The antics of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed and detested Shah of Iran, remind me of a line from the poem "The Man Who Wasn't There" by the American Hugh Mearns: "Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away".
The poem seems to perfectly encapsulate the way Pahlavi, the man who would be king, suddenly appears out of nowhere each time there is a crisis in Iran. After decades of silence, Pahlavi set off on a whirlwind international tour following the nationwide uprising in Iran in 2022-23.
Blatantly exploiting the cruel death in custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, Pahlavi spoke at a press conference in the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in Washington D.C., in February 2023, where he promised to launch a charter of demands for a future Iran called 'The Mahsa Charter', whose text according to some of his own supporters had been edited by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) in Tehran.
