its reenactment. Every time the phrase “golden age” is uttered in a Western accent or monarchist forum, it echoes against the walls of Evin prison, where women were hung by their wrists until they urinated on themselves, where their bodies were ravaged and brutalized. That forgetting is not passive. It is assault. It is epistemic killing, a final attempt to bury the bodies that wouldn’t stay buried.

The past is not past when its propaganda is repackaged as memory. Nostalgia in this context is not just delusion—it is counter-insurgency. It is the erasure of struggle and the re-legitimization of the torturer.

1976 AI report

Memory as Resistance

Let me be crystal clear: memory is not about mourning the past. It is about refusing to let the present be rewritten by the powerful.

We remember not for some melancholy ritual, not to light candles over bones. We remember to fight. To indict. To make sure that the names stay too loud for monarchist ears to silence. This is a refusal. Of clean stories. Of nostalgic lies. Of Western complicity and diasporic betrayal.

This is a politics of forward-looking grief: not just mourning the bodies thrown in lime pits or shot in fake escapes, but mourning the intellectual futures that never came to be. The books those women never wrote. The schools they never founded. The social movements they would have led. This is grief as futurism. A call not just to recover what was lost but to imagine what could have been.

A decolonial ethics of memory demands this: that we remember the wounds that silence tried to cauterize, and that we name those who wielded the knives. The Shah, SAVAK and their Western handlers have Iranian blood on their hands.

We refuse the clean corpse of historical narrative. We choose instead to exhume, to speak, to disrupt. We demand justice not only for what was done, but for what was prevented. That is the wound. That is the fire.

And we will not let it go cold.

Disclaimer:

I categorically reject and hold no affiliation—past or present—with the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), also known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. This organization, while historically opposed to the Pahlavi regime, has long since devolved into a reactionary, cult-like entity with a documented history of authoritarianism, abuses against its own members, opportunistic alliances with imperial powers and treason of its countrymen. My work should not be misconstrued as sympathetic to or aligned with MEK ideology, strategy, or propaganda.

The remembrance of those persecuted by the Pahlavi regime—Marxists, leftist students, intellectuals, and revolutionaries—is a project rooted in anti-imperialist, decolonial, and feminist commitments. This work exists in explicit opposition to both the Pahlavi monarchy and reactionary forces including the MEK (elements affiliated with whom have aided in the illegal attack against Iranian sovereignty by the same forces that toy with the idea of reinstating the Monarchy). The memory of the disappeared deserves clarity and political integrity—not historical laundering by groups whose hands are stained by their own betrayals.

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References

1. Abrahamian E. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. 1999.

2. Amnesty International. Annual Report 1974–1975. London: Amnesty International; 1975.

3. Abrahamian E., History of Modern Iran, (2008),

4. Amnesty International. Monthly report, Vol.5 No.5 July 1975

5. Iranica Online. “Feminist movements III. in the Pahlavi period.” 1999 Dec 15.

6. Foundation for Iranian Studies: Reform and Regression: The Fate of the Family Protection Law (2008) https://fis-iran.org/article/reform-and-regression-the-fate-of-the-family-protection-law/

7. Kashani-Sabet F. Conceiving citizens: Women and the politics of motherhood in Iran p. 189

8. Iranica Online. “Feminist movements III. in the Pahlavi period.” 1999 Dec 15.

9. Majd H. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. Doubleday; 2008. p 241.

10. Shahidian, H. Women and Clandestine Politics in Iran, 1970-1985 (1997).