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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Ironic since all your friends got their info from crank German evangelical anthropologists and oligarch run media. That sounds like a very unfair situation to be in. If your friends aren't willing to listen to evidence as to why they're wrong than that could bleed into other areas of your friendship with them.
I wonder if you ask those same friends about Palestine they'll have a non
response. If they do have a principled stance on Palestine then you can bring up how China is a peace negotiator in West Asia and how the US has been stoking the flames of violence through invasion and funding of terrorist groups. Why would China be interested in peace in the mostly Islamic West Asia when they apparently commit genocide on Muslims for just existing?
If they have a bothsides to Palestine you might need to find better friends though.
See I'm just complaining though. Because the more I argue the more like a crank I seem. They are pro Palestine though.