Iran: Under the Western Gun for Half a Century

Iran: Under the Western Gun for Half a Century

Whatever one thinks of Iran's government, with its many well known and endlessly publicized faults, imagine a government and a country that have stood up, basically alone, against the combined might of the entire Western Alliance for close to a half century! 

This is the time (around 47 years) that has elapsed since the Shah's government was ovethrown in 1979.

For much of this time, Iran has also faced, though to a lesser extent, the strong displeasure (and the adverse consequences of that displeasure) of firstly the USSR, and then of Russia and China--though these two have subsequently, perforce, become more supportive of Iran, out of dire necessity.

There was of course also the previous quarter century that had followed the British and US supported military coup against the elected government headed by Mossadegh, after he had attempted to move towards Iran getting a fairer share of its oil export revenues from the Western oil companies.

This was in 1953, resulting in 26 years of rule by the Shah and his Savak, in close alliance with the West and its regional allies, including especially Israel. 

Indonesia's government, led by Sukarno, a leader of the non-aligned movement, met a similar fate during 1965-67, again connected in part with oil and gas, and also part of the merciless drive of the Western Alliance against socialism and communism. 

The immediate toll in deaths from that Western backed military coup, led by General Suharto, was much worse in Indonesia, than the immediate consequences of the earlier military coup had been in Iran.

Around a million Indonesians were killed, mainly those who were part of workers' and peasants' organizations, and/or were socialists, communists, or ethnic Chinese. 

I strongly suspect that the government in India, headed by Indira Gandhi, was also targeted by the West for a takedown, following the Indian army's liberation, in 1971, of what became Bangladesh and consequent to Mrs. Gandhi's move towards nationalizations and her continued reliance on the USSR for political backing at the UN and for armaments.

In addition to the major Western powers, headed by the USA, plus the highly aggressive and subversive regional power, Israel, Iran has had to deal with the regional, Western-allied oil sheiks and the extremist "Islamic" militants supported by them, including those operating out of a ravaged Afghanistan to its east and later a ravaged Iraq to its west. 

These militant groups also often had direct or indirect Western backing, of course before 2001-09-11, but also, in some cases, even after that horror in the US homeland.

That atrocity had been orchrstrated by some of those who had been instrumental on wreaking such horrors (but over a much longer time period and with far more massively lethal and other adverse consequences) on the heads of ordinary Afghans and others. 

Iran also had had to deal, soon after the revolution that threw out the Western-installed Shah, with a lethal six-year war launched by Iraq's Saddam Hussein, with strong Western and other backing (using chemical and allegedly also biological weapons supplied by Germany and other Western governments).

That war alone had killed around a million Iranians and left many others maimed for life, including many who suffered through slow deaths from the effects of chemical weapons.

The extreme economic strangulation, currency manipulation, sabotage, cyber attacks, assassinations of scientists, engineers, and others, and much more have never ceased, only grown even worse over time.

All of this conbined has announted to a crushing and increasingly unbearable weight, creating further misery for Iran's population.

Yet Iran--and its government, for all its faults--had not only survived but had done so without kowtowing.

What is more, over time, the Iranian government had been reduced to the sole ally of the militant groups in West Asia that were still offering some resistance to Israeli, Western, and, for (as in Yemen, most obviously) Arab oil sheikh aggression and oppression. 

Compare this with the responses of most other governments (beginning with the regional Arab ones that were not taken out by the US and its allies, but not ending there) to Western-Alliance manipulation through bribing and bullying (to put it most mildly).

The only government and country that has been able to withthstand such extreme pressures, having done so for even longer, has been North Korea, whose popularion had gone through what can only be called a near-genocidal experience in the 1950s. 

However, North Korea did get direct help during that prolonged horror from the newly liberated People's Republic of China and, to a lesser degree, from the USSR. 

Much of what followed in North Korea, including nstitutionalized (and perhaps justified) paranoia about the intentions of the Western Alliance, extreme authoritarianism, dynastic rule,  and the development and publicization of a strong deterrent military capability (in not just its large standing army but also its missiles and nuclear weapons) can be traced to that collective, near-existential experience and trauma of the 1950s. 

2026 March 1, Sun.

Berkeley, California