You're still tilting at this windmill, JohntheOFM? Now you've added toppling a pro-Axis monarchy in 1941 as another reason wjy Iran is a mess…guess we shouldn't punch Nazis, now??
No, the "mess in Iran" is NOT primarily because of the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion OR the 1953 Mossadegh coup. Those events were real, involved foreign powers, and left scars—but they do not explain, much less excuse, the theocratic police state that has ruled Iran since 1979. Blaming them is a classic deflection that shifts responsibility from the Iranian revolutionaries who installed radical Twelver Shia clerical rule and from the regime that has brutalized its own people for nearly five decades.
Let's look at this step by step.
In August 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded neutral Iran (Operation Countenance). Reza Shah abdicated on 16 September 1941 and was exiled; his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took the throne. The Allies occupied the country until 1946, using it as the "Persian Corridor" to ship over 5 million tons of Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany.
The stated reasons were straightforward and tied to the existential war against Hitler:
* Secure Iranian oil fields (critical for the Allies).
* Open and protect the supply route to Stalin's armies after the German invasion of the USSR.
* Neutralize German influence. Reza Shah had welcomed German engineers and advisors for modernization projects (as a counterweight to longstanding British and Russian/Soviet meddling). He resisted Allied demands to fully expel ~3,000 German nationals, citing neutrality and ongoing infrastructure work.
Reza Shah was no ideological Nazi. He was a pragmatic nationalist who admired German efficiency and discipline as a "third force" to balance Britain and Russia. He declared neutrality and tried to play all sides. Public sentiment in Iran was often pro-German for the same anti-British, anti-Russian reasons—not because Iranians wanted to join the Holocaust or conquer Europe.
This was not a casual "topple the pro-Nazi regime" adventure. It occurred while Britain stood alone (then with the US and USSR) against a regime that had already conquered most of Europe and was committing industrialized genocide. The invasion was swift, with relatively low casualties on all sides. It disrupted Iran economically (inflation, food shortages, some famine in areas), but it also kept the oil flowing for the war effort and prevented a potential Axis foothold that could have threatened the Caucasus, India, or Allied supply lines.
After the war, the Allies largely withdrew. Iran regained full sovereignty, joined the United Nations, and hosted the 1943 Tehran Conference where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin affirmed Iranian independence. Mohammad Reza Shah continued (and expanded) his father's modernization project: infrastructure, education, military professionalization, and later the White Revolution reforms.
How does this 1941 event "explain" the 1979 theocracy or today's repression? It doesn't. It is a distant wartime episode in a global conflict against actual fascism. Blaming it for the Islamic Republic is like blaming the Treaty of Versailles solely for Hitler while ignoring the choices of German voters and elites in the 1930s. The causal chain is absurdly stretched. The Pahlavi state that emerged from 1941 pursued secular modernization for decades. The people who overthrew it in 1979 explicitly rejected that path in favor of clerical theocracy.
The 1941 invasion was ugly realpolitik in a world war. The 1979 revolution was a deliberate choice by Iranians—Islamists, leftists, and others—to install something far more total and enduringly destructive.
Now we get to your real favorite deflection – the 1953 Coup. The 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Operation Ajax) did involve CIA and MI6 support. Pro-Soviet Mossadegh had nationalized the British-controlled oil industry in 1951, leading to economic crisis, British embargo, and political chaos. The coup restored the Shah's power after a brief exile. Cold War realpolitik.
But even here, the narrative is oversimplified:
*Domestic Iranian actors played major roles: elements of the military, clergy (including Ayatollah Kashani, who broke with Mossadegh), bazaar merchants, and anti-communist forces.
*Mossadegh was a nationalist and a socialist who dissolved parliament, centralized power, and faced internal opposition.
*Post-coup Iran under the Shah delivered the White Revolution: land reform, women's suffrage and education gains, industrialization, and rising living standards for many (despite corruption, inequality, and SAVAK repression).
Crucially, in today's Islamic Republic, the 1953 coup is not "drilled into every schoolboy" as the central national trauma or the explanation for everything wrong. Iranian regime textbooks treat Mossadegh positively as an anti-imperialist figure but give him passing mention.
The dominant myth is 1979 as a divine victory over tyranny, over the Great Satan (America) and the Little Satan (Israel) with constant warnings about Western plots and the need for vigilance under the Supreme Leader. Mossadegh is a footnote; the clerical narrative often frames secular nationalists as incomplete without religious guidance.
Even if one grants the worst reading of 1953, it occurred in 1953. The Islamic Revolution happened in 1979, 26 years later. In between came economic growth, social changes, and rising expectations under the Pahlavis. The revolution was not an inevitable backlash to 1953; it was a specific ideological project.
And let's not forget the LEFTIST organization of the 1979 revolution. Iranian communists (Tudeh Party), Marxist guerrillas (Fedayeen), and the hybrid Islamist-Marxist MEK actively helped return Ayatollah from exile with the help of French and European Socialists and Communists, then helped Khomeini's movement topple the Shah. They saw the cleric as a useful "useful idiot"—a popular religious figure who could mobilize masses against "imperialism" and the monarchy. Their plan: ride the wave, then sideline Khomeini for "scientific socialism."
They were catastrophically wrong. Once in power, Khomeini's Islamists moved fast. They purged the leftists first. Tudeh was crushed by 1983; many leaders executed. Fedayeen and MEK members were hunted, imprisoned, tortured, and killed in the thousands during the early 1980s revolutionary tribunals and the 1981–85 and 1988 mass executions.
The regime imposed Twelver Shia theocracy: mandatory hijab, Sharia punishments (stonings, amputations, executions for apostasy, homosexuality, "enmity against God"), subordination of ancient Persian culture to revolutionary Islamism, and export of jihad via proxies (Hezbollah, later Houthis, Hamas, etc.). The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) featured human-wave attacks with Basij teenagers given plastic "keys to paradise." Hundreds of thousands died.
Here's a death toll comparison (using conservative estimates from human rights groups and historians):
* Under Mohammad Reza Shah (1941–1979): SAVAK and security forces responsible for roughly 300–400 confirmed political executions over decades, plus hundreds more killed in clashes or the 1963 and 1978–79 unrest. Broader estimates for political deaths 1963–1979 range up to a few thousand, with the revolution itself accounting for a large share (Khomeini's 60,000 claim was propaganda inflation; historians put revolution deaths in the low thousands to ~10,000).
* Under the Islamic Republic: Thousands executed in the first years alone. Over 7,900 political executions 1981–1985. The 1988 massacre alone: 2,800–5,000+ (mostly political prisoners, many already sentenced). Total political executions in the 1980s likely 10,000–20,000+. Add Iran-Iraq War deaths (hundreds of thousands of Iranians), ongoing executions, and protest crackdowns (2009, 2019, 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom—hundreds to low thousands killed, plus this year's reported suppressions).
The scale is not comparable. The Shah's regime was authoritarian with real repression and torture. The Islamic Republic is a totalitarian theocracy that has killed far more of its own people while imposing an alien ideological straitjacket on Persian civilization.
The Islamic Republic drills fear, not Mossadegh-centric grievance or 1941 resentment:
*Dissent = enmity against God.
*The West and "internal traitors" are eternal plotters.
*The Great and Little Satans are the eternal enemies
*Martyrdom for the regime is glorious.
*Obey the Supreme Leader.
Once the Twelvers are removed, Persian culture—ancient, secular-leaning in its high tradition, and compatible with modernity—has a real chance to reassert itself. The theocracy has spent 47 years trying to erase or subordinate it.
Foreign interventions in 1941 and 1953 were imperfect acts by great powers in difficult times. They do not absolve Iranians of agency in 1978–79, nor do they explain the specific tyranny that followed. The leftists who helped midwife the theocracy became its early victims—a cautionary tale about allying with totalitarians.
The mess in Iran today is the direct result of the 1979 revolution and the clerical system it created. Everything else is secondary context or excuse-making. History's lesson is not "the West ruined Iran." It is that replacing one flawed modernizing autocracy with a radical theocratic one resets the civilizational clock backward.
The Iranian people deserve better than either. When the current regime falls—as all such regimes eventually do—Persia can begin recovering its own trajectory.
snapped some photos of games he didn't get a chance to play in at Council of Five Nations.
ing idea what they "teach their students." You're fixated on this stupid and bankrupt narrative -- for what reason? 
