This is essentially a translation and summary of this German Wikipedia article:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parviz_Nikkhah
I wrote it after it turned out that East-Germany was behind several murders of West-German left-wing activists, for which the other activists (but not the families of the murdered) had long blamed the "fascist" West-German state.
What the German left did to the Shah and the people of Iran cannot easily be forgiven. And the middle-east would look very different today if it hadn't been for the "peace activists" and revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s.
Many of their leaders have long sinced either abandoned their ideology or openly joined the extreme right. But the world they created still exists.
The below tells the story of an Iranian student who became the leader of the Iranian opposition movement in Europe and what his ultimate fate was at the hands of the tyranical regime in Iran.
Parviz Nikkhah was born in Tehran in April 1939. He was executed by the "Islamic Republic" regime on 13 March 1979.
In the 1960s Nikkhah was a student in Germany where he associated with the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS), an anti-Shah group, and the German SDS (Socialist German Student Federation). His sister Parvin was a member of the Iranian Tudeh party, Iran's communist party. The Tudeh party was illegal in Iran. Parvin's husband was also a Tudeh activist.
Ironically Parviz' studies in Germany were paid by a state-funded project to educate Iran's population. But many or most Iranian students quickly associated with anti-Shah groups, especially after hearing from western sources how tyranical the Shah was.
Parviz quickly became the European leader of the CIS and a Maoist who rejected the official Tudeh party's course which followed the reforming Soviet-Union.
This life ended for Parviz when, in Iran, he was found to be involved in an assassination attempt on the Shah on 10 April 1965. In court Parviz made clear his opposition to the monarchy but denied involvement with the assassination itself.
"I am Marxist-Leninist, that's why I am against the Shah. But terrorism is not a part of my ideology."
Jean-Paul Satre, former SS man and famous left-wing author Guenter Grass, and Noam Chomsky wrote letters to the Shah and after a personal conversation between the Shah and Nikkhah the death penalty was changed into ten years in prison.
While in prison Nikkhah was idolised by Iranian students. The CIS and SDS used their martyr to point out the tyranny of the Shah. But Nikkhah himself changed.
Parviz Nikkhah's sister and her husband visited him often in prison. They had left the Tudeh party and had become supporters of the Shah's policies. They brought him books and magazines and managed in long conversations to change Parviz' position but not his opinions.
Parviz now supported the Shah's land reform against the great land owners and the religious establishment, the Shah's legal reforms that made men and women equal before the law, and most other policies instituted by the Shah. In particular he remembered the Shah as a man who took the time to talk to him personally rather than the bloody dictator he was told about in the west.
So Nikkhah asked to speak the Shah again in 1968 and apologised for his role in the assassination attempt and told him he now supported his policies because they seemed to be right way to create a more just society in Iran. The Shah fully pardoned him.
Nikkhah became a journalist at the Iranian state television. His former comrades saw him as a traitor.
And when his former comrades managed to liberate Iran from the Shah in 1978, Nikkhah was again sentenced to death, this time for writing an article against the "Islamic revolution". Nikkhah maintained he never even wrote the article.
However, the enlightened revolution the SDS and CIS had fought for was different from the tyranny of the Shah. There was no conversation with the tyrant and the death penalty was not modified to prison time.
Parviz Nikkhah was executed on 13 March 1979, one month after Khomeini's return.
At that time the SDS and CIS were still celebrating the victory of the just revolution over the tyrannical Shah.
But soon the students woke up. And Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani, one of the founders of the Confederation of Iranian Students ultimately wrote:
I think the student movement had detached itself from Iranian society and its real problems. The movement propagated an image of the poor Iranian farmer who lived off only a few dates, as it was maybe the case at the times of Ahmad Shah or Reza Shah. In our imagination reforms and revolution couldn't go together.
We believed that the Shah only granted equal rights to women because he wanted to make them into civil puppets. We thought that women could not be free when the Iranian people are not free.
Such thoughts led us into an alliance with Khomeini, without thinking that the civil liberties the Shah had fought for were not enough but at least an improvement. The Confederation was built on complete opposition to the current system. The members were not part of an opposition movement deeply rooted into society with theoretical revolutionary ideas.
They were idealists who opposed social injustice and whose enemy was the Shah. They didn't have deeper knowledge of Iran and were afraid to discuss the Shah's reforms. It might have happened that we would have lost the enemy if we had done that.
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Written in memory of the last Shah of Iran, a great man whom Germany, Israel, and the entire world owe so much and whose reforms in Iran were ultimately undone by left-wing protesters and the new regime they allowed to be created in Iran. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi died 30 years ago next month.