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CIAyesterday
2016: The year the ghost of Mosaddegh returned
A vast segment of Americans are legitimately concerned that Trump may upend
their democratic institutions.
31 Dec 2016 11:20 GMT |
Mohammed Mossadegh, second from the right, surrounded by press and officials as
he arrives at an airport, circa 1955 [Getty Images]
By
Hamid Dabashi
@HamidDabashi
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
In August 1953, when I was a two-year-old toddler growing up in my hometown of
Ahvaz in oil-rich southern Iran, the British and the Americans conspired
against the newly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, toppled his
democratically elected government, reinstalled a runaway tyrant, Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi, to rule over us, and robbed an entire nation of the possibility of
living in a democracy.
As fate would have it, some 63 years later, now in the homeland of the very
same plotters who toppled Mosaddegh, a vast segment of Americans are
legitimately concerned that Donald Trump, their newly elected president, may
usher in a dictatorial abrogation of their democratic institutions,
particularly their cherished freedom of press which he seems to be able to
torpedo with a few words in his noxious nocturnal tweets.
The British liberals are equally incensed about how the Brexit vote may be the
sign of a nasty xenophobic turn in the history of European liberal democracy.
Brexit and the election of Trump are therefore seen as cataclysmic events
marking 2016 as a turning point in the history of "Western democracy".
Today I of course deeply empathise when I read a piece in the New York Times
such as The End of the Anglo-American Order, in which Ian Buruma argues quite
eloquently how "for decades the United States and Britain's vision of democracy
and freedom defined the post-war world" - and then asks quite anxiously: "What
will happen in an age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?"
But still I cannot help whispering to myself ever so politely: Excuse me, sir,
but are you sure that the US and Britain had a vision of democracy and freedom
that defined the post-war "world"? Was Iran part of this "world"? Was 1953
within that "post-war" era? What about Chile in 1973, or any number of other
nasty covert operations the British or Americans conducted around the globe?
What about us? Are we not people, do we not deserve democracy? "If you prick
us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we
not die? And if you wrong us …"
The Listening Post - The CIA Russia hacking report and the media (8:28)
Persian poetic justice
More than half a century after the CIA plot against Mosaddegh I have lived to
see the same CIA accusing the Russians of interfering in the presidential
election of 2016, manipulating the electorate to get a charlatan businessman
into the White House. If Bernie Sanders were the American Mosaddegh, Trump is
their Mohammad Reza Shah, as it were.
Is the US being administered a bit of its own medicine, perhaps? According to a
report by The New York Times back in 1984, the CIA "contributed more than $1.4m
to two political parties in El Salvador's presidential campaign".
This, however, was no isolated incident. Since the 1940s, the CIA "has played a
covert role in elections and in the affairs of political parties in other
countries".
We also know that between 1953 and 1961, under Allen Dulles, the CIA overthrew
the governments of Guatemala, "invaded Cuba, and was tied to the killing of
Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first democratically elected leader".
The task today is for Trump not to be allowed to do to the US - or
nativist xenophobia in UK and elsewhere to Europe - what the US and UK
conspired and did to Iran and elsewhere.
More recently, The Washington Post has also allowed into its pages the fact
that "the United States does have a well-documented history of interfering and
sometimes interrupting the workings of democracies elsewhere."
In his report, Ishaan Tharoor further adds: "In the late 1940s, the newly
established CIA cut its teeth in Western Europe, pushing back against some of
the continent's most influential leftist parties and labour unions."
Today you may think the US has repented from such unsavoury behaviour, except
it has not. Again, as Tharoor reports: "After the end of the Cold War, the
United States has largely brought its covert actions into the open with
organisations like the more benign National Endowment for Democracy, which
seeks to bolster civil society and democratic institutions around the world
through grants and other assistance."
OPINION: The prospect of the US as a 'banana republic'
I know of quite a number of discredited expat Iranian "opposition" who are the
beneficiary of such largesse, being cooked up for a potential "regime change"
back in their homeland.
Recently a particular group among them wrote a letter to Trump asking him to
dismantle the Iran nuclear deal, impose more crippling sanctions on their own
people, and help them to bring "democracy" to their homeland.
Once Jesus upon a path
The moral of the story is not a vindictive reading of history. Iranians today
live in the throes of a repressive theocracy brought upon themselves by their
own domestic tyrants.
But the troubled soul of Anglo-American liberal democracy today in both the US
and UK will have to be read as the historic closure to the false distinction it
has made between domestic prosperity and foreign warfare.
The task today is for Trump not to be allowed to do to the US - or nativist
xenophobia in UK and elsewhere to Europe - what the US and UK conspired and did
to Iran and elsewhere. In that task we, the survivors of those atrocities, have
much to share with our former tormentors and present hosts.
OPINION: What went wrong? A withering West
It's the festive season associated with the name of Jesus Christ - so let me
conclude with a magnificent poem by the towering moral authority of Persian
poet Nasir Khusraw in which the figure of Christ appears prominently:
Should you have a sword in hand don't rush to slaughter people,
For in God's eyes evil will never be forgotten.
Jesus once saw a dead body wasting upon a path,
He wondered and paused for a moment of reflection:
"Whom did you kill," he whispered quietly, "so you were killed in return?"
"And where would the man who killed you be in return killed by someone else!"
"Don't harass people knocking at their door with your fingertip!
So no one would bother you banging at your door with a tightened fist!"
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University in New York.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
