For those taking the moral high ground..

This is a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph taken 1 hour after the convicteds' trial began, in northern Iran shortly after the Shah Reza Pahlevi was overthrown.

The photographer was anonymous for more than 27 years.

Here's the fascinating story

It is worth noting that Reza Pahlevi did indeed have a secret police unit, and those who opposed him did indeed sometimes disappear. (And I worked with a couple guys who said they had to leave Iran for their safety.)

But Pahlevi generally was considered a 'benevolent autocrat' by some who ignored his iron fist, while compared to Hitler by those who opposed him.

Both may be true, depending on your POV, but I dont recall any mass executions from his regime.

Now to the point:

The only ones he dared not suppress were the clergy.... that was his undoing. Which brings us on the one hand to the House of Saud... and to the tricks and machinations of the Islamists in the US and Western Europe, on the other.

And the other chilling similarity is that both the Shia Clergy and Leftists were opposed to the Shah, and united in working against him. And many of the first on the wrong end of those guns were.....

The Moral Bankruptcy of Realism

 

Re: RE: For those taking the moral high ground..

Yes... and not exactly. We'll go back to some of that wiki article on the shah:

In the early 1950s, there was a political crisis centered in Iran that commanded the focused attention of British and American intelligence outfits. In 1951, the Iranian parliament, under the leadership of the nationalist movement of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry. This shut out the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was a pillar of Britain's economy and political clout. A month after that vote, Mossadegh was named Prime Minister of Iran.

In response to nationalization, Britain placed a massive embargo on Iranian oil exports, which only worsened the already fragile economy. {**} Neither the AIOC nor Mossadegh was open to compromise in this period, with Britain insisting on a restoration of the AIOC and Mossadegh only willing to negotiate on the terms of its compensation for lost assets. The U.S. president at the time, Harry S. Truman, was categorically unwilling to join Britain in planning a coup against Mossadegh, and Britain felt unable to act without American cooperation, particularly since Mossadegh had shut down their embassy in 1952.

But 'mildly leftist' in those times wasnt unusual either. what did the US gain from changing its mind?
This was in the period of Soviet expansionism.

Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, was finally persuaded by arguments that were anti-Communist rather than primarily economic, and focused on the potential for Iran's Communist Tudeh Party to capitalize on political instability and assume power, aligning Iran and its immense oil resources with the Soviet bloc. Though Mossadegh never had a close political alliance with Tudeh, he also failed to act decisively against them in any way, which hardened U.S. policy against him.

I was a kid at the time; but I was curious as to why Britain was so intransigent in that region. Especially during the Suez crisis*... so I read a little more.

The key to the stalemate between Anglo-Iranian Oil and Mossadegh wasnt just that the company lost rights and profits, it was that they lost a lot of money on their development investment. As pointed out by Wiki, Mossadegh wanted to only pay for audited assets seized.

The CIA pointed out to Ike that Iran neither had the capital or the operational talent at the time to totally manage its own oil production. The Soviet Union, however, was looking to expand its sphere of petro-influence and the concern was that the de-facto commercial control would shift from the West to the Soviets.

{** a Fog-note: Once again embargoes and sanctions muddy the geo-politics and make matters worse rather than better.
There is something where we really never have learned our lessons}

So... to say it was 'ALL ABOUT OIL' was just as true then as now... and just as disingenuous.

*The Suez crisis was 'All about Oil' too... About greedy nationals forgetting WHY they had a man-made resource and who it was built it for them and why... while trying to exert political bent by control of passage.

Again from Wiki

*** May be an 'inconvenient truth' for some.

I have to inject here, that I am extremely impressed with Wikipedia. Since the site is maintained by, and has input from, anyone who cares to write in it... the even-handed and to the point content is amazingly accurate to what I have read and remember... even though I have to read it to dredge those thoughts back up.