Comment by kakacik
4 hours ago
Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.
Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.
As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.
Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...
It's complicated. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
The American and the British supported the Shah and ousted the popular prime minister in 1953: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
But why start/stop there? We can go farther back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran
Anyways, it's true the US meddled in Iran. The most recent meddling pre the Islamic Revolution pressuring the Shah to improve the human rights situation which enabled the (mostly secular) anti-regime forces to organize.
"In 1977 the Shah responded to the "polite reminder" of the importance of political rights by the new American president, Jimmy Carter, by granting amnesty to some prisoners and allowing the Red Cross to visit prisons. Through 1977 liberal opposition formed organizations and issued open letters denouncing the government." from the above. These social process culminated in the Shah leaving Iran.
Kind of funny: "Worse for the Shah was that the Western media, especially the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), immediately put Khomeini into the spotlight.[18][151] Khomeini rapidly became a household name in the West, portraying himself as an "Eastern mystic" who did not seek power, but instead sought to "free" his people from "oppression." Western media outlets, usually critical of such claims, became one of Khomeini's most powerful tools.[18][117]"
There are a lot of good books about Iran. Another interesting aspect is that a lot of the idealistic left wing revolutionaries that tried to remove the Shah were IIRC amongst the first to be lined up against a wall and executed by the Islamists that took over. AI summary: "The aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution was a brutal and tragic period for the secular, left-wing, and Marxist groups that had played a crucial role in overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
While the revolution is often remembered strictly as an Islamic uprising, it was actually a broad coalition of secular liberals, student movements, labor unions, communists (like the Tudeh Party), Marxist guerrillas (like the Fedayeen-e Khalq), and Islamists who united against the Shah's autocracy. However, once the Shah went into exile in January 1979 and the monarchy collapsed, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist supporters moved swiftly to monopolize power and systematically eliminate their former revolutionary partners."
EDIT: Another interesting detail in there is that some internal massacre ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1978) ) is blamed on the Zionists. This claim is completely debunked - never happened. Everything old is new again.