wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
why would they? why would they tell us that they are ACTIVELY destroying the world?
i was lucky enough to have a scholarship to an excellent private high school, and we had precisely one class that covered these events. public school? didn’t even mention them.
edit: oh, and the class was an elective, and only spring semester, because the same teacher did intro to law in fall semester. so basically only 24 kids a year in all of minneapolis, to the best of my knowlege, were informed of our deliberate destabilization of the middle east in the 80′s and 90′s.
it’s not like we could just spread the word on social media, either. there was no such thing.
it’s easy for millennials to look down on gen-x and boomers for being ignorant, but we just didn’t have the tools to acquire this information. we may not have believed everything we were told – hell, gen-x at least was famously cynical about the propaganda we were taught in school – but that didn’t mean we were able to find out the truth.
it’s up to you now, kiddos. don’t you say “it’s not my job to educate you” when we wouldn’t even know there was something to look for without posts like this. go forth and make truth known. fact-check everything. you’re the first generation that can.
I found out about the ugly stuff at home, from books and my very anti establishment family, then went to school and watched the teachers take wide narrative detours around genocides and illegal human experimentation and the CIA and war crimes and other assorted US government misdeeds, and i was one angry little doomsday child because i was sure they were doing it to deceive us for THE GOVERNMEMT, not just because they had also been given the revised facts themselves.
I was in the sixth grade during the first desert storm. I never said a word but i well remember being furious at teachers a whole lot of the time. i was also very very extra angry every thanksgiving.
I thought i was chill these days till i recalled this stuff and nope still ornery
Published
just moving along like everyone else 