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OT: American Politics

LeafOfFaith said:
It's not about personal prosperity. They lived in peace there, despite there being an undercurrent of bigotry among the masses. It was a country that lived much like Americans did in the US at the time.

And no, sorry, their opinions and the opinions of hundreds of others - both Jewish and Muslim - that I've interacted with over half a century mean more than a few voices here that have literally only read summaries of things on Wiki and prance around as experts. It's like someone now telling a Holocaust survivor about how things really were in Germany, whether one way or the other. I'll take the word of the people who lived through it.
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Well, you know, I also legitimately do have family that are from Iran, and were also even a member of a persecuted ethnic & religious minority under the Shah's rule. And they don't (or didn't, in the case of the ones who've since died) have nice things to say about the Shah.

So, boom! My anecdotal evidence cancels out yours. That's how this works, right?

Now I guess we have no choice but to go with heavily documented history, which shows the Shah was a brutal authoritarian dictator who overthrew democracy and directly paved the road to the Islamic fundamentalist government that is anathema to you now.
 
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He "overthrew democracy" in an effort to usher in and cement a replica of prevailing Western values and society, against a rising tide of religious lunatics that intended to plunge the country into radical islam and socialism/communism.
 
MindzEye said:
They did not. That's what an authoritarian monarchy is.



They held a referendum, in which the voters gave him the power to do so. He was attempting to turn Iran from a monarchy to a republic and needed to reduce the legal power of the monarch (Shah) to do so, thus the vote to dissolve parliament.

For someone who rattled on about contextualization to drop this little gotcha is funny. This was in '53, years into Mossadegh's time as PM and a few years into the fight over the nationalizing of Iranian oil. He knew there were foreign forces aligned against him and he was trying to take steps to win that fight.



'Influence'

gtfo
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They did live free there. Under an authoritarian monarch who actually restored democratic elements eliminated by the guy he pushed out (if you know about the referendum, then you know about the questionable legitimacy and criticisms of it - 99.9% pro is pretty amazing for a guy whose policies couldn't even get through the elected parliament, etc.). A constitutional monarch that actually promoted almost identical ideals to the ones we hold and live by. One that was replaced by a bunch of sadistic terrorists who proceeded to destroy the country.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
They did live free there. Under an authoritarian monarch who actually restored democratic elements eliminated by the guy he pushed out (if you know about the referendum, then you know about the questionable legitimacy and criticisms of it - 99.9% pro is pretty amazing for a guy whose policies couldn't even get through the elected parliament, etc.).
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Pure, pure bullshit.

From Abrahamian's Between Two Revolutions:

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LeafOfFaith said:
Which is more democratic or less democratic than parliament being dissolved while Mossadegh ruled by decree until he was ousted?
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Mossadegh asked for emergency powers from parliament and was granted them. Those emergency powers required him to go back to parliament every 6 months for renewal and his party did not hold the power to grant the emergency powers unilaterally. It required the support of other parties to grant him emergency powers. These powers existed in the Iranian constitution and we've seen democratic governments utilize emergency powers over the decades to confront extreme challenges. The mainstream take on what he was using them for is what I mentioned already, he was attempting to pave the way for Iran to become a democratic Republic and do away with the monarchy.
 
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