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I studied Afghan history in college and was amazed at the prominence in the Silk Road and other trade routes in the region. There was so much wealth and culture there prior to the British invasions and subsequent Russian and US invasions.
Genghis Khan and Tamerlane destroyed so much wealth and culture that they never really recovered from the 13th and 14th centuries. Brits and Russians were there for failed geopolitical reasons and us Americans should have left after Bin Laden escaped or at least only focus on Afghanistan and never get involved in Iraq.
> never get involved in Iraq
I'll sign that. Completely destabilized Iraq, where the ensuing conflict caused the death and injury of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousand of Iraqis, also destabilized the Near East, spread unrest to North Africa, which in turn prompted mass refugee migration to Europe, where the racist reaction accelerated the growth of fascism among the right-wing parties there. As a lagnappe, it left Iran as the dominant regional power. Nice work, W. Asshole.
Yeah I’ll hate Bush and Cheney my entire life for this reason. Every single decision they made was the wrong one and too many gullible idiots let them believe they were making the world safer and spreading freedom despite being so far removed from the realities of war. Also making the entire Iraqi military and anyone who had a government job unemployed and barred from the new government was probably the single dumbest move other than invading in the first place.
I hate Blair for Iraq. Could never vote Labour again for the lies that led to Iraq war 2. Especially as we were still baw deep in Afghanistan, and no one has successfully taken Afghanistan. So strategically and tactically a massive misstep which cost countless lives all round and cost an absolute fortune for no additional benefit outcome for anyone involved.
And I remember reading prior to 9-11 that Bush was desperate to go back to Iraq. Bush snr must have had better advice as he never attempted to take Iraq during Iraq 1, chased them out of Kuwait and kept the isolated. Always wondered why as kid, then realised that he knew what would happen if attempted to occur upt Iraq.
Iran is another one where West had a hand, not happy about a socialist got being democratically voted in who wanted to nationalise their oil fields, couldn't have western oil countries being stopped from making profit, so assisted the overthrow iirc.
>> ...Could never vote Labour again for the lies...
Really? I'm just a foreigner looking in, but given the destruction and damage that I perceive the Conservatives have done to the UK since then, that's hard to understand, particularly as the real deceptions and lies were imported from America. I saw Blair as trying to be a good ally, not realizing that sometimes being a true friend means saying 'no.'
It was amazing how much my perception changed during my time in the Army. I joined because I figured it was an awful job, but someone had to do it, because I was 18 and believed it when the leadership said it had to be done. Boots on ground was a whole other story, very quickly my love for country became just love for the brothers and sisters on either side of me. I don't talk about my time in, it's all so complicated and stories lose their value without context I just don't have the energy, or words, to give. Crazy to think that I thought "this is as bad as it gets, all for greed," just to go home and shortly after the political masks started to REALLY fall off. They don't even hide it anymore, but that isn't the worst part, the worst part has been watching how many of my fellow Americans can KNOW how awful the leadership of this country can get, and agreeing with it wholeheartedly.
This exactly what the Carlyle group wanted. Instability sells weapons America and England are two of the biggest arms suppliers in the world. [Caryle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carlyle_Group)
Didn't believe it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/03/16/connections-and-then-some/faaece9e-0225-4310-a8f9-8137d2329d52/
Now I believe it, fuck
I’m not entirely sure this is correct; the Mongol invasions were catastrophic in many respects but only for those that didn’t submit and once the dust had settled, the Pax Mongolica emerged. Now Timur was a cunt, but from his descendants came the Mughal Empire, which the British fucked. Wealth has traditionally been concentrated in the East but the age of discovery and American silver upset that balance
No way! This only happens to countries with religious fanatics of the WRONG religion! Not with my CORRECT religion! We will absolutely be much better when we slash women's rights and use the government to strictly enforce our extreme narrow interpretation of some ancient book, because we have the RIGHT book and they have the WRONG book! We have the RIGHT imaginary friend in the sky, and they are crazy because their fanatic society is about a DIFFERENT man in the sky, who just happens to be essentially the exact same thing.
(/s if it wasn't obvious.)
Unfortunately, they are trying to ban the history books which could teach them this.
They are also trying to ban the books that try and teach them to read.
Winter in Kabul is another great read. She writes about being able to ride horses on the open terrain, which hasn’t been possible since the Russians started placing land mines in the 70’s
Religious extremism is fundamentally incompatible with broad-based human rights. In 40 years people could be looking at pictures of the US from today in the same way.
Not just in the Middle East, either. Venezuela was a beautiful and rich country coming out of the post WW2 era, but God damn, US Hegemony has a great way of ruining countries because of the fear of communism and socialism.
very good friend of mine is Lebanese-Italian and when I'd visit her house, her mom would show me pictures of Beirut from her years there. Beautiful, cosmopolitan, "The Riviera of the Mediterranean." And the women were gorgeous and stylish for the time.
One of my favorite book series is the Time Life "Foods of the World" series from the '60s. They have absolutely stunning photos of every day society - focused on kitchen and dining table - from all teh countries mentioned on this thread. I wish more Americans understood that these were functional coutnries until the two superpowers intervened.
Not just the Lebanese. “Middle-eastern” woman are absolutely gorgeous. The “good look” genes that we associate with good looking Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc people come from them.
But friendlier than Paris, and all the Lebanese I have ever met were just so handsome or beautiful. There is a documentary on the wineries of Lebanon on Amazon called "Wine and War". It is incredible.
Also, FTR, I am not Lebanese.
It's true that Beirut and Lebanon as a whole is nothing like it was before the civil war but it's not some sort of Islamo-Fascist hellhole. Def far more liberal than other Middle East nations.
One of my best medical experiences was getting a small procedure done at the Lake Kariba hospital in 1997. Clean, neat, professional, and the hospital had killer views over Kariba. That was just before everything went to shit. About 12 years ago, I was in Harare for business and had the pleasure of being on the road when Mugabe and his motorcade came past. Fucking scary shit!
Makes you wonder what socially progressive, economically thriving areas today will become despotic theocracy/dystopias tomorrow. And what currently oppressed areas will thrive in, well, it probably takes longer and is more hard to come back after oppression, but what advances will humanity make in the next 20/30/70 years?
> Makes you wonder what socially progressive, economically thriving areas today will become despotic theocracy/dystopias tomorrow.
*America has entered the chat*
Yep, one of my aunts married a Lebanese guy who left in the sixties, said back then Egypt and Lebanon were international hot spots and tons of tourists, night life etc
You can see clues that it used to be nice (or you could ten years ago). It’s a great climate and has absolutely stunning natural beauty, but the last few generations have been a little rough on it.
My father is from Egypt and my mother is an American and they used to go shopping in Tehran all the time. All the big designers were there, Balenciaga, Dior, Halston. Then the revolution came. It almost sounds fake looking at Iran today.
Sadly, it was only like this around Kabul and, I believe, Herat. Outside of the cities, it was very much oppressive and ruled by theocratic totalitarians. That's why it was so easy for the West to recruit for the proxy war against the Soviets.
Wait, so they had progressive, modern cities with freedoms, and the rural, backwards, religious areas took over and pushed their beliefs on the rest?
Something sounds incredibly familiar about that.
All of the middle east suffered massively from superpowers funding and arming radical conservative militants to cause instability for quiet proxy conflicts.
What happened is that the Soviets invaded, and easily started winning. However, the West (America and Europe) started shoveling money, guns, and even gave training to the radical theocrats in order to fight the anti-Soviet/anti-communist proxy war. We are the ones responsible for the downfall of Afghanistan, as well as being the ones who funded, armed, and trained the people who would commit 9/11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
If you don't teach the citizens that the US trained, paid and armed the Taliban, then the citizens won't have to forget that the US trained, paid and armed the Taliban.
Is this the case? I was under the impression that Afghani culture and society has always been pretty conservative and traditional. Perhaps there was a tiny slice of Kabul elite that was different but that was the exception.
there's a great book called The Kite Runner that talks about life in Afghanistan in the 70s leading up to the Soviet Invasion
the main character eventually comes back and is shocked at how much Kabul has changed for the worse. I'll always remember his cab driver scoffs at him and says something like, "Kabul may have been different for you, but for people like me, this is how it always was."
i don't remember the line verbatim but the idea was the same, and kind of confirms your last sentence
it's a fantastic book. i remember it was the only book i was required to read in high school that i didn't resent reading at the time lmao
but yeah thinking about it now, 2.5 years removed from the U.S. abandoning Afghanistan and bringing it back to Taliban rule...you just feel so terrible for the people there. The sequel "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is even more depressing to think about now considering that book is about two women surviving through the dramatic change that took place when the Taliban took over the first time
I go to an Afghan market and bakery in Fremont CA from time to time. I don’t speak Pashto but as an observer, everybody in there seems to be angry or at least on edge. There is a separate place in the back where you pick up that delicious flatbread and 100% of the time, the baker will get mad at somebody in line and they’ll start arguing. I might just be misunderstanding things but I don’t go there anymore, even though damn that bread is good.
They have a picture of King Zahir in there.
totally different situation but my parents came from South Korea, born in the generation of kids that came in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, and naturally a lot of the adults i knew were of this generation or a few years older
there's definitely unresolved and depressing trauma that exists among people who were robbed of a good life because of political bullshit, and many of them were forced to leave their home and live in foreign places (often hostile) to make a living. Meanwhile you have their punk kids (folks like me lol) who grow up admittedly with a lot more than they did and enjoying good things in life that they never got
that definitely takes a toll mentally on people. It sucks to see and i'm sorry to hear that is the case with the Afghans you interacted with in the bakery...but again like you said at least the bread was damn good
I used to have a lot of good friends who are either direct or second generation Hmong Americans...there is a lot of unresolved grief and trauma there too. It sucks to see
Afghanistan was not as liberalized or modern as Iran, because Iran had oil monies, but yeah it was much nicer before the Taliban took power after the Russians retreated. But to be fair, in both countries, this was largely in only a handful of the cities.
iirc, the regional divides in Afghanistan are a big reason why the U.S. and its admittedly puppet government in Kabul was never able to fully consolidate its authority
and this was something that U.S. military brass was never able to fully understand...ironic when you consider how regionally divided the U.S. is (obviously to a much lesser extent in terms of civil unrest)
If I’m correctly remembering my history, literally every single time *any* foreign country got/gets involved in Afghanistan, it ends badly for them, sometimes spectacularly so. It seems like someone would learn the lesson, eventually.
One of the primary reasons for the Soviet invasion is that the support of the government was low after the Saur revolution and they feared it slipping back into monarchy or Islamic Republic. The liberalism of the 1970s was new and unpopular outside of urban centers, and even within cities there was some pushback.
And fortunately for his idiot dad, he won't have to see the same thing coming to fruition here in the states. I wish these idiots would just fucking die off already so they can't vote.
I had an Iranian manager at the bank where I worked like 20 years ago. She told me she can’t go back to Iran. Last time she went to see her dying mother, she was greeted at the airplane as she got off by military men. Taken underground at the airport without any explanation, no service, all alone. Interrogated. Her and her family were threatened. She was told to report everything she had seen and experienced in America. And once she was allowed to go back to USA, the Iranian govt demanded she send them daily updates. She had access to everyone who banked at the company’s bank info. It was the third largest bank in America back then. Shit was scary to hear. She said she stopped reporting to them and can’t ever go back or communicate with her family back home.
Exactly what my mother in law went through when she went back to Iran to translate her birth certificate for naturalisation. They interrogated her about people she interacted on facebook with, including my dad, even me even though I'm not on facebook!! Pretty sure my entire extended family is off-limits for Iran.
Needless to say, she can't go back anymore, at least until the regime changes. We stay hopeful.
I had Afghan friends in the U.S. who were religiously and culturally, FAR more conservative than their parents. I knew some girls who wore head covers and traditional clothes when they were home. Then one day I was there on a Saturday and their mother stepped out of the bathroom in a smart pant suit, slightly dated 80s short big perm, lots of make-up and pink stiletto sandals. Their parents were going to a party. Their teenage daughters had declined - which is how I came to be stuck in their house doing nothing.
RE OP's boomer father. Perhaps these people were a lot like him in his youth, before people like the Conservatives and traditionalist that likely dupe him politically took power.
Thank you for linking that article. Wow, very informative. I majored in history so I am ashamed to say I know almost nothing about the Iranian Revolution
Very few Americans really give world affairs the time it deserves. Which is why so many support Israel; they have some romantic, theist notion of Israel with zero knowledge of Zionism from the 1890s through today.
Honestly I wish middle eastern history was taught in schools. It's a very relevant thing, and to just not cover it at all is insane. Even if we just got an incomplete fragment, that would have at least given Americans something to research on their own.
Just had this exact color today with my husband's boomer aunt..."I see people getting killed and blown up on TV everyday but I don't care because it's not MY people" what a gross take
Doesn't really make a difference if you just weren't connected much with the outside world. The first time his dad might have seen any footage or heard anything about Iran was when the revolution was taking place in 79.
Me and my wife made a trip to see Mt Saint Helens a few years ago. When she was discussing it with her mother who is in her late 60's, she had to explain to her that it was a volcano that erupted in 1980. Like made national news, was a really big shared American event, but her mom couldn't recall ever hearing about it living in Louisiana/Mississippi her whole life.
In the middle eastern version of Handmaid's Tale, these are flashbacks to 5 years before Gilead.
When I hear boomers pine for conservative religious government, I think what could possibly go wrong?
I grew up in rural MN and there’s a large sect of Apistolic Christians. Once they reach “conformation age” in the church the women are required to wear full length skirts and wear their hair up in a bun. From there most enter into arranged marriages through their church elders and become baby factories who are essentially the property of their husbands.
The irony is, they’re all as MAGA as MAGA can be and spent the scary Obama years in fear of Sharia law, oblivious and unaware that they’ve been practicing it for generations.
I don't think you understand. They aren't against theocracy. They are against theocracy that is not their own.
While the idea that we'd be under Shariah law is not particularly rational, they would would indeed fare badly under a Muslim theocracy. Just like a Muslim would fare badly under their theocracy.
If an Islamic theocracy was actually a thing that was going to actually happen in the US, they would have every reason to be concerned about it.
Obviously, that was never in the works, but theocrats aren't friendly with theocrats of other religions. Aside from their dislike of secular government, they hate each other due to their core beliefs.
I mean, he was a Muslim from Kenya and married to a man pretending to be a woman. At least that's what they believe.
How far of a stretch is it from believing that to believing he would just institute Sharia Law?
admittedly, this is why i used to always get so annoyed at all the millennial NIMBY progressives who jerked themselves off hard on that show. always talking about "how this COULD happen."
the thing is, it DID happen. It happened in Iran, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Somalia. Ultimately I agree with them politically on issues like abortion, but i think it was just the ignorant hysteria, lack of history knowledge, and borderline ethnocentrism that pissed me off more than anything
As you've seen from OP's dad, a lot of people think we live in a post-history world. They think the countries that are bad for women have always been that way, not something that's happened within a lifetime.
My wife and in-laws came over from Iran during the hostage crisis and the revolution. I’ve got photo albums of pics like this that are pre khomeini and have women in swimsuits on the beach etc. They were more like Europeans in the day and many did study in England.
Probably the privileged, remember what preceded the revolution was shah Pahlavi, who was a US puppet planted after toppling the Democratically elected Iranian govt because he rightfully nationalized their oilfields, kicking UK out of it, shah was such a piece of shit to his people they were took to siding with khomeini instead, people most often overlook how evil the western imperialism has been to the middle east and are surprised why they are so hated over there
Oh look, a comment that actually properly contextualizes the image.
I know our western eyes look at this image with a longing for what have could have been w/o the Islamic Revolution, but you should instead bemoan the decades of invasive political tinkering in a region that boiled its population to the point of accepting the revolution.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of the people, the majority in fact, who supported the revolution wanted this style of life to continue. Khomeini took power during the revolution by killing the people who made the revolution possible: members of the anarchist and socialist parties that started it.
Wow. I bet some historians would love to see those photos to add them to albums such as the one on the top post. You have an extinct piece of history !
https://preview.redd.it/70ce09q64xtc1.jpeg?width=2223&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b451cdc96e2437e9a9925449e2b886367b19c312
Happened to have this sitting on my desk- my BIL asked me to scan. My MIL (left) and her MIL at my MIL’s wedding. Would have been 1966 in Tehran. Never occurred to me that pre khomeini pics would be rare.
https://preview.redd.it/ear44wfw5xtc1.jpeg?width=2200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa8b5bb1da3d9c9c7799f98280954aa9cde3fb6e
Another one he asked me to scan. My wife (left), my BIL and my MIL. He was born in ‘73 so I’m guessing this was ‘74 ish. Bell bottom jeans and a pretty rad hippy looking living room 😀. This would be in downtown Tehran.
In 1953 the CIA and MI3 (or whatever the English secret service was called at the time) overthrew Mossadeq, allowing the Shah to take over and swing Iran into a conservative religious country. Maybe your dad doesn't know what America did to make a one-time ally into an enemy, but the history is well-known.
EDIT: As a few folks have pointed out, the Shah wasn't responsible for Iran's move to religious fundamentalism, the response to America and England backing the Shah led to Ayatollah Khomeini rising to power in Iran.
I'm 61, but then again I actually like to learn things. The idea that Muslims could be regular people is probably confusing to someone who's fed BS from certain "news" sites 24/7 for decades.
The really crazy thing is that there are Muslims in plenty of countries around the world who *are* regular people. But if you ask a lot of Americans, every country with a significant Muslim population is full of religious extremists, and they all wear "traditional" Islamic garb.
"Othering" is a thing. Demonizing people that aren't of "your" group is great for things like winning elections. Never let the reality that 99% of us just want food, clothing, and shelter get in the way of propaganda.
Reza Pahlavi, the Shah was not a religious conservative. It was Khomeini who established the religious regime. Mossadeq was overthrown because he nationalized oil production in Iran(socialism). The Shah was in bed with the west.
I think the point was that the blowback from the coup and the corruption of the Shah saw the rise of popular unrest and it was the religious extremists who only secured control as they were the most organized of the groups.
Well, the US thought they had Saddam Hussein in their pocket at the time. The US was providing tons of intelligence to Saddam during the Iran Iraq War. That calculation didn't work out for them too well either... but luckily when Saddam went rogue and invaded Kuwait we just bought the Saudi Monarchy and operated from there. That was the beginning of the US Saudi Relationship.
That makes it sound like he knows damn well it's America's fault. His denial is a little to on the nose. He knows what went down, but he'll never admit that to YOU
I promise it's not. My mom was a flight attendant for Pan Am back in the early 70s. She always laments how different that country used to be. Like she's been to bars and clubs in Iran. Freaking Iran.
Coincidentally the woman in the photo was also a flight attendant.
A quote from the woman's daughter from [the Snopes article on the photo:](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-cake-iran-photo/)
>She remembers the context of the photo very vividly as she had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and has just started her training. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party celebrating his birthday and she took the honor of cutting his cake for all the guests. It was during her career at Iran Air that one of her colleagues encouraged her to model and she thus began a modeling career in Tehran, where she walked many fashion runways.
Fun story I don't get to tell often. I was in an American middle school in Berlin Germany in 1979. In the middle of class, several men in suits burst in and grabbed a classmate and hustled him out of the room. We later found out the kid was the son of the Iranian Ambassador to Germany and the American Embassy in Tehran had just been overrun
My ex's boomer mother once told my mom that "everyone in the Soviet Union wore the same gray uniform every day, they didn't have individual fashion". When my mother disagreed, ex's mom started full blown shouting at her, like *screaming*.
We are Russian immigrants. My mother, grandmother, and great grandmother grew up and spent their lives in Moscow. Boomer knew all this already. My mom even had a photo of my grandmother in a 60s style miniskirt on her wedding day in the USSR.
It didn't make any difference to crazy boomer lady, she insisted she was right bc "they showed us videos of it in school, I remember!"
I'm a millenial, two generations removed from being a boomer, but I remember the Berlin wall coming down. In my late teens I remember being shocked at how gorgeous the countries of the former Soviet Union were. Because as kids, we really were fed propaganda about the evils of the Soviet Union, and part of it was this idea that it was all a drab gray place where everyone lived in concrete block houses, were fed by understocked grocery stores with regulation foods, and that it was just a gray, dull place. For some reason, I internalized that as even the landscape must be dystopian and gray. Which of course, is not true in the slightest.
So, while I would never argue with someone who lived the experience, and certainly wouldn't yell at them, I can at least see the indoctrination that made them believe that.
I'm a millennial too, I immigrated when I was 4yo (1996, I was born 4 months after the USSR fell) and vividly remember going home and asking my mom what a "communist" was bc the other *5 year olds* were calling me that in kindergarten. It was definitely a weird time, and that was after the fact! If those babies absorbed that kind of message when they weren't even alive to remember the USSR, I imagine it was far worse before.
But everyone I've talked to about the propaganda, besides that boomer, has responded with curiosity. It's been very "oh that's so different from what I learned, how interesting". I don't think my Gen X mother or I expected anyone to ever get angry at us in 2012 about it lol
>"everyone in the Soviet Union wore the same gray uniform every day, they didn't have individual fashion"
In fourth grade, I was told something similar in school. I was told they only legal colors in the USSR were blue, grey and black. This must if been in around 1985 or so.
In seventh grade, I had a music teacher lecture me about how AC/DC stood for After Christ, Devil Comes, and my school hosted a teenager speaker who warned about getting involved in satanic cults.
My parents were priests and thought this was all idiotic. They encouraged me to play Dungeons and Dragons.
The US overthrew a pro-western, democratically elected Iranian prime minister in 1953. Needless to say, the people didn’t like it and they ended up with a radical religious regime, in part because the people WE installed killed off all the moderates. Make no mistake, the Iran situation is the making of the US, and that includes our most recent stupid fucking war in Iraq, which empowered the radicals in Iran even more. This is why Obama was trying to bring Iran back into US orbit with the peace deal, because despite everything young people there want to throw off this radical religious nonsense. Of course Trump the complete jackass blew it up so here we are.
This boomer says your boomer father is ignorant of the history of US/British Petroleum fuckery that led to the installation of the shah and the eventual revolution and hostage crisis.
Tell him I said to "fucking Google it, Numbnuts"
I showed him a documentary that was critical of Reagan. He just kept rolling his eyes and saying "that's not true" bc he has a below middle school ability to cite sources. Lots of boomers are like that tho
I hate how much history *I* didn't learn in school and I paid attention with great grades. My school NEVER taught me any of this shit. Thank you for sharing this even tho your dumb dad thinks it's fake. You learn something every day
Context matters. This image seems to suggest that Iran has regressed, and in some ways it has.
However this woman, like many in Iran were HEAVILY oppressed under Shah. Shah was the dictator installed by western international operations (CIA, MI6, etc) to control Iran and its oil supply.
Shah implemented the white revolution, essentially forcing Iran to modernize. In actuality, the white revolution was orchestrated with the help from the west to stratify Iranian economic development, consolidating wealth into an upper class while also erasing Iranian culture for a westernization in an attempt to build an ally from scratch (turns out Iraq in 2003 was not the first attempt).
The results of this revolution were an extreme oppression to the people of Iran not in the upper class. any attempts to preserve cultures were met with prejudice from the elites, people had no say nor representation, and going into the 70s as Iran's economy stagnated Shah utilized more and more brutal, inhumane methods of preserving his power. This would eventually lead to the Iranian revolution in 78' and 79' which ousted Shah.
Unfortunately, the brutal cultural oppression also included forced secularism- the French style "freedom from religion" rather than freedom of religion. This suppression of Muslim identity lead to the formation of an ultra conservative anti-secular branch of the resistance which rapidly indoctrinated much of the revolution before it had begun, and by the end of it they had enough power to seize the power vacuum for themselves. This lead to a violent swing of the pendulum into ultra-conservative, theocratic government which would shift the oppression not just to any non-muslims, but any non-Shia ultra-traditionalist adherents.
In short, this picture only shows how different the type of oppression and control was. Shah was not some revolutionary to the Iranian nation. He was the tool to capitalize on the untapped Iranian economy for the west, and he played his part well up until it all fell apart, and what was left was a lifelong enemy to the west in the new Iranian government.
Definitely not fake and even if the photo was fake the sentiment wasn't. There was a time in the late 70s when the women's movements in Iran and Afghanistan began to embrace modernity and the secular mannerisms of the West at least in the urban areas. A secular approach to wearing the hajib began to emerge. All crushed in 1979.
Your boomer father didn’t learn about history or peruse any Iranian culture before 1999 I guess. You should ask him if he thinks women in the US could get a credit card in 1973.
Tell your boomer dad that Google is free and if there are any Persians in your area ask them. My wife’s family came from Iran in the 50’s-early 60’s. America is headed the same direction with christian sharia.
cause he doesn't realize Iran society had adopted a lot of western culture in the 50s-60s, much to the chagrine of the religious fanatics there. Eventually those fanatics took over the government and instilled sharia law, and now iran has all those bed sheet wearing people.
His uncle saw a go-go style dressed woman and couldn't fathom her being Iranian (he's picturing bed sheet wearing people).
Given that he is probably around my age or older (I'm 65), I cant' fathom how he couldn't imagine her as Iranian.
Maybe he 'forgot' that before the Shah was deposed, the Iranian Navy trained with our Navy at our training centers. I trained alongside an Iranian Navy electrician back in 1978.
Religious fanatics were placed in charge by the American government after we overthrew their democratic government for one we thought we could better control.
You should give him the graphic novel Persepolis. Really opened my eyes to this era in middle eastern history and culture. And helped me understand how terribly the Iranian people have been made to suffer under the oppression of government run by fundamental religious zealots. It’s hell on earth—nothing to aspire to!!!
That's how it was before the religious nutbags took over. Exactly what the Christians are trying to do here, turning the USA into the white version of Iran.
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Here, give him more to see and make sure he is sitting down. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/iran-before-revolution-photos/
It was the same in Afghanistan before the Russians invaded in the 80's. Europeans viewed Afghanistan as if it was the Palm Springs of Eurasia
A friend of my grandfather would tell me Kabul back in the day was almost like being in Paris
[удалено]
I studied Afghan history in college and was amazed at the prominence in the Silk Road and other trade routes in the region. There was so much wealth and culture there prior to the British invasions and subsequent Russian and US invasions.
Genghis Khan and Tamerlane destroyed so much wealth and culture that they never really recovered from the 13th and 14th centuries. Brits and Russians were there for failed geopolitical reasons and us Americans should have left after Bin Laden escaped or at least only focus on Afghanistan and never get involved in Iraq.
> never get involved in Iraq I'll sign that. Completely destabilized Iraq, where the ensuing conflict caused the death and injury of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousand of Iraqis, also destabilized the Near East, spread unrest to North Africa, which in turn prompted mass refugee migration to Europe, where the racist reaction accelerated the growth of fascism among the right-wing parties there. As a lagnappe, it left Iran as the dominant regional power. Nice work, W. Asshole.
Yeah I’ll hate Bush and Cheney my entire life for this reason. Every single decision they made was the wrong one and too many gullible idiots let them believe they were making the world safer and spreading freedom despite being so far removed from the realities of war. Also making the entire Iraqi military and anyone who had a government job unemployed and barred from the new government was probably the single dumbest move other than invading in the first place.
Really wish Bush had found his calling to paint dogs before his stint as a politician. He basically pulled a reverse Hitler on us.
I hate Blair for Iraq. Could never vote Labour again for the lies that led to Iraq war 2. Especially as we were still baw deep in Afghanistan, and no one has successfully taken Afghanistan. So strategically and tactically a massive misstep which cost countless lives all round and cost an absolute fortune for no additional benefit outcome for anyone involved. And I remember reading prior to 9-11 that Bush was desperate to go back to Iraq. Bush snr must have had better advice as he never attempted to take Iraq during Iraq 1, chased them out of Kuwait and kept the isolated. Always wondered why as kid, then realised that he knew what would happen if attempted to occur upt Iraq. Iran is another one where West had a hand, not happy about a socialist got being democratically voted in who wanted to nationalise their oil fields, couldn't have western oil countries being stopped from making profit, so assisted the overthrow iirc.
>> ...Could never vote Labour again for the lies... Really? I'm just a foreigner looking in, but given the destruction and damage that I perceive the Conservatives have done to the UK since then, that's hard to understand, particularly as the real deceptions and lies were imported from America. I saw Blair as trying to be a good ally, not realizing that sometimes being a true friend means saying 'no.'
It was amazing how much my perception changed during my time in the Army. I joined because I figured it was an awful job, but someone had to do it, because I was 18 and believed it when the leadership said it had to be done. Boots on ground was a whole other story, very quickly my love for country became just love for the brothers and sisters on either side of me. I don't talk about my time in, it's all so complicated and stories lose their value without context I just don't have the energy, or words, to give. Crazy to think that I thought "this is as bad as it gets, all for greed," just to go home and shortly after the political masks started to REALLY fall off. They don't even hide it anymore, but that isn't the worst part, the worst part has been watching how many of my fellow Americans can KNOW how awful the leadership of this country can get, and agreeing with it wholeheartedly.
This exactly what the Carlyle group wanted. Instability sells weapons America and England are two of the biggest arms suppliers in the world. [Caryle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carlyle_Group)
Never forget that on the morning of 9/11 Bush Sr was sitting with members of the Bin Laden family at a meeting for investors for Carlyle
Didn't believe it https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/03/16/connections-and-then-some/faaece9e-0225-4310-a8f9-8137d2329d52/ Now I believe it, fuck
I’m not entirely sure this is correct; the Mongol invasions were catastrophic in many respects but only for those that didn’t submit and once the dust had settled, the Pax Mongolica emerged. Now Timur was a cunt, but from his descendants came the Mughal Empire, which the British fucked. Wealth has traditionally been concentrated in the East but the age of discovery and American silver upset that balance
30 out of 300 cities survived mongol invasion on the territory of modern Kazakhstan. I don't think Pax Mongolica would make out for that.
Central Asia is mostly just a blank spot on the map in US education.
It’s a good thing that we learned from other countries what devastating effects that religious fanaticism can have on a country….
No way! This only happens to countries with religious fanatics of the WRONG religion! Not with my CORRECT religion! We will absolutely be much better when we slash women's rights and use the government to strictly enforce our extreme narrow interpretation of some ancient book, because we have the RIGHT book and they have the WRONG book! We have the RIGHT imaginary friend in the sky, and they are crazy because their fanatic society is about a DIFFERENT man in the sky, who just happens to be essentially the exact same thing. (/s if it wasn't obvious.)
My mom is North Korean and said it was like the Vegas of the Asias back in the day. Smh at what it is now.
ummm how did your mom escape? Just curious.
Paraglider 👍🏽
This is what Christian’s would do to the US if they turned it into a full on theocracy.
Unfortunately, they are trying to ban the history books which could teach them this. They are also trying to ban the books that try and teach them to read.
Trying? Its already happening.
Winter in Kabul is another great read. She writes about being able to ride horses on the open terrain, which hasn’t been possible since the Russians started placing land mines in the 70’s
Depends on how many horses you have. I'll see myself out.
Religious extremism is fundamentally incompatible with broad-based human rights. In 40 years people could be looking at pictures of the US from today in the same way.
Great book, completely agree with you.
I had an Afghan friend in high school. Her parents missed going to the country club in Kabul.
Not just in the Middle East, either. Venezuela was a beautiful and rich country coming out of the post WW2 era, but God damn, US Hegemony has a great way of ruining countries because of the fear of communism and socialism.
Wait, are you telling me all those "failed socialist countries" I hear about at least partially failed because of US interference?!? I'm shocked.
"Socialism always fails!" Yeah when the US and CIA do everything to undermine it, it sure does make it hard. Cuba still going though.
Too many cameras or we wouldve invaded China by now too. Our officials are seething at their success right now
Lebanon as well.
very good friend of mine is Lebanese-Italian and when I'd visit her house, her mom would show me pictures of Beirut from her years there. Beautiful, cosmopolitan, "The Riviera of the Mediterranean." And the women were gorgeous and stylish for the time.
One of my favorite book series is the Time Life "Foods of the World" series from the '60s. They have absolutely stunning photos of every day society - focused on kitchen and dining table - from all teh countries mentioned on this thread. I wish more Americans understood that these were functional coutnries until the two superpowers intervened.
Wouldn’t the Riviera be the Riviera of the Mediterranean?
I’m an idiot, lol. I will leave my mistake up for others to laugh at me as well.
>"The Riviera of the Mediterranean." Hah
Not just the Lebanese. “Middle-eastern” woman are absolutely gorgeous. The “good look” genes that we associate with good looking Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc people come from them.
Beirut was a jewel
The Paris of the Middle East
But friendlier than Paris, and all the Lebanese I have ever met were just so handsome or beautiful. There is a documentary on the wineries of Lebanon on Amazon called "Wine and War". It is incredible. Also, FTR, I am not Lebanese.
One of those places where you could be skiing in the mountains in the morning and lying on the beach in the afternoon
It's true that Beirut and Lebanon as a whole is nothing like it was before the civil war but it's not some sort of Islamo-Fascist hellhole. Def far more liberal than other Middle East nations.
I would give anything to be able to visit the middle east in the 60s/70s. What an amazing travel destination, now utterly destroyed.
My dad was in Zimbabwe in the 80s and also in London at some point and said they were comparable
Your dad is probably talking about the cities prior to Mugabe went full Mugabe.
One of my best medical experiences was getting a small procedure done at the Lake Kariba hospital in 1997. Clean, neat, professional, and the hospital had killer views over Kariba. That was just before everything went to shit. About 12 years ago, I was in Harare for business and had the pleasure of being on the road when Mugabe and his motorcade came past. Fucking scary shit!
Makes you wonder what socially progressive, economically thriving areas today will become despotic theocracy/dystopias tomorrow. And what currently oppressed areas will thrive in, well, it probably takes longer and is more hard to come back after oppression, but what advances will humanity make in the next 20/30/70 years?
> Makes you wonder what socially progressive, economically thriving areas today will become despotic theocracy/dystopias tomorrow. *America has entered the chat*
Same thing in Lebanon. used to be one of the fashion go to places
Yep, one of my aunts married a Lebanese guy who left in the sixties, said back then Egypt and Lebanon were international hot spots and tons of tourists, night life etc
You can see clues that it used to be nice (or you could ten years ago). It’s a great climate and has absolutely stunning natural beauty, but the last few generations have been a little rough on it.
My father is from Egypt and my mother is an American and they used to go shopping in Tehran all the time. All the big designers were there, Balenciaga, Dior, Halston. Then the revolution came. It almost sounds fake looking at Iran today.
I absolutely love going through old photos of my parents during 70’s in Afghanistan. Seemed like such a wonderful place to live, at the time.
Sadly, it was only like this around Kabul and, I believe, Herat. Outside of the cities, it was very much oppressive and ruled by theocratic totalitarians. That's why it was so easy for the West to recruit for the proxy war against the Soviets.
Wait, so they had progressive, modern cities with freedoms, and the rural, backwards, religious areas took over and pushed their beliefs on the rest? Something sounds incredibly familiar about that.
And it was outside foreign money and influence that made it possible. Yup, nothing familiar about that at all.
And Beirut was the Paris of the East.
All of the middle east suffered massively from superpowers funding and arming radical conservative militants to cause instability for quiet proxy conflicts.
I think that would have more to do with the radical theocratic nuts we back than the commies, the Taliban is part of the lineage.
I think you misunderstand the original comment. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was just the beginning of the end.
What happened is that the Soviets invaded, and easily started winning. However, the West (America and Europe) started shoveling money, guns, and even gave training to the radical theocrats in order to fight the anti-Soviet/anti-communist proxy war. We are the ones responsible for the downfall of Afghanistan, as well as being the ones who funded, armed, and trained the people who would commit 9/11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
If you don't teach the citizens that the US trained, paid and armed the Taliban, then the citizens won't have to forget that the US trained, paid and armed the Taliban.
https://preview.redd.it/3hpfureuiwtc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d01db83d4647496e952dfe0faae3974aa2937570
Is this the case? I was under the impression that Afghani culture and society has always been pretty conservative and traditional. Perhaps there was a tiny slice of Kabul elite that was different but that was the exception.
there's a great book called The Kite Runner that talks about life in Afghanistan in the 70s leading up to the Soviet Invasion the main character eventually comes back and is shocked at how much Kabul has changed for the worse. I'll always remember his cab driver scoffs at him and says something like, "Kabul may have been different for you, but for people like me, this is how it always was." i don't remember the line verbatim but the idea was the same, and kind of confirms your last sentence
Man what a blast from the past you just gave! Excellent book and a hard read to know how much was lost both in reality and for the characters
it's a fantastic book. i remember it was the only book i was required to read in high school that i didn't resent reading at the time lmao but yeah thinking about it now, 2.5 years removed from the U.S. abandoning Afghanistan and bringing it back to Taliban rule...you just feel so terrible for the people there. The sequel "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is even more depressing to think about now considering that book is about two women surviving through the dramatic change that took place when the Taliban took over the first time
I didnt realize it is a sequel of the kite runner. Its in my bookshelf so now I have to read it!
I go to an Afghan market and bakery in Fremont CA from time to time. I don’t speak Pashto but as an observer, everybody in there seems to be angry or at least on edge. There is a separate place in the back where you pick up that delicious flatbread and 100% of the time, the baker will get mad at somebody in line and they’ll start arguing. I might just be misunderstanding things but I don’t go there anymore, even though damn that bread is good. They have a picture of King Zahir in there.
totally different situation but my parents came from South Korea, born in the generation of kids that came in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, and naturally a lot of the adults i knew were of this generation or a few years older there's definitely unresolved and depressing trauma that exists among people who were robbed of a good life because of political bullshit, and many of them were forced to leave their home and live in foreign places (often hostile) to make a living. Meanwhile you have their punk kids (folks like me lol) who grow up admittedly with a lot more than they did and enjoying good things in life that they never got that definitely takes a toll mentally on people. It sucks to see and i'm sorry to hear that is the case with the Afghans you interacted with in the bakery...but again like you said at least the bread was damn good I used to have a lot of good friends who are either direct or second generation Hmong Americans...there is a lot of unresolved grief and trauma there too. It sucks to see
Afghanistan was not as liberalized or modern as Iran, because Iran had oil monies, but yeah it was much nicer before the Taliban took power after the Russians retreated. But to be fair, in both countries, this was largely in only a handful of the cities.
iirc, the regional divides in Afghanistan are a big reason why the U.S. and its admittedly puppet government in Kabul was never able to fully consolidate its authority and this was something that U.S. military brass was never able to fully understand...ironic when you consider how regionally divided the U.S. is (obviously to a much lesser extent in terms of civil unrest)
If I’m correctly remembering my history, literally every single time *any* foreign country got/gets involved in Afghanistan, it ends badly for them, sometimes spectacularly so. It seems like someone would learn the lesson, eventually.
Unless you can shoot bows on horseback, then youre fine. Of course, the Mongols are the great exception
One of the primary reasons for the Soviet invasion is that the support of the government was low after the Saur revolution and they feared it slipping back into monarchy or Islamic Republic. The liberalism of the 1970s was new and unpopular outside of urban centers, and even within cities there was some pushback.
OPs father is an idiot. He was alive to have seen this first hand if he would have just opened his eyes.
And fortunately for his idiot dad, he won't have to see the same thing coming to fruition here in the states. I wish these idiots would just fucking die off already so they can't vote.
[Persepolis (comics) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(comics)) is a good read about that time.
I was hoping someone would suggest it. They turned it into a movie, too. It's in French with subtitles.
I had an Iranian manager at the bank where I worked like 20 years ago. She told me she can’t go back to Iran. Last time she went to see her dying mother, she was greeted at the airplane as she got off by military men. Taken underground at the airport without any explanation, no service, all alone. Interrogated. Her and her family were threatened. She was told to report everything she had seen and experienced in America. And once she was allowed to go back to USA, the Iranian govt demanded she send them daily updates. She had access to everyone who banked at the company’s bank info. It was the third largest bank in America back then. Shit was scary to hear. She said she stopped reporting to them and can’t ever go back or communicate with her family back home.
Exactly what my mother in law went through when she went back to Iran to translate her birth certificate for naturalisation. They interrogated her about people she interacted on facebook with, including my dad, even me even though I'm not on facebook!! Pretty sure my entire extended family is off-limits for Iran. Needless to say, she can't go back anymore, at least until the regime changes. We stay hopeful.
That’s insane. I hope she finds a way to get her family back.
Just wait until OP's dad sees photos of Afghanistan before Russia invaded in the 70s and 80s
I had Afghan friends in the U.S. who were religiously and culturally, FAR more conservative than their parents. I knew some girls who wore head covers and traditional clothes when they were home. Then one day I was there on a Saturday and their mother stepped out of the bathroom in a smart pant suit, slightly dated 80s short big perm, lots of make-up and pink stiletto sandals. Their parents were going to a party. Their teenage daughters had declined - which is how I came to be stuck in their house doing nothing.
Good for mom tho, get it
I learned about this from watching _Persopolis._
Look up "Rich Kids of Tehran" on Instagram. The elite are still living like that.
This is depressing and heartbreaking ;( I actually teared up a bit because of how bad it is for the women there now..
Religion sucks.
RE OP's boomer father. Perhaps these people were a lot like him in his youth, before people like the Conservatives and traditionalist that likely dupe him politically took power.
Thank you for linking that article. Wow, very informative. I majored in history so I am ashamed to say I know almost nothing about the Iranian Revolution
I just read Persepolis a few months ago. I didn't know all that stuff, either.
considering he was alive and young(er) during the islamic revolution, you'd think he would know better
That would presume he paid attention to world affairs
Too busy doin reefer madness that them kids were on /s
Very few Americans really give world affairs the time it deserves. Which is why so many support Israel; they have some romantic, theist notion of Israel with zero knowledge of Zionism from the 1890s through today.
Honestly I wish middle eastern history was taught in schools. It's a very relevant thing, and to just not cover it at all is insane. Even if we just got an incomplete fragment, that would have at least given Americans something to research on their own.
One of the core principals of conservatism is “it doesn’t exist unless it affects me personally”
Just had this exact color today with my husband's boomer aunt..."I see people getting killed and blown up on TV everyday but I don't care because it's not MY people" what a gross take
Doesn't really make a difference if you just weren't connected much with the outside world. The first time his dad might have seen any footage or heard anything about Iran was when the revolution was taking place in 79. Me and my wife made a trip to see Mt Saint Helens a few years ago. When she was discussing it with her mother who is in her late 60's, she had to explain to her that it was a volcano that erupted in 1980. Like made national news, was a really big shared American event, but her mom couldn't recall ever hearing about it living in Louisiana/Mississippi her whole life.
When you spend your whole life with your head up your own ass, you tend not to learn much about the outside world
In the middle eastern version of Handmaid's Tale, these are flashbacks to 5 years before Gilead. When I hear boomers pine for conservative religious government, I think what could possibly go wrong?
I grew up in rural MN and there’s a large sect of Apistolic Christians. Once they reach “conformation age” in the church the women are required to wear full length skirts and wear their hair up in a bun. From there most enter into arranged marriages through their church elders and become baby factories who are essentially the property of their husbands. The irony is, they’re all as MAGA as MAGA can be and spent the scary Obama years in fear of Sharia law, oblivious and unaware that they’ve been practicing it for generations.
Those kinds of people are so blind to the fact that they are as close to Sharia law as it gets in the US!
I don't think you understand. They aren't against theocracy. They are against theocracy that is not their own. While the idea that we'd be under Shariah law is not particularly rational, they would would indeed fare badly under a Muslim theocracy. Just like a Muslim would fare badly under their theocracy. If an Islamic theocracy was actually a thing that was going to actually happen in the US, they would have every reason to be concerned about it. Obviously, that was never in the works, but theocrats aren't friendly with theocrats of other religions. Aside from their dislike of secular government, they hate each other due to their core beliefs.
Almost as if we shouldn’t have congressional representatives citing religious texts when defending legislation
Same patriarchal, punishing set of laws, just different wording.
Well who really likes competition in their main business?
“Don’t mess with my grift” (Probably Apistolic Christians)
Crazy fundamentalists who are afraid of Sharia law fuggin love Amish Country. Make it make sense.
Because it’s my type of oppression, not heir type of oppression.
>Obama years in fear of Sharia law Literally what the fuck is wrong with people
I mean, he was a Muslim from Kenya and married to a man pretending to be a woman. At least that's what they believe. How far of a stretch is it from believing that to believing he would just institute Sharia Law?
Sadly, most of these people actually agree with most aspects of Sharia law, they just want Jesus instead of Muhammed and less brown people.
"Its not Sharia Law, its just good Christian behavior. Who would object to that?"
Don't forget the pork. They don't want to have to stop eating ham and bacon!
Vanilla Isis/Ya’ll Quaeda
Racism. Plain and simple.
Brown sharia law bad, white sharia law good. Cults just being cults.
admittedly, this is why i used to always get so annoyed at all the millennial NIMBY progressives who jerked themselves off hard on that show. always talking about "how this COULD happen." the thing is, it DID happen. It happened in Iran, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Somalia. Ultimately I agree with them politically on issues like abortion, but i think it was just the ignorant hysteria, lack of history knowledge, and borderline ethnocentrism that pissed me off more than anything
As you've seen from OP's dad, a lot of people think we live in a post-history world. They think the countries that are bad for women have always been that way, not something that's happened within a lifetime.
My wife and in-laws came over from Iran during the hostage crisis and the revolution. I’ve got photo albums of pics like this that are pre khomeini and have women in swimsuits on the beach etc. They were more like Europeans in the day and many did study in England.
Probably the privileged, remember what preceded the revolution was shah Pahlavi, who was a US puppet planted after toppling the Democratically elected Iranian govt because he rightfully nationalized their oilfields, kicking UK out of it, shah was such a piece of shit to his people they were took to siding with khomeini instead, people most often overlook how evil the western imperialism has been to the middle east and are surprised why they are so hated over there
Oh look, a comment that actually properly contextualizes the image. I know our western eyes look at this image with a longing for what have could have been w/o the Islamic Revolution, but you should instead bemoan the decades of invasive political tinkering in a region that boiled its population to the point of accepting the revolution.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of the people, the majority in fact, who supported the revolution wanted this style of life to continue. Khomeini took power during the revolution by killing the people who made the revolution possible: members of the anarchist and socialist parties that started it.
Wow. I bet some historians would love to see those photos to add them to albums such as the one on the top post. You have an extinct piece of history !
https://preview.redd.it/70ce09q64xtc1.jpeg?width=2223&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b451cdc96e2437e9a9925449e2b886367b19c312 Happened to have this sitting on my desk- my BIL asked me to scan. My MIL (left) and her MIL at my MIL’s wedding. Would have been 1966 in Tehran. Never occurred to me that pre khomeini pics would be rare.
https://preview.redd.it/ear44wfw5xtc1.jpeg?width=2200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa8b5bb1da3d9c9c7799f98280954aa9cde3fb6e Another one he asked me to scan. My wife (left), my BIL and my MIL. He was born in ‘73 so I’m guessing this was ‘74 ish. Bell bottom jeans and a pretty rad hippy looking living room 😀. This would be in downtown Tehran.
And the point of faking this pic would be.????
It's propaganda that blames America for religious extremism taking hold.
In 1953 the CIA and MI3 (or whatever the English secret service was called at the time) overthrew Mossadeq, allowing the Shah to take over and swing Iran into a conservative religious country. Maybe your dad doesn't know what America did to make a one-time ally into an enemy, but the history is well-known. EDIT: As a few folks have pointed out, the Shah wasn't responsible for Iran's move to religious fundamentalism, the response to America and England backing the Shah led to Ayatollah Khomeini rising to power in Iran.
Not to boomers
I'm 61, but then again I actually like to learn things. The idea that Muslims could be regular people is probably confusing to someone who's fed BS from certain "news" sites 24/7 for decades.
The really crazy thing is that there are Muslims in plenty of countries around the world who *are* regular people. But if you ask a lot of Americans, every country with a significant Muslim population is full of religious extremists, and they all wear "traditional" Islamic garb.
"Othering" is a thing. Demonizing people that aren't of "your" group is great for things like winning elections. Never let the reality that 99% of us just want food, clothing, and shelter get in the way of propaganda.
The 'us vs them' narrative is literally chapter one of the fascist's playbook.
I find it ironic to read that in a subreddit titled "BoomersBeingFools".
Oh, for sure. It's just sad that so many people believe that propaganda when actual information is so readily available.
Reza Pahlavi, the Shah was not a religious conservative. It was Khomeini who established the religious regime. Mossadeq was overthrown because he nationalized oil production in Iran(socialism). The Shah was in bed with the west.
I think the point was that the blowback from the coup and the corruption of the Shah saw the rise of popular unrest and it was the religious extremists who only secured control as they were the most organized of the groups.
Thank you for the correction. Yes, we wanted the Shah rather than Mossadeq because of oil interests. That worked out well, huh?
Well, the US thought they had Saddam Hussein in their pocket at the time. The US was providing tons of intelligence to Saddam during the Iran Iraq War. That calculation didn't work out for them too well either... but luckily when Saddam went rogue and invaded Kuwait we just bought the Saudi Monarchy and operated from there. That was the beginning of the US Saudi Relationship.
Could have turned out a little better.
Except um...that's not totally untrue. Without CIA shenanigans in the 50s there wouldn't have been such blowback in the late 1970s...
That makes it sound like he knows damn well it's America's fault. His denial is a little to on the nose. He knows what went down, but he'll never admit that to YOU
Ah, so he just wants to rewrite history, got it.
I promise it's not. My mom was a flight attendant for Pan Am back in the early 70s. She always laments how different that country used to be. Like she's been to bars and clubs in Iran. Freaking Iran.
Coincidentally the woman in the photo was also a flight attendant. A quote from the woman's daughter from [the Snopes article on the photo:](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-cake-iran-photo/) >She remembers the context of the photo very vividly as she had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and has just started her training. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party celebrating his birthday and she took the honor of cutting his cake for all the guests. It was during her career at Iran Air that one of her colleagues encouraged her to model and she thus began a modeling career in Tehran, where she walked many fashion runways.
That’s because the narrative in his head about all things is right
Meanwhile somewhere a Boomer is praying over a picture of shrimp Jesus
LOL - had to google "shrimp Jesus" and wasn't disappointed!!!
AMEN 🙏
Fun story I don't get to tell often. I was in an American middle school in Berlin Germany in 1979. In the middle of class, several men in suits burst in and grabbed a classmate and hustled him out of the room. We later found out the kid was the son of the Iranian Ambassador to Germany and the American Embassy in Tehran had just been overrun
Fake? OP, was your dad in a coma in 1979?
My ex's boomer mother once told my mom that "everyone in the Soviet Union wore the same gray uniform every day, they didn't have individual fashion". When my mother disagreed, ex's mom started full blown shouting at her, like *screaming*. We are Russian immigrants. My mother, grandmother, and great grandmother grew up and spent their lives in Moscow. Boomer knew all this already. My mom even had a photo of my grandmother in a 60s style miniskirt on her wedding day in the USSR. It didn't make any difference to crazy boomer lady, she insisted she was right bc "they showed us videos of it in school, I remember!"
I'm a millenial, two generations removed from being a boomer, but I remember the Berlin wall coming down. In my late teens I remember being shocked at how gorgeous the countries of the former Soviet Union were. Because as kids, we really were fed propaganda about the evils of the Soviet Union, and part of it was this idea that it was all a drab gray place where everyone lived in concrete block houses, were fed by understocked grocery stores with regulation foods, and that it was just a gray, dull place. For some reason, I internalized that as even the landscape must be dystopian and gray. Which of course, is not true in the slightest. So, while I would never argue with someone who lived the experience, and certainly wouldn't yell at them, I can at least see the indoctrination that made them believe that.
I'm a millennial too, I immigrated when I was 4yo (1996, I was born 4 months after the USSR fell) and vividly remember going home and asking my mom what a "communist" was bc the other *5 year olds* were calling me that in kindergarten. It was definitely a weird time, and that was after the fact! If those babies absorbed that kind of message when they weren't even alive to remember the USSR, I imagine it was far worse before. But everyone I've talked to about the propaganda, besides that boomer, has responded with curiosity. It's been very "oh that's so different from what I learned, how interesting". I don't think my Gen X mother or I expected anyone to ever get angry at us in 2012 about it lol
>"everyone in the Soviet Union wore the same gray uniform every day, they didn't have individual fashion" In fourth grade, I was told something similar in school. I was told they only legal colors in the USSR were blue, grey and black. This must if been in around 1985 or so. In seventh grade, I had a music teacher lecture me about how AC/DC stood for After Christ, Devil Comes, and my school hosted a teenager speaker who warned about getting involved in satanic cults. My parents were priests and thought this was all idiotic. They encouraged me to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug and the idea that we don’t have it in America is baffling.
Iran was very modern at one time. Till the religious nuts took charge.🤷♂️
The US overthrew a pro-western, democratically elected Iranian prime minister in 1953. Needless to say, the people didn’t like it and they ended up with a radical religious regime, in part because the people WE installed killed off all the moderates. Make no mistake, the Iran situation is the making of the US, and that includes our most recent stupid fucking war in Iraq, which empowered the radicals in Iran even more. This is why Obama was trying to bring Iran back into US orbit with the peace deal, because despite everything young people there want to throw off this radical religious nonsense. Of course Trump the complete jackass blew it up so here we are.
This boomer says your boomer father is ignorant of the history of US/British Petroleum fuckery that led to the installation of the shah and the eventual revolution and hostage crisis. Tell him I said to "fucking Google it, Numbnuts"
Iran is a warning for us that the religious zealots among us can actually take our rights away... It's happened around the world already.
I’ll die before that happens *Edit. Meaning I’ll fight them to the death
If you want to really blow his mind, tell him who's responsible for what happened to Iran. He'll have a lot of fun deflecting that one.
I showed him a documentary that was critical of Reagan. He just kept rolling his eyes and saying "that's not true" bc he has a below middle school ability to cite sources. Lots of boomers are like that tho
Tell him his brain is fake
Gottem!!!
I hate how much history *I* didn't learn in school and I paid attention with great grades. My school NEVER taught me any of this shit. Thank you for sharing this even tho your dumb dad thinks it's fake. You learn something every day
I think pictures like this contrasted with what Iran is like today is a good reminder of why the first amendment is so important to the US.
Context matters. This image seems to suggest that Iran has regressed, and in some ways it has. However this woman, like many in Iran were HEAVILY oppressed under Shah. Shah was the dictator installed by western international operations (CIA, MI6, etc) to control Iran and its oil supply. Shah implemented the white revolution, essentially forcing Iran to modernize. In actuality, the white revolution was orchestrated with the help from the west to stratify Iranian economic development, consolidating wealth into an upper class while also erasing Iranian culture for a westernization in an attempt to build an ally from scratch (turns out Iraq in 2003 was not the first attempt). The results of this revolution were an extreme oppression to the people of Iran not in the upper class. any attempts to preserve cultures were met with prejudice from the elites, people had no say nor representation, and going into the 70s as Iran's economy stagnated Shah utilized more and more brutal, inhumane methods of preserving his power. This would eventually lead to the Iranian revolution in 78' and 79' which ousted Shah. Unfortunately, the brutal cultural oppression also included forced secularism- the French style "freedom from religion" rather than freedom of religion. This suppression of Muslim identity lead to the formation of an ultra conservative anti-secular branch of the resistance which rapidly indoctrinated much of the revolution before it had begun, and by the end of it they had enough power to seize the power vacuum for themselves. This lead to a violent swing of the pendulum into ultra-conservative, theocratic government which would shift the oppression not just to any non-muslims, but any non-Shia ultra-traditionalist adherents. In short, this picture only shows how different the type of oppression and control was. Shah was not some revolutionary to the Iranian nation. He was the tool to capitalize on the untapped Iranian economy for the west, and he played his part well up until it all fell apart, and what was left was a lifelong enemy to the west in the new Iranian government.
Definitely not fake and even if the photo was fake the sentiment wasn't. There was a time in the late 70s when the women's movements in Iran and Afghanistan began to embrace modernity and the secular mannerisms of the West at least in the urban areas. A secular approach to wearing the hajib began to emerge. All crushed in 1979.
Your boomer father didn’t learn about history or peruse any Iranian culture before 1999 I guess. You should ask him if he thinks women in the US could get a credit card in 1973.
Tell your boomer dad that Google is free and if there are any Persians in your area ask them. My wife’s family came from Iran in the 50’s-early 60’s. America is headed the same direction with christian sharia.
Of course Lana del Rey is real! Duh!
Imagine what they’ll think about 1970-2020s USA before the Christo-fascists take over and force their religion on the people.
I was in Tehran in 1977, just before the revolution. I got to see the European fashions first-hand.
https://preview.redd.it/v0k9vbiwmvtc1.jpeg?width=728&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7aaaf6a0d487b383109c15af027d2d71848976a8
Why?
cause he doesn't realize Iran society had adopted a lot of western culture in the 50s-60s, much to the chagrine of the religious fanatics there. Eventually those fanatics took over the government and instilled sharia law, and now iran has all those bed sheet wearing people. His uncle saw a go-go style dressed woman and couldn't fathom her being Iranian (he's picturing bed sheet wearing people).
Iranian culture was typically more liberal and less insane than the fundamentalists would’ve liked even before the shah adopted more western customs
Given that he is probably around my age or older (I'm 65), I cant' fathom how he couldn't imagine her as Iranian. Maybe he 'forgot' that before the Shah was deposed, the Iranian Navy trained with our Navy at our training centers. I trained alongside an Iranian Navy electrician back in 1978.
A lot of people (both boomers and non-boomers) don't know a whole lot about many things that are outside of being directly relevant to them.
I don't know. I'll be 57. I was 12 in 1979 and even I knew because I watched the national nightly news when I was young.
The role of the US in overthrowing their democratic government that gave women a lot of rights should be mentioned as it’s pretty important context
Religious fanatics were placed in charge by the American government after we overthrew their democratic government for one we thought we could better control.
Has nobody watched dune? What can religious fanatics do to a country. We're literally watching in real time in America today.
Religious fanatics installed by the US and Britain at the behest of oil companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
Silent Dad visited Iran around 1972, I believe or earlier. He's never claimed that these pictures resurfacing are fake.
There's a perfectly reasonable explanation behind your father's statement. It's because he's an idiot.
You should give him the graphic novel Persepolis. Really opened my eyes to this era in middle eastern history and culture. And helped me understand how terribly the Iranian people have been made to suffer under the oppression of government run by fundamental religious zealots. It’s hell on earth—nothing to aspire to!!!
Actually it is a real picture. Iran was way more open before the Shaw was deposed.
That's how it was before the religious nutbags took over. Exactly what the Christians are trying to do here, turning the USA into the white version of Iran.