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
Tag: politics
Swing Left
Control of the House in 2018 will be decided by a handful of Swing Districts, places where the last election was decided by a thin margin. Find your closest Swing District and join its team to learn about actionable opportunities to support progressives—and defeat Republicans—in that district, no matter where you live. We can stop Trump and the GOP agenda by working together NOW.
THIS is how you get shit done.
one last thought before sleepytime
i think maybe folks who don’t know me well are assuming i’m advocating nonviolent resistance because i’m a gentle hippie who fears confrontation and believes in hugs and flowers
but the truth is i spent a whole lot of my life being really angry and violent, and got into a lotta lotta fights
like this is going to sound like a dumb ‘the whole bus applauded’ brag but i did in fact take on 4 nazi punks solo and ‘win’ once when i was i think 19 – by win i mean i hurt one real bad and the rest took off going “holy shit you’re crazy” and “what the fuck is wrong with you” because i was so rabid i freaked them out, because when i’m genuinely scared i kind of flip the berserker switch
this only happened once ok i was not some kind of vigilante, they caught me in a parking lot and were gonna teach me a lesson for being friends with a guy they had a problem with, it was a whole stupid thing, ANYWAY what i’m saying is that punching nazis in the face is not an abstract idea for me, it is a thing i have genuinely had to clean up after in my bathroom sink
so i know exactly what you get from it
to wit: the shakes
in addition to some self-congratulation and bragging rights, but i’m not gonna lie, i threw up when i got home
i wish i had some pat moral about what the nazi punks from colorado did next but it had nothing to do with me, they apparently went back home bc one of them had a warrant out on him or something, it doesn’t really matter, nothing changed. i don’t even know if the friend they had a vendetta for ever found out i got in a fight with them or what he thought about it if he did, we weren’t that close
real life is messy
yeah ok the point is i did the violence thing for too many years and it kinda sucked and was not very effective at achieving anything whatsoever, and that’s why i’m a pacifist now, the end.
It seems to me that a lot of people are falsely equating non-violence with non-hostility and total pacifism. No. That’s not even a little bit the same thing. I hold no illusion that I’m going to be winning a neo-Nazi over by breaking bread and singing kumbaya, but I’m not under the illusion that I will be winning them over at all. What I want to do is drive them back into their slimy sewer dumps where they can rot for good. I intend to make an environment so hostile to their ideals that they will have no place to sow those seeds, their hate and fear mongering will bear no fruit.
Think about it. Think about your life experiences, and remember how FUCKING HARD it was to fight back against multiple people that dismissed you and told you to shut up versus the time someone took a swing at you. Punching back was cathartic, and made you feel in control, but being faced with an overwhelming vocal opposition probably made you feel powerless and alone, yeah? I know we’ve ALL had that experience, either for our race, religion, gender or attraction orientation, disability, or social-economic class.
Take that. Take that and turn it right back on them. Shame them, rebuke them, get your friends, your relatives and neighbors to do it to. If you feel you are alone, try to find and connect with like-minded people online and form meet ups. Write to your elected government at all levels and ask them what they plan to do to oppose them. Go to town meetings and confront them directly. The alt-right is a tiny, tiny fraction, but they gain power only when they go unopposed, so oppose them at every step. Make them fight for every single inch of ground they want, and burn through their will until they slink away exhausted, with their tails between their legs.
you make a really good point here, and thank you for taking my disjointed half-asleep confessional and making something useful out of it.
nonviolence is not for winning over the enemy. it is for turning their progress into an exhausting obstacle course they can’t complete. it is EXTREMELY hostile.
i hate the fact that st*ve b*nnon wrote a failed shakespearean rap musical screenplay about the l.a. riots and that my horrified black ass wants to know more about it. oh my god.
wait WHAT
Does this mean there’s an alternate universe where Lin-Manuel Miranda is on the National Security Council?
No, dude, the problem is not “feminists are impossible to please”. The problem is that you have exactly one woman with a regular speaking role in your cast of dozens, so she ends up having to be everything to everybody.
I want to talk about Universal Basic Income for a little bit, because I’m always sad it’s not talked about in national politics
If you don’t know,
universal basic income is a form of social security system in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. (Imagine if you will, if the government simply gave every citizen over the age of 18 $35,000 every year. Enough money to cover the BASIC NEEDS of a person.) The free market and labor market still exist, people still work for money, people still buy stuff with money.
Some links if you are curious as to how this works:
The wikipedia article on Basic Income.
Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income?
The Economic Case for a Universal Basic Income (Part 1 of a series)
How Universal Basic Income Will Save Us From the Robot Uprising
I really like this for a couple of reasons as an economic policy. I mean, there are the obvious benefits in that it is more efficient than our current mishmash of welfare programs, and it basically makes welfare fraud impossible (not that I’m even that worried about welfare fraud honestly. But some people are. So there ya go.)
But it’s also just a really efficient way to address SO MANY OTHER problems at once.
Guaranteed paid parental leave? Done.
LGBT+ Homelessness? Done.
Childhood hunger? Done.
Unemployment? Done.
People losing their jobs to automation and the shifting workforce needing less and less human labor to function? Done.
Like, it’s a really simple, straight forward, 21st century solution to so many problems. Any problem that stems from “People are living in poverty or near poverty and are completely reliant on their employer to not starve to death”- this fixes it.
It strengthens an employee’s bargaining power in labor negotiations which helps create a more robust labor market.
It gives artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, inventors, community leaders, homemakers, caretakers, etc. the ability to provide their vital services to their communities without having to worry about how to make ends meet.
It’s a good idea and we should start moving towards it as a country.
I think it’s potential to validate and support people who don’t do traditionally profitable labor is super important
The point about the rich, privileged right wing in America.
They can’t understand basic reality or practicality.
Or how the real world works in the end.
He literally compared needing life-saving healthcare to wanting a nice, fancy expensive sofa.
I mean, my God. Think about this.
That statement is shuddering and downright creepy.
When you’re poor you play the game of “is this worth going to the doctor or hospital for?”
This is the story of the ear/sinus infection(s) I have apparently had for half a decade
They… they know that being ill isn’t optional, right?
no because they live by the just world fallacy
they are rich and privileged because they deserve it for being good people
if you get sick it must be because you aren’t good enough
this is literally what conservatives believe
A good take on why Trumpkins don’t hear what the rest of us hear when President Trump spews incoherent word salad.
Also why I have limited interest in, or energy for, trying to persuade them through rational debate.
I have been baffled by this all along – I could not for the life of me imagine what his supporters were hearing when they listened to him babble incoherently. He’s like a political Rorschach’s test.
I feel like I’ve had the curtain drawn back.
I realized I do this to him too. I’m always trying to figure out WHAT THE FUCK HE MEANS. Only because I don’t like him and what he stands for, I’m actually trying to parse reality from it, so it strikes me as insane.
But if I was predisposed to him, my mind would decide on something that filled out my preconceived expectation.
Humans Brains are so fucking weak and wrong.
Okay, so. The problem with Tumblr is that even though it’s a great place to talk about social justice concepts it isn’t a great place to mobilize or organize political change. That means that social justice on here mostly ends up being performative rather than active.
Unfortunately the easiest way to perform your ideological purity within an online community is to point the finger at those who are less pure (see: callout posts, blacklists, smackdowns, receipt pulling, reductive black-and-white mantras/statements, ‘10 Reasons Why So-and-So Isn’t a Real Feminist’, and so on). I see this happening more and more and it makes me really uncomfortable because a) it discourages necessary discussion and learning within social movements by framing all differences/disagreements as moral battles where one person is right and the other person is terrible and b) it reduces social justice to a passive, self-congratulatory performance of personal identity rather than an active, organized pursuit of political change.
Look: Tumblr is many great things, but it is not a safe space. The safe space (a concept originating in the women’s liberation movement) is designed to allow members of a community to speak freely and compare personal experiences with the assurance of respect and the intention of expanding ideas while also finding common ground. Tumblr doesn’t work that way. It’s a vast online forum where likes, reblogs, and followers determine whether or not a particular voice is heard, and it’s just too fast, too big, too diverse, and too anonymous to assume good-will and common interest from all participants. Therefore, many people’s chief priority becomes loudly proving their loyalty to a particular group, as group members who say the wrong thing risk being cast out, blacklisted, harassed, and even threatened.
The result is that Tumblr communities become more polarized, beliefs become more entrenched, thought-terminating cliches abound, common interests are overlooked, and participants are hesitant to ask questions or do anything that might open them to criticism or condemnation (which naturally includes most meaningful political action).
And the problem with this Revenge of the Sith post-9/11 ‘you’re either with us 100% or you’re the enemy’ attitude (where we refuse to work with or even listen to people whose beliefs differ from ours in any way) isn’t just that it’s a little cultish and scary, it’s that it’s totally unsustainable in politics. It’s worth remembering that constantly culling a movement to get rid of less-than-perfect members doesn’t just make the movement purer and purer, it makes it smaller and weaker.
I’m gonna outlive donald trump i dont care how long i have to wait i wanna live in a world where he doesnt exist and I dont have to hear or see him
Spite, fuel me
im not goin anywhere
god this was so uplifting to read
just moving along like everyone else 