Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran

Today is Sunday, 4 November 2012.

Americans generally delight to forget that the United States Empire has been making war upon the Iranian people since 1953, when the CIA overthrew the elected civilian government of Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, and re-installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (“the Shah”, whose daddy had been, not of imperial blood, but a semi-literate military coup-maker deposed by the British in 1941 for his Nazi sympathies) as dictator.

Replacing a parliamentary democracy with an absolute monarchy:  what a concept!

Years of corruption, misrule, and murder led the Shah, in the face of increasing public resistance, to flee the country on 16 January 1979, thus ending the Pahlavi monarchy (although his son, in good comic-opera style, pretends to be Shah).  He then lived on his ill-gotten gains in Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico, and developed a gallstone condition which required surgery.  At the insistence of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger (a thug who knows a thing or two about war crimes and crimes against humanity), Pahlavi was allowed to travel to New York City for treatment.  The safe harbour given Pahlavi was interpreted by most of the Iranian people as a continuation of the American war, and resulted in the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, and the taking of American hostages, on this date in 1979.

Pahlavi left the USE on 15 December 1979, moving to Egypt, where he died on 27 July 1980.

Fast-forward to now: economic sanctions have been deployed, and USE military action threatened, because Iran may be developing a nuclear bomb.

This from the only country ever to drop The Bomb on human beings.

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Your author was archivist at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater from 1975 to 1980.  In those days, OSU had a large number of Iranian students enrolled in petroleum and engineering programs.  After the embassy seizure, Iranian students (and those who “looked like one”) were subjected to verbal obscenities and physical attacks.  This culminated in a rally, on the Library plaza, to ostensibly support the hostages, but which more closely resembled a Klan rally, with signs such as “Sand Niggers Go Home”.

I had stationed myself near the speakers, shouting commentary about their racist statements.  One of their main complaints concerned the burning of American flags. When the hate-fest culminated in the burning of an Iranian flag, I seized the flag and put out the fire.  I was attacked, and spared a beating only because a rally leader said, “Not in front of the cameras!”

(Humorous side note:  the rally was featured on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, where I was promoted to “Dean of the Libraries”.  The actual Dean freaked, and made me promise that, were he to be called before an investigatory committee of the state legislature, I would explain the misidentification.  I was delighted to oblige.  Alas, no such committee was ever impaneled; I would have enjoyed giving them an earful.)