The Red and the Black Reactionary

In politics, the term “reactionary” is used for governments that stand against political, economic, cultural, and social developments and are more concerned with preserving the status quo or returning to the past which typically is considered as a reverting to an earlier and inferior condition. The agents of such governments are called “reactionary elements.”

Looking back on reactionary governments, the return is not about turning to divine or human values. Because in the past, most governments were based on the dominance of the rich and powerful over the lower classes of society, and the law and individual freedoms were subject to the conditions and demands of the ruling class, and also the people were not being allowed to interfere in government affairs.

“Reactionary” derives from the French word réactionnaire (a late eighteenth-century coinage based on the word réaction) and has been in use since the French Revolution in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and was meant to support the kingship and the sovereignty of authoritarian regime who would resist the revolutionaries.

In ‎1963‎, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi called the Shi’ah clergy “the black reactionaries” who showed a strong opposition in reaction to the plan of the White Revolution. He intended to use the term “red and black reactionary” to represent the clergy as accomplices to the communists in the eyes of the people. By “red reactionary,” he meant the Tudeh Party. They were promoting the communist ideology, and because the Soviet flag was red, the Shah referred to them as “red reactionaries.”

In his speech on January 24 in Qom, the Shah, with derogatory remarks, called the ayatollahs “foreign agents,” saying that they were worse than “the red destructors, the traitors who want to deliver the country to others.”

In the aftermath of the rigged referendum for the six articles of the White Revolution on January 26, 1963, the media also used the phrase “red and the black reactionary” to humiliate the ayatollahs and their supporters, and in that view, the Pahlavi government used the term “red and the black colonialism” against the Islamic Movement after the incident of June 5, 1963.

On January 7, 1978, an offensive article on “Iran and Red and Black Colonialism” was published in Ettela’at daily newspaper. This article paved the way for the huge protests against the Shah’s regime so that the walls of the kingdom started to crumble and within a year all the imperial government’s structures had collapsed.