Coll 28/67 ‘Persia. Annual Reports, 1932–’ [‎256v] (512/644)

Nevertheless, however complete the Allies’ victory may be, it is not to be expected
that Iranians as a whole will ever become as wholeheartedly pro-British as they
were pro-German in the middle of 1940. Until undeceived by events they will
continue to hope that in the last resort Germany will protect them against
Russia—a service which they do not expect Great Britain to perform. But there
is another reason. It would be flattering to our self-esteem it we could attribute
the natural pro-Germanism of the Iranian to his baseness and his inability to
appreciate the more disinterested parts of the British case. He is base, and he
doesn’t believe that anyone is ever disinterested, but at the same time it would
be foolish to expect our defence of freedom and independence to be taken at its
face value by a people who live close to India and the Arab States in the Persian
iGulf, who have heard something about our Zionist policy, and who interpret m
a fashion highly discreditable to ourselves the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907
land the Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1919. The fact is that Germany is in a strong
position in having no overseas possessions and in being able to throw stones at
Great Britain without fear of being hurt by a rebound, and now that the fear of
Italian entry yet farther into the eastern world seems to have been eliminated,
Germany is no longer embarrassed in her eastern policy by attachment to an ally
with a dubious past. Moreover, the public, partly under the influence of German
propaganda, have come to hold us responsible for the Shah and his misdeeds.
The intensity of German propaganda has been mentioned above (paragraph 15).
British propaganda has been greatly improved during the year, but it suffers from
many handicaps. The British are far less numerous than the Germans; it takes
far longer to get periodicals and news-reels from Ungland than from Germany;
and in wireless propaganda we have lagged far behind the Germans. It is true
that in August India inaugurated a broadcast in Persian from Delhi, which
certainly had some influence, but the Iranians tended to regard this as a poor
second best, and to resent being treated as of less importance than twenty or
thirty other peoples in whose languages news was being broadcast from London.
In December, however, the British Broadcasting Corporation began to broadcast
in Persian four times a week, and the only criticism ever directed against it by
this highly critical people was on the ground that it was not given every night.
By the end of the year good British news-reels were beginning to reach Tehran
more quickly, and arrangements were in train for a supply of English films with
good entertainment as well as propaganda value. But it has been realised that
there are two things without which our propaganda can have little effect on
public opinion : military successes against Germany, and trade. The general
public are glad to see the overthrow of Italy, who enjoys no sympathy here, but
they regard Germany as the enemy that Great Britain will have to defeat to
win the war, and although many are beginning to wonder whether Germany can
win, very few yet believe it possible that she can be defeated. At the end of
December His Majesty’s Legation reported that British propaganda in Iran was
a plant without roots for the lack of commercial interest to support it. It was
explained that Germany’s greater success in satisfying the needs of Iran, and the
vacillation of our own policy, ending in a series of disappointments for the
Iranian Government, had inevitably created in the minds of the official and com
mercial classes the impression of weakness. It was, therefore, urged that the work
of the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation, which had just been
inaugurated in Iran, should not be restricted merely because the financial balance
in any given transaction proposed might be on the wrong side.
25. It could reasonably be argued, until the last year or so, that public
opinion in Iran mattered little, since the only person whose opinion resulted in
action was the Shah. The Shah is still the only source of authority, but there is
now a potential danger in the fact that the population have been persuaded,
partly by active German propaganda and partly by their own vanity, which will
not admit that they can have deserved the Government they have got, that the
British are responsible for all their troubles for having, it is alleged, placed the
Shah on the throne and maintained him there ever since. This distortion of the
facts, which is carried to such lengths that a senior official has been known to
represent the millions extracted from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the
Shah’s blackmail as a subsidy granted by His Majesty’s Government to bolster up
his regime, may be absurd; but it is dangerous, because if the Shah’s grip relaxed,
or if trouble resulted, e.g., from the nearer approach of the war to the borders of
Iran, the Germans might take advantage of this feeling to promote a movement