Uh, what? Cite for the claim that he is viewed as an “Iranian national hero”? According to these surveys, Iranians are about as likely to view him positively as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the old Shah) - is he also an Iranian national hero? If he was a hated American backed dictator, how come he’s got identical approval ratings to Mossadegh? Most curious.
Yes, he did:
It’s interesting. In the U.S. – if you run across references to Mossadegh at all – he’s invariably titled “the democratically elected President of Iran”. It’s also invariably reported that Mossadegh’s one and only flaw – that which the US and UK could not abide – was that he was going to nationalize Iran’s oil production.
That TIME article is long-forgotten ancient history.
Some more context about Mossadegh and the 1953 “coup” (which is more accurately described as a counter-coup putting down Mossadegh’s attempted takeover…):
Eta:
Indeed, this article makes reference to that to fact:
The Iranian parliament’s role in the choice of a prime minister was similar to, but weaker than, the U.S. Senate’s role in confirming presidential appointments, such as, among others, Supreme Court justices, some cabinet posts, and ambassadors. Yet despite this even stronger legislative role, no one refers to “the democratically elected Justice Samuel Alito,” the “democratically elected Secretary of State Antony Blinken,” or “the democratically elected Ambassador Pamela Harriman.”
This fetishistic formulation, applied to Mossadegh is even odder, for reasons that are worth examining.
I fear the US is about to discover the reason for that. Namely: we don’t as they are one in a long line of democratically elected leaders in a political culture of democratically elected leaders. That may not be the case much longer in the US. It certainly wasn’t after Mossadegh was deposed. Thats why he’s referred to that way, he wasn’t just one of a line of unelected strongmen, he was the end of the period where Iran had Democratically elected leaders.
While it may be true that Iran had a period of democratically elected leaders that ended around that time, it is crucial to note that Mossadegh was not one of them, and that right before he was exposed by allies of the Shah he was in the process of taking power away from bodies like parliament and the courts and hoarding it for himself.
Yes he was. He was elected prime minister by the Democratically elected parliament of which he was a Democratically elected member.
It is entirely correct to refer to him as the Democratically elected president
From America and Iran: A History, Chapter 19:
Stamps issued in his honor:
Incorrect, he was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah after some consultation with the democratically eleced parliament. And then he suspended that parliament, because he was a dictator.
He was less democratically elected than Hitler, in the same ballpark of “democratically elected” as Elon Musk in his role as head of DOGE.
Well, yes, I’m aware that the Ayatollah Regime in their attempt to present themselves as revolutionary anti-colonialists rather than the imperialist religious fanatics they are, has claimed his legacy. That doesn’t mean that actual Iranian people view him positively.
By those standards Kier Stamer is not democratically elected
By that standard no country with a parliamentary system is a democracy.
The UK parliamentary system has many faults indeed, and the voting system is awful. First past the post ha given Labour a majority they did not deserve, and if Farage gets elected PM by that system some day they will regret not having changed the system when they still could.
But that is a story for another day.
The UK is a country where the parliament has a very long history and where a monarch going against parliament would shatter the monarch’s own legitimacy. That wasn’t the case in Iran in 1953.
Further, if Kier Stramer was actively plotting against the king to the point where Charles had to flee to France to avoid being assassinated, and then Stramer suspended Parliament and ran a sham referendum where you could either anonymously say “yes, suspending parliament was based” or you could travel to Cornwall where you could vote in an open ballot in front of a bunch of angry looking soldiers if you wanted to vote “no that was not OK” which he won with 99.99% of the vote, and after he did all that he was deposed by the head of the RAF on behalf of King Charles, and then after all that people still insisted on calling him “the democratically elected Kier Stramer who was deposed by the CIA” I’d roll my eyes and raise my eyebrows at that.
It was Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother (not cousin) Yonatan who was killed at Entebbe. Still held in high esteem as a hero in Israel, with books and films about him.
By the way, I know nobody asked, but I still think it’s an interesting aspect of the iconic (at least in Germany) photo in the OP’s post: The woman holding Benno Ohnesorg’s body is Friederike Hausmann, née (and at the time) Dollinger; she’s now a recognised historian specialising in Italian history and translator of Italian books into German. The reason why she’s so elegantly dressed in that photo, with earrings and black evening gown, is that she was planning to sneak into an opera attended by the Shah that night to protest.
I didn’t know that, how interesting! Thank you!
“The constitutional monarchy is like cricket. It looks crazy, but it actually works.”
(Attributed to some legal scholar on British constitutional law whose name I don’t recall)
Note the spelling. Moṣaddeq is the accurate transliteration of the name from Persian مُصَدِّق. Used by scholars who have studied Persian or at least use the contributions of those who have. “Mossadegh” is an artifact of a time before standardized transliterations. The name is of Arabic origin: مُصَدِّق muṣaddiq literally means one who believes that you’re telling the truth. A corroborator of truth telling. It’s cognate with Hebrew words like צֶדֶק tsedeq ‘righteousness’, צַדִּיק tsaddiq ‘righteous person’, and צְדָקָה tsedaqah ‘righteous deed’. Also cognate with Neil Sedaka!