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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The Iranian coup, 1953 libcom
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Don’t quite wanna make a post for it on /doomer or /cth cause a whole thread of “Vent your stories of witnessing fascism in action” or whatever would be downer as hell, but thinking about one of the first ones I saw, that I didn’t quite parse at the time but is part of who I am now.
CW: American fascism, Border Pigs, no details.
spoiler
In like 2009 I was working at a Wendy’s with a bunch of funny people, lived in a medium city I guess at the time, part of the DFW metro area and very suburban sort of vibes. I could make it a longer story but all that matters is the end. One day, I came to work and there was like two other people there. Everyone else was just gone. They didn’t show up to work, they weren’t at their places, and it took a minute to find someone who noticed and shared “Yeah border people came by earlier”. Like 30 people from my community just disappeared, and nobody would talk about it, or noticed, or cared. We didn’t even close the store for a period, the boss just ordered people to come in from neighboring towns. I left, the job and the town.
Edit: You know, reading that back it still doesn’t sound real. Never really felt real, like a glitch in reality.
This is literally the shit they used to explain to me why the soviets were so evil. “You get a knock on the door, big men tell you to pack a bag, no one sees you again”. This was the height of evil that justified all aggression against the soviets.
It’s, yeah, it’s not real. That this just happens and most people don’t question it.
Evil fucking place