I can recommend the documentary Coup 53 [0] on this subject. The rest of the episodes of End of Empire have kindly been uploaded to YouTube and are worth a watch.
70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
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Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#62There's a certain strain of political outlook exemplified by an article like this, commonly categorized as "post-colonial", that ironically morphs itself into increasingly complex and implausible shapes to explain why all of the bad things are caused by the "first world" and nobody else has or will ever have any autonomy as an agent in the world. The other aspect of irony to this is that this worldview is cultivated…
The Shah couldn't have taken the power without US help. It's one of the US few success, Pinochet being the second. Obviously it's easier when you have internal support. Basically the Iranian conservatives were divided. The Shah was unlikeable (or untrustworthy I think, if I remember correctly), so the old feudal/clannish/agrarian society wouldn't really support him. The industrialists liked him better, and the islami…
> The Shah couldn't have taken the power without US help. It's one of the US few success, Pinochet being the second.
Can you explain this? I wouldn’t call Iran’s situation or Pinochet good outcomes at all, but are you meaning that the US achieved what it intended too, so was therefore successful?
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#63Sad to see what Iran has become - no in small part thanks to the US/UK's meddling and installing a crazed theocratic government. The Iranian people deserve so much better - they are a nation of really smart people and would be a beacon in the Middle East if it wasn't for a bunch of religious reactionaries holding power. Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were expat Iranians who left and have no intentio…
The young generation of Iran doesn't buy into the whole blaming the US thing for something that happened 70 years (1 generation!!) ago - which the US tried to install a more westernized leader. A lot of anti-US people with agenda wants the world to think otherwise. Case in point:
Mourners In Iran Refuse To Trample On Swedish, American Flags. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202307280335
Iranian students avoid stepping on images of U.S., Israeli flags. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJLG8jCq1Q
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> stealing other countries' shit at gunpoint, which went out of fashion after WW2 It didn’t go out of fashion. Industrialization made wars of conquest unprofitable by 1890-1910 or so, and it took the world that long to get a clue. (Russia, notably, still hasn’t figured it out.) If you build one factory, you make money; if you build an army to steal your neighbor’s factory, most likely you both get zero factories.
You never start a war to gain some bombed-to-shit factories or barren deserts, you start wars to gain control of valuable land with resources and more easily defensible borders, get control of lucrative trade routes, and gain workers(slaves) and natural resources for your own factories. Of course, it's much easier and cheaper these days to use your intelligence services to stage a coup in that country so that your co…
> you start wars to gain control of valuable land with resources and more easily defensible borders, get control of lucrative trade routes, and gain workers(slaves) and natural resources for your own factories
In modern warfare, you don’t get these for free. If you’re trying to yoink from a fellow nation-state, you risk your own factories being bombed. If you’re up against a less sophisticated foe, you still sacrifice industrial production and diplomatic goodwill in excess of any base resource gains.
It’s cheaper and more fruitful to trade for those goods than it is to steal them. (Coups are no exception. They disrupt the economy and jeopardise the security situation. Much simpler to trade with Tehran than try for a coup that doesn’t result in civil war or blowback.)
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#65There’s a great book about this called All the Shahs Men, highly recommend
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#66Sad to see what Iran has become - no in small part thanks to the US/UK's meddling and installing a crazed theocratic government. The Iranian people deserve so much better - they are a nation of really smart people and would be a beacon in the Middle East if it wasn't for a bunch of religious reactionaries holding power. Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were expat Iranians who left and have no intentio…
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Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#67That coup allowed a liberal society to flourish in Iran... now look where they are. I'd rather have US coups than any type of Iran-Russian autocratic regime.
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Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Industrialization made wars of conquest unprofitable by 1890-1910 or so, and it took the world that long to get a clue To wit: “…much of [balance-of-power politics] theory was based on agrarian states or early industrial states. And one of the features of agrarian interstate relations was that returns to war outpaced returns to capital, which is a fancy way of saying you could get richer, faster by conquest than by…
> the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery And yet the "war on terror" happened. US companies gained a lot from that even if the average taxpayer didn't.
In every war, someone gains something, but War on Terror was detrimental to the US as a whole, and the American population understands that - which is why the hawks are really unpopular right now. The defeat of H.C. in 2016 can at least partly be explained by the fact that she was considered a foreign policy hawk.
Compare this to wars of Ancient Rome which were actually popular, because they brought home visible wealth.
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#69Sad to see what Iran has become - no in small part thanks to the US/UK's meddling and installing a crazed theocratic government. The Iranian people deserve so much better - they are a nation of really smart people and would be a beacon in the Middle East if it wasn't for a bunch of religious reactionaries holding power. Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were expat Iranians who left and have no intentio…
The coup most definitely did not install a theocratic government, an autocratic one quite likely but lets not pretend that the western secular Iran of the 60’s people seem to be so fond off wasn’t there predominantly because of the Shah not despite of him.
The Islamic Revolution didn’t succeed power by chance, whilst the Shah was opposed by many factions form secular communists to religious fanatics the reason why the mullahs came on top was because the majority of the population was a bunch of illiterate religious nut jobs.
This is also why Turkey has regressed so much, the secular metropolitan elite that followed Ataturk’s legacy was and is out numbered by the rural masses at least 3 to 1. At some point something had to give which is now why you have decades of Erdogan.
Re: 70 years ago, an Anglo-US coup condemned Iran to decades of oppression
#70>The next day, on August 19, 1953, with the aid of “rented” crowds widely believed to have been arranged with CIA assistance, the coup succeeded
I searched the article and its reference for any details on the mechanics of this "coup." Zilch.
WSJ has an article today, in fact, about it. Mossadegh was not "democratically elected." There was massive opposition to him inside Iran. The UK was opposed to him, of course.
As for the "rented" crowds: evidence please?