The current Ayatollah bullshit cannot be explained without that coup d'état. People flocked to the religious zealots because the alternative was a Western satrap.
It is a bit like explaining the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia (1948) by the Western betrayal at Munich in 1938. It was a factor. But not The Factor. Just one of many.
In case of Iran, there, too, were other factors at play. The general drive of the Shah to be the Iranian Atatürk-like Modernizer, which clashed with the conservative rural population. The abilities of Khomeini, who pursued his goal of overthrowing the monarchy with absolute zeal. (Would Turkey be nowadays a modern state if Atatürk himself faced a similar opponent?) Willingness of France to shelter Khomeini and willingness of some Western intellectuals to fawn over him. Naivete of the Iranian Left that joined Khomeinis movement and hoped to come up on top, only to eventually get slaughtered for being "enemies of God".
Etc.etc. It is somewhat intellectually lazy to just drag out Mossadegh and leave the conversation, like GP did. It also masks other unpleasant facts.
For example, in my opinion, the Western intellectual class of the 1970s made a serious mistake by supporting Khomeini and cannot even bring itself to acknowledge it. I think this was at least as consequential to the eventual birth of the Islamic Republic as the Mossadegh coup. But the more people talk about the latter, the more they tend to forget about the former.
I don't remember my government sending bombs to the Ayatollah so they can keep carpe-bombing Tehran.
Protests serve to force your government to take action. i honestly at this point don't see what could mine to to stop this. Given the sanctions are not working, the only option to change Iran is maybe a direct intervention like Syria. And that sure worked great.
What news are you reading? This is featured in virtually every Western media outlet. Maybe it's not so prominent in public discourse because it's sharing screentime with ICE's raids and NATO's rapid collapse.
There is also the issue of not being easy to confirm anything out of Iran right now, which is certainly concerning.
The NYT's top story is still focused on the killing of a single protestor in Minneapolis. They aren't highlighting Iran because a massacre of this scale will be seen as justifying Trump's imminent strike on Iran, and leftists are gearing up to protest that, just as they did the Maduro operation
In modern representations, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find red-dude-with-horns. Seems like we shifted towards hot-dude-with-something-off (Lucifer series, Good Omens), when we do see red-dude-with-horns I feel like it's meant to be somewhat ironic/on-the-nose (south park, preacher).
Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explo.... And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
reply