CrusaderFrank
Diamond Member
- May 20, 2009
- 163,706
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The informed already know this history, the uninformed will likely not read it and maintain their perfect track record
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“Before you can have an opinion on Iran, you owe it to yourself to know its history. What Churchill and Britain did with Iranian oil. What MI6 and the CIA did to Mosaddegh in 1953. What the Shah spent at Persepolis while his people went hungry. What America did when Saddam gassed Iranian soldiers.
Read this. Then tell me the anger is irrational.
The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know
I will be honest about why I wrote this article.
Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.
This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.
Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Let me show you why.
The Original Theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.
In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.
The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return…”
“Before you can have an opinion on Iran, you owe it to yourself to know its history. What Churchill and Britain did with Iranian oil. What MI6 and the CIA did to Mosaddegh in 1953. What the Shah spent at Persepolis while his people went hungry. What America did when Saddam gassed Iranian soldiers.
Read this. Then tell me the anger is irrational.
The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know
I will be honest about why I wrote this article.
Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.
This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.
Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Let me show you why.
The Original Theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.
In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.
The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return…”
