The article by James Blitz and Roula Khalaf in the Financial Times on the 15th
of December, "A missed moment," is an example of either amnesia or poor research or both. To suggest that intelligence operatives were ignorant of events in Iran in the post WWII period requires one to believe they were deaf and dumb. In 1966 one of my roommates in college was an Iranian student whose brother was murdered on arrival home in Teheran from the US after completing his degree. My roommate
told me his brother was shot in front of his father. Events like this were being translated personally as in my case, to Americans all over the country in the 1960s and early 1970s. In late 1970 a luxurious
event at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (where I had just been hired) was organized to honor representatives of the Shah. A massive demonstration by Iranians took place in front of the Legion
that nearly overwhelmed the police force brought to protect the visitors. Everyone was shocked by the intensity of the students and the masks they wore to protect them from identification by SAVAK. This
was not an isolated affair.
Reza Baraheni wrote a long article on the repressive regime in Iran under the Shah describing the activities of SAVAK, the CIA trained Iranian torture unit on October 26, 1976. He made a plea for American attention to the developing problem. No one was interested.
For anyone who was watching there were many other signs, in an attack in February of 1978 there was a massive riot in Tabriz where 6 people were officially reported as killed and 125 injured, businesses
and banks were set fire. As with the bombs set off in 1974 during Richard Nixon's visit, all disturbances were referred to as Marxist. The strike in February 1979 reported in America by the Associated Press
as instigated by radical oil workers shut down Iran's oil industry. This was not the first such action but was the first to gain significant US media play. The workers were still referred to as Marxists, little discussion appeared in the US press about Khomeini until Mehdi Bazargan was eliminated. Partly the blindness of the US
press and much of Europe was due to the blacking out of any anthropological voices of the coming crisis. William O. Beeman has written a book discussing the process of descent in ignorance in American views of Iran in his book,The "Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other." Of course, much of this was evident in Edward W. Said's book Covering Islam (1981), but it is of interest that former foreign service personnel from both England and America are now trying to make the situation look confused.
These efforts to rewrite history fold neatly into the current paradigm to label all resistance movements, especially in the Near East, as associated with al Qaeda (see http://www.dailykos.com/... To label the world with such ignorance can only result in disaster.
Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
Dept. of Anthropology
San Francisco State University