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.
I can absolutely confirm. Public school education in South Carolina did not teach the realities of colonialism. It sure as hell didn’t teach us about racism. I had an AP Us History teacher named Ms. Outlaw. I was doing badly in school because of survivor stuff and trans stuff (in the 90’s in South fucking Carolina!!!!) and I was really feeling isolated. Being any stripe of queer just wasn’t spoken of, but I heard it was actually talked about in History of Minority Groups, so I signed up for the ELECTIVE class. The same woman that in my AP US History class framed the civil war as entirely economic and claimed that the sole purpose of the emancipation proclamation was to weaken the southern economy and thus help the north win the war–which TOTALLY WASN’T ABOUT SLAVERY–looked me dead in the fucking eye while acknowledging in the history of minority groups class that the civil war was, indeed, specifically about slavery. I was the only white kid in that class. That was my senior year of high-school and the internet was still not what it is today, so my awakening to the realities of white supremacy was slow and jerky, but it really started that day. Other things happened growing up that clued me in, but it wasn’t until the exact same teacher represented two diametrically opposed views of American history while making pointed eye contact with me that I picked up on what was obvious to every black student in that class.
Furthermore during my stint on a special forces ODA and in all the training leading up to it I learned all about SF’s history as being an instrument specifically for Cold-War era proxy warfare. That was our specific task before the war in Afghanistan and Iraq: to train indigenous people to fight our enemies in our stead, KNOWING that they would be abandoned once we were done with them, just like the Degar people (who we still call the Montagnards) in Vietnam. Most Americans don’t know about them in spite of a resettlement effort taken on by many Vietnam era special forces personnel to have them relocated to the united states (primarily in North Carolina).
Tldr; Americans are taught a very propagandistic version of history that focuses on “American exceptionalism” to the exclusion of major world events–especially ones that make us look bad.
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Meg's Mumbles 