On this day in 1953, the U.S. and British governments initiated a coup d’état against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had been preparing to nationalize Iran’s British-owned oil fields.

Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), later re-named British Petroleum, and to limit the company’s control over Iranian oil reserves. When the AIOC refused to cooperate with the Iranian government, the parliament voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country.

In response, the British began a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically and engaged in subterfuge to undermine Mosaddegh’s government.

Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a communist takeover, Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration overthrew Iran’s government. The coup action was also supported by the Iranian clergy, who opposed Mosaddegh’s secularism.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hired mobsters to stage pro-Shah riots and paid people to travel to Tehran and take over the streets of the city. Between 200 and 300 people were killed in the ensuing mayhem.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. Many of his supporters were imprisoned, several received the death penalty. Mosaddegh himself lived the rest of his life under house arrest, dying in 1967.

After the coup, the Shah ruled as a monarch for the next 26 years until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

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  • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    It’s so fucked up that OkCupid a decade ago seemingly just worked. Like they figured it out but then had to enshittify it because it just isn’t profitable to make people happy

        • SoylentSnake [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          yo v true, the monopolistic control of not just the online dating market, but the very act of meeting someone b/c of death of third places have let them become trash dehumanizing products to a degree that’s insane, they have neither competitors within the formal capitalist market or like within larger sociological structures

          • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            2 months ago

            Digital conveniences hollowed out most of irl and then the stockholders wanted to get paid so the services providing those conveniences that eroded the previous socially fabric became monopolized and those monopolies are houses of cards in and of themselves that can only be kept up by proftizing and therefore enshittifying everything digital. It expands to pretty much all facets of life, we took the carrot and later got the stick.