Is reading not required to pass the bar exam in California?
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You keep defending the fucking Shah by saying that people who ackshually lived there thought he was a good guy...so he must be. Well every motherfucker in that picture also lives in the same motherfucking place and thought Khomeini was a pretty good guy.
Both were monsters.
Yes, reading is required. Was contextualizing required for anything that you studied?
Those motherfuckers in that picture are mourning the loss of a guy who spat at western values, shit on women's rights, literally caused the mass exodus of the entire jewish population from the country, executed journalists (even cartoonists!) for criticizing anything, censored the shit out of media, music, and art, funded and promoted terrorism, took radical islamic insanity to another level, and is the father of crap like 9/11 and October 7. That's the guy whose picture they're holding up.
The guy he forced out had more in common with US and Canadian leaders back then than most US and Canadian leaders do now, was an ally to the West in a shitshow region, was a proponent of every ideal we strive for, and ran the country in such a way that had its culture, economy, and stature rising to a level of a western nation. You keep pointing to the tactics used against political opponents, but most of those opponents were the scumbags I just referenced in the preceding paragraph, religious zealot sociopaths that wanted to send the country back into the stone age with their insanity. You seem to love Mossadegh so much because democracy!, but he dissolved parliament and ruled by decree when he didn't get the support he wanted, he was leaning communist, he too jailed political opponents (but sure, didn't go as far as the Shah in that department), and took action against the monarchy. You act like the Shah was just some guy on the street who forced out Mossadegh - he was the constitutional monarch. So yeah, while his approach to dealing with political opponents wasn't great, look at the shitstains he was up against who ultimately took him out, and look at the country they've created since they ousted him.
There's an enormous gap between a guy who took more severe action against shitbag political opponents (who you'd want to see jailed yourself, and I'm sure wouldn't mind to see wiped off the face of the earth...unless you like that regime right now?), and literally some of the worst garbage on the planet that go against everything we stand for. Just compare the country before and after the Shah - I don't think there's any dispute that it's an utter disaster now, is there?
I've mentioned this before, but 1/4 of my ancestry is from there. My grandfather's line are generations and generations of Persian Jews going back to lord knows when. They were academics (great grandfather founded and ran a Jewish school) and entrepreneurs, openly Jewish living in an Islamic state. They loved it there, lived through the different regimes you've only read about, had no intent to ever leave because it was such a great place. Mind you, I've never been and can't attest, so I'm just relaying what I've heard millions of times since I was a kid. But he had to pick up and move from this country he loved so much on a moment's notice essentially in 1979, leaving behind most of what his family had, which got nationalized. His wife, my grandmother, was the product of a French Catholic blonde blue eyed woman whose parents met around WW1 in France and moved to Tehran. She also loved it, so did her Parisian mother, who actually stayed behind in 1979 with one of her daughters because she thought she was too old to make it somewhere new (she lived for another 30+ years though). My grandparents had six kids. All miss it and wish they could go back. Each of the grandparents had several siblings and cousins - all adored it. They have countless friends, who all had to flee, mostly to CA, NY, and the UK. I know hundreds of them, and nobody has ever had a bad thing to say about Iran pre-1979.
My grandfather has legit maybe three full library-style bookcases of books in his house just on Persian history, and especially 20th century events that affected his life so much. He listens to Persian radio and tv all day long, and there's endless content on talk channels about politics both now and then, as you can imagine. If there's an expert on this subject matter, it's him. Of course, there are things to criticize about the Shah, but you won't hear many normal people refer to him as a monster, or to equate him to the goddamn Ayatollah. It's like if Israel had been taken over by Osama bin Laden and you equated him and Netanyahu. It's absurd and insane. My grandparents revere the Shah and his line, and much of the criticism is that he chose to flee the country himself instead of stay and defend it against the actual monsters who took control.
The point is, all of these people who respect and speak highly of the Shah are now Americans, Brits, or Canadians mostly, and have had one or two generations of offspring that live peacefully among us. They value and respect Western values, just like us. They live like normal people over here, successfully integrated, in direct contrast to the average joe you can find on the streets of Iran, who licks his chops at the thought of someone nuking the US and Israel into oblivion some day. So, when people who share your values, but who actually lived over there and lived through these events, don't consider the Shah a monster, and would laugh at you for saying that he and the Ayatollah were the same shit cut from the same shitty cloth, you should maybe consider that your casual online reads on the subject and the history of the country have led you astray.
