Iran, the history of western coup-mongering
Iran – the history of western coup-mongering
Reactionary governments serve the West in keeping control of the oil. They have an image problem with the fundamentalist regime in Iran, so they try to appear in western media as protectors of its people. Modern Iranian history was snatched from its people by the CIA/MI6 coup back in 1953, still an unhealed wound.
Graham Douglas
When Iran is in the western news it’s usually because the US or Israel is ‘running out of patience’ about the nuclear energy problem, as if they are the world’s appointed policemen, and the country’s caring ‘protectors’ who only want to free its people from the rule of the clerics.
Of course, there is a brutal repression going on in Iran, with one of the highest rates of executions in the world, and a regime that desperately clings to a patriarchal control of women that has made “Woman Life Freedom” a globally recognized slogan. The US – still operating the Monroe Doctrine that Latin America is the US ‘backyard’, which they officially disavowed in 2013 – now wants to free Venezuela from dictatorship. But it’s important to understand the history of western colonial interference in countries that have the oil yet dared to challenge the dominance of the northern hemisphere. A dominance that rode to the rich man’s freedom on the backs of the poor in the global east and south. And religion has been there when needed to justify repressive regimes, whether the long-standing established Wahabi Islam in Saudi Arabia or the more recently imposed fundamentalism in Iran.
Continuing our conversation, Bani Khoshnoudi explains some key points of Iranian history, where a democratic and nationalist government that had been developing since the parliamentary revolution of 1906, was crushed by the coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6 in 1953, and in 1979 the inevitable revolt was captured by the arrival of the mullahs. The effect of the 1953 coup was to blow out the moderate centre of Iranian political life, leaving space for the fanatics on both sides – long-term it was a failure for US foreign policy, made even clearer when it became known that it was a model for subsequent coups across Latin America.
Does the 1953 coup still have an influence? They put in place a repressive regime under the Shah, and then the Islamists instituted another.
This is our huge unhealed wound. The Iranian struggle against despotic monarchy and colonialism started in the early 1900s. In 1906, we had the Constitutional revolution. It was an armed struggle from different parts of the country coming together to make a parliamentary system. Fighting against British and Russian influence with a monarchy sitting there. The Qajar dynasty was completely despotic and horrible, and then Reza Shah came in after the 1953 coup. It was a moment when we could have become a nation state from the inside, but he created a monarchy. We've been living so many imposed lies like the Shah’s so-called ‘Pahlavi dynasty’. From a poor family he became a military man and then he named himself Shah. And under the Shah, there was modernisation and schools and many things that we can appreciate, but the problem is that international intervention was still present. The British oil companies could not get their hands out of Iran, as with everywhere else in the area that they named the Middle East. They divided up the whole East as if it were theirs. There’s the Middle East, the Far East and the Southeast, all relative to where Britain is located.
Why don’t they call it Western Asia, as they do in India?
Exactly. The ’53 coup is so important because it was another moment when through political education and struggles, we tried to reform. Mossadegh took power in the parliament because the 1906 parliamentary system was maintained under the monarchy. He was a devout anti-colonial nationalist; everything was about putting the oil into Iranians hands. We know now, it's all documented, the coup was the CIA and M16, working together in Operation Ajax. And it was the practice run for all the coups that happened throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s all over Latin America, and Africa. The killing of leaders like Lumumba, the arrival of Pinochet, all this is related.
The Shah was trying to modernise more, but we still had all these foreign powers sucking our country dry of its resources while most people stayed poor. It's a classic story, and for us, it's so important: Mossadegh represented something like Lumumba represented for Congo, and we don't forget them.
I know that the Iranian people are not Arabs, but did the Arab Spring in 2011 affect Iran?
A great map was published recentlyof the ethnic diversity in Iran. We are not ‘pure Persians’, we speak Farsi and our language has existed for thousands of years. But Iran also has a very distinct closeness to the Arabs. In 2011 we had the TV on for days watching how Tahrir Square in Cairo was getting full of people. It was the year after our Green Movement. Demonstrations were happening on all the commemorative anniversaries, including the fall of Mossadegh, and in recent years people have been filming it on their phones, but putting them on YouTube and Facebook was difficult because of the regime’s internet restrictions. It was very exciting to see the struggle against oppression reverberating in Arab countries. We all know it's going to explode eventually. Egypt and Iran have had very parallel histories, with Nasser and Sadat.
Your previous film, “The Silent Majority Speaks” was banned in Lebanon and declared offensive to the Iranian regime and to Islam.
I've never been somebody to walk the line or be conformist, I made the film the way I needed to make it. It's not just about the regime; it's questioning the way images influence our political activity. The film got banned because of people who want to control what other people think and see. I was not in Lebanon. It was an incredible Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab who had made this tiny festival all by herself and really wanted to share the film with her people. It was called the Cultural Resistance Festival in Beirut and Tripoli. They had reached out to the Lebanese press, because they have their own struggle against censorship. But it made it riskier for me to go to Iran. I’m not anti-Islam but anti-Islamist. I'm against all organised religion in a way. Religion is great to have for oneself. But look at what organised Christianity has done historically and is still doing, in the name of evangelical what not. It's a tool of oppression and control, I'm a devout anti-fascist and I find fascism in religious organisations.
It's all part of one thing, and it's very male-orientated. I'm sceptical of how we allow ourselves to be controlled by a bunch of men, and the terrible women who collaborate. We're still living in this patriarchal control system. And control systems have used religion and the idea of God to get into people's minds. Some people call it the opium of the masses, but I think it's the harshest, most violent manipulation to use these threatening ideas of heaven and hell and good and evil. That's a simplistic way to say it; probably humanity has needed something to give it meaning and direction. But it has become a means of control.
Like many people in Islam, you are fighting against Western imperialism - to give it a short name - and against a repressive regime, yet there are people within Islam who say you're attacking Islam.
I agree with decolonial thinking, but I’m also very critical of decolonial thinkers who try to impose these ideas that we need to go back to some original past, which is ridiculous. Radical thinking is great but there are also some really controlling tendencies. I fight against all these tendencies, whether they are mullahs, or so-called left intellectual decolonial people that want to force an idea down your throat, and that can be violent as well. I'm not a moderate kind of person, but we all think we know what's true. We now live in this world of organised cancel campaigns and lynchings. This sort of McCarthyism is very dangerous, whether it be left or right. We saw so many communist countries send people to the death squads. We can’t be idealistic: humans look for control of each other.
The interview with images and links can be found here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/12/01/iran-the-history-of-western-coup-mongering/