Christopher Hitchens on Iran & the 1953 Coup "Atrocity"

Christopher Hitchens on Iran - July 2006

Author Christopher Hitchens

In a book review on an anthology of Iranian literature written for The Atlantic Monthly [Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature - July 11, 2006], British writer and literary critic Christopher Hitchens refers to the 1953 coup carried out by America and England against Mossadegh as an "atrocity". Hitchens, by the way, is a staunch conservative who stubbornly defends the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens also refers to the effect foreign interference and domination has had on the Iranian psyche and the deep paranoia towards the British that remains to this day:

Mention of Napoleon brings me to the work of Iraj Pezeshkzad. How is one to convey the extraordinary charm and power of this author? A little preface is needed. Iranian intellectuals are nostalgic (I do not think this use of the term is improper) for two moments in their nation's agonized history. The first is the 1906 constitutional revolution, when the liberal and cosmopolitan elements of the society, though eventually suppressed by Russian imperial gunnery, managed to establish a precedent for a modern and outward-looking system. The second is the atrocity of August 19, 1953, when the elected nationalist government of Mohammed Mossadegh was forcibly removed by an Anglo-American intrigue that instated the shah as a dictator and returned the country's main natural resource to foreign control. These two external interventions gravely stultified Iran's development and had a retarding effect on the national psyche. It became almost customary and automatic, in a land that is so naturally internationalist, to attribute literally everything to the machinations of designing outsiders. (The Khomeinist regime, needless to add, exploits this plebeian tendency to this day. It also avails itself of the antique Shia concept of taqqiya, or the religious permission to dissemble in dealings with infidels. One might call this the top-down version of ketman.) As an Englishman I found it almost flattering to encounter the number of people in Tehran who -- culturally rather despising Americans -- believed that the British government determined absolutely all matters. Why, had they not even installed the mullahs in 1979 as a revenge for the way that the United States had taken the lion's share of oil after 1953? The British ambassador, whose official dominion includes two especially nice walled garden estates in upper and lower Tehran, confessed to me that he sometimes found this paranoia useful, since it meant that nobody would decline to meet him.