Discussing Iran

Snagged from Tumblr:

  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 the 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.

I was explaining this and how, during the Reagan 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.