I didn’t defend him and don’t defend him. I’ve met some of SAVAK’s victims and heard stories from my Father.
Furthermore, I’m not sure how any reasonable person could have read my post as a defense of him.
I’ll merely say that if people are going to express strong opinions about the man they might want to have a basic enough knowledge of Iranian history to not confuse the two different times he overthrew leaders.
It’s a little bit like hearing people make strong statements about American history and then someone confusing Teddy Roosevelt with FDR.
This probably came across a little harsher than I intended. I just don’t like being accused of defending the Shah anymore than I suspect most Miami Cubans like being called apologists for Castro and do get annoyed when people make strong statements about my native country and then display little knowledge or understanding of it.
I find it hard to believe that Batista had 4800 murders and torturers working for him. Batista was certainly corrupt but he wasn’t all that bloodthirsty. He was more concerned about living the good life and pocketing money than killing off enemies. He didn’t even have the Castros killed when they were in police custody.
A bold assertion from ignorance and basically a heavily skewed view point. It’s not really surprising that foolsguinea would make such a claim, however. And I’m sure he thinks it’s justified, even using an obviously cherry picked time frame, but it simply doesn’t hold up under even a cursory scrutiny. Ok, there are examples of the US supporting dictators, sure enough. And one can argue that this dictator or that one was worse, blah blah blah. But look at the core allies of each nation. The US’s core allies during that time period were the Western European NATO allies, Japan, South Korea and several other progressive nations such as Canada. Who were the Soviet Union’s core allies again? Oh, that’s right…they were the Warsaw Pact fun bunch. So, while the US had a few, even perhaps many nations we SUPPORTED who were second or even third tier allies who were less than savory, the USSR’s core allies were basically puppets to Moscow who brutally suppressed their populations. One has but to look at what happened when the Soviets folded to see how as soon as the Russian boot came off those corrupt regimes went down and those countries bolted for the hills, in many cases joining NATO as rapidly as they could to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.
Certainly one can make a case that the US is less than perfect, that we do unsavory things and often blunder badly. But there is no facts based comparison between the US and the USSR OR China…the US is pretty obviously the ‘least bad’ of that bunch, even in the short time frame given there. There are a ton of better countries that are ‘least bad’ wrt the US, but those two? You have to be pretty blind and/or ignorant of history and ignorant of how things were under either regime to make that claim, though I guess if you spin enough you could claim that China, despite it’s horrible record of human rights violations in it’s own borders really didn’t do a lot externally in that time period (having already gotten Tibet and kept it firmly under it’s brutal heel), so on that narrow criteria I guess a case could be made there, though you have to be willing to spin and twist and narrowly define what ‘least bad’ means in very specific vertical language to get there. The USSR though?
I’m sorry. My knowledge of modern Iranian history mostly begins with Mosaddegh throwing the British out. I had no recollection that the Shah had deposed his own father like that.
The way you put it was vague enough as to sound anti-Mosaddegh (and thus pro-coup) to those of us who mainly only know this history through an American lens. That’s why I noted my surprise.
Fair enough.
I wanted to add that I don’t think it’s important or meaningful that Bernie honeymooned in the USSR or vacationed in Venezuela wrt a single vertical incident that will prevent him from being elected. I doubt anyone who could or would potentially vote for him in a presidential or even primary election would give two shits, and anyone still around who would is unlikely in the extreme to ever consider voting for him regardless. I won’t vote for the man, but it has nothing to do with where he honeymooned or vacationed, or even the fact that he’s a independent socialist.
Yeah, I think Bernie was a peacenik, not a Fellow Traveler or whatever the term is. He seems mostly to have been associated with Trotskyists, not Stalinists, which undermines any claims of Moscow sympathies.
BTW, I accept that my contention has been defeated quite handily. I concede that the USSR was, overall, more brutally imperialistic than the USA, pre-Gorbachev.
I’m not saying Batista couldn’t have created some Ministry of Love type organization and killed off thousands of perceived enemies. I’m just pointing out the evidence seems to say he didn’t do that.
Did he stage coups? Sure, he wanted power. Did he get in bed with the mob? Sure, he wanted money. But neither of those things mean Batista staged a reign of terror. Not every dictator is a Hitler or Pol Pot or Idi Amin.
He created the much more American endearing name “Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities” which by a quick look at his wiki gives a wide range of a possible death toll of between 1000-20,000. How many people do you think he had tortured and /or killed?
