I know what it's like bro. You gotta get some better underwear.

!historychads @Wildstrike_Fancyhide !eurochads

I recently polled my people and this is what they wanted me to write about. Fortunately I can use declassified CIA documents for most of my research.

There were multiple huge crises in the Middle East in 1958 that seemed like they were going to lead the world into war. There was even a major deployment of US troops there. But you never hear about them. Why? Because there wasn't a war. I'm going to tell you some stories about what scared the heck out of everyone in the USA and the Middle East but they managed to get it under control. Think of it as the anti-Chernobyl.

Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue. Yeah, those were the days.

Syria

The first big crisis of the year, the one that got everything rolling, was Syria's admission to the United Arab Republic. Or to say it another way, Syria being annexed by Egypt. Every state in the region and the superpowers had been expecting something like this to happen eventually since World War II. Now it seemed that the balance of power had been overturned and all of the pent-up conflicts in the Middle East were about to blow up.

I'm guessing it wasn't really a 99.99% vote in favor of it because Nasser had grave misgivings about this and could barely be persuaded to.

Syria was the most failed "failed state" that you could imagine. It owes its existence to the French demand at the end of World War I that after all their sacrifices they deserved their own chunk of the Ottoman Empire. In 1946 it gained its independence but it didn't have much of a national identity other than being the land that France used to own. It was widely expected that it would soon be absorbed into a larger Arab state with Iraq and Jordan. But for extremely complicated reasons this didn't happen and little Syria survived.

Notice how everything he mentions being in "Syria" is in what we call "Lebanon" now.

Soon it wished it hadn't survived. After independence Syria had about one successful coup every two years and countless failed ones. By 1958 most of the factions had been purged from political life and it was Ba'athists who held a tenuous grip on power. They couldn't even trust their fellow Ba'athists, and worse, the Communists were becoming dangerously powerful. And nobody likes a commie. In order to make sure they didn't seize control, in January 1958 Syria's leaders came up with a creative strategy: Become part of Egypt.

One of the main factions that briefly held power there in the early 1950s was the batshit crazy SSNP. I heard the British were supporting them back then.

Egypt

This was pretty crazy but not as crazy as it sounds. There was a strong desire across the region to unite into one Arab nation. What is the heart of the Arab nation? Egypt. And its leader Nasser was the only one who could do this. Two years earlier in the Suez Crisis, Eisenhower ordered Britain and France back into their cucksheds and forbid them to invade other countries anymore. But Arabs saw this as a great victory where Nasser stood up to the colonial powers and defeated them, which at least had a kernel of truth to it. Many people across all the Arab world considered him to be their leader and were annoyed that their country hadn't joined him yet.

Some of the most extreme cope I've ever seen. British troops withdrawing in humiliation from Egypt under American orders, never to return.

The only problem is, how do you get Nasser onboard? He wants to to unify the Arabs, but he doesn't want to start out by being responsible for this basket case country that doesn't have its shit together. Eventually he agrees on a few conditions: The Syrian people have to vote for him. All political parties will be dissolved. The army will get out of politics.

The conservative monarchies are not about to take this lying down. The Saudis try to arrange a coup before unification can happen, but it is terribly inept. The King of Iraq, who kinda hoped he was gonna be the one to annex Syria and lead the Arab world, proposes merging with Jordan. It's another pro-British monarchy ruled by his brother so it makes sense in these dangerous times. The problem is, the Saudis are afraid of Nasser but they're also afraid of Iraq and Jordan getting too powerful, so they have trouble coordinating a response.

This is what the government of Iraq was like in the 1950s. I wonder what will happen to them...

The UAR

On February 22 Egypt and Syria join together as the United Arab Republic.

• The kings of Iraq and Jordan are worried that this will lead the many Nasserists among their own people to overthrow them.

• King of Saudi Arabia is too busy dealing with getting overthrown by his brother to do much.

• President Chamoun of Lebanon is extremely alarmed. The domestic situation is already really screwed up and the last thing he needs is Nasserists on 80% of the country's border.

• Israel doesn't really care since both Egypt and Syria are already hostile to them. Their only problem is if Iraq and Jordan merge because Iraq would be the senior partner and they are not fans of the whole Zionism thing.

• The British are desperate to keep alive the Arab monarchies they set up after WWI. Their whole imperial plan was to build these up and now they only have Iraq and Jordan left.

• The USA is ambivalent. Nasser is hard to deal with, but at least he kept the commies out of the region.

• The Soviets are probably as mad as Boris Badenov when one of his plots fails.

Epilogue

Nasser soon sends Egyptians to take over key government positions away from Syria. The Ba'athists are understandably butthurt as they're the ones who invited the Egyptians to come and now they're getting pushed out of power and having their newspapers shut down. The Egyptians probably figure that if these people are so incapable of running their own lives that they ask us to take over their country, they can't be trusted in leadership roles. There's also less obvious divisions, like business people being butthurt about how the Egyptians don't understand that their economy is different. These tensions were already obviously before the year was out. In 1961, a coup topples the Egyptians. Like so many others who tried to control Syria in this era, they lasted about two years.

Damascus, 1950s. According to some redditor.

!historychads

@FourthAlt @teoctist_the_gynecologist @edieightro @Domnhall

Pic of the basement of the Ipatiev House after the shooting.

>Around midnight on 17 July, Yurovsky ordered the Romanovs' physician, Eugene Botkin, to awaken the sleeping family and ask them to put on their clothes, under the pretext that the family would be moved to a safe location due to impending chaos in Yekaterinburg. The Romanovs were then ordered into a 6 m × 5 m (20 ft × 16 ft) semi-basement room. Alexandra requested a chair because she was sick, and Nicholas requested a second for Alexei. Yurovsky's assistant Grigory Nikulin remarked to him that the "heir wanted to die in a chair. Very well then, let him have one." The prisoners were told to wait in the cellar room while the truck that would transport them was being brought to the House. A few minutes later, an execution squad of secret police was brought in and Yurovsky read aloud the order given to him by the Ural Executive Committee:

Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.

>Nicholas, facing his family, turned and said "What? What?" Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and the weapons were raised. The Empress and Grand Duchess Olga, according to a guard's reminiscence, had tried to bless themselves, but failed amid the shooting. Yurovsky reportedly raised his Colt gun at Nicholas's torso and fired; Nicholas fell dead, pierced with at least three bullets in his upper chest. The intoxicated Peter Ermakov, the military commissar for Verkh-Isetsk, shot and killed Alexandra with a bullet wound to the head. He then shot at Tatiana, who ran for the double doors, hitting her in the thigh. The remaining executioners shot chaotically and over each other's shoulders until the room was so filled with smoke and dust that no one could see anything at all in the darkness nor hear any commands amid the noise.

>Alexey Kabanov, who ran onto the street to check the noise levels, heard dogs barking from the Romanovs' quarters and the sound of gunshots loud and clear despite the noise from the Fiat's engine. Kabanov then hurried downstairs and told the men to stop firing and kill the family and their dogs with their gun butts and bayonets. Within minutes, Yurovsky was forced to stop the shooting because of the caustic smoke of burned gunpowder, dust from the plaster ceiling caused by the reverberation of bullets, and the deafening gunshots. When they stopped, the doors were then opened to scatter the smoke. While waiting for the smoke to abate, the killers could hear moans and whimpers inside the room. As it cleared, it became evident that although several of the family's retainers had been killed, all of the Imperial children were alive and only Tatiana was injured.

Poor Tatiana Nikolayevna

She sort of looked like Anya Taylor Joy

>The Tsarevich was the first of the children to be executed. Yurovsky watched in disbelief as Nikulin spent an entire magazine from his Browning gun on Alexei, who was still seated transfixed in his chair; he also had jewels sewn into his undergarment and forage cap. Ermakov shot and stabbed him, and when that failed, Yurovsky shoved him aside and killed the boy with a gunshot to the head. The last to die were Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria (however, according to Yurovsky's note, Alexei, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia were the last to die), who were carrying over 1.3 kilograms (2.9 lb) of diamonds sewn into their clothing, which had given them a degree of protection from the firing. However, they were speared with bayonets as well. Olga sustained a gunshot wound to the head. Maria and Anastasia were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads with pillows in terror until they were shot in the head. Yurovsky killed Tatiana and Alexei. Tatiana died from a single shot to the back of her head. Alexei received two bullets to the head, right behind the ear. Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, survived the initial onslaught but was quickly stabbed to death against the back wall while trying to defend herself with a small pillow which she had carried that was filled with precious gems and jewels. While the bodies were being placed on stretchers, Anastasia cried out and covered her face with her arm. Ermakov grabbed Alexander Strekotin's rifle and bayoneted her in the chest, but when it failed to penetrate, he pulled out his revolver and shot her in the head.

>The bodies of the Romanovs and their servants were loaded onto a Fiat truck equipped with a 60 hp engine, with a cargo area measuring 1.8 by 3.0 metres (6 ft × 10 ft). Heavily laden, the vehicle struggled for 14 kilometres (9 mi) on boggy road to reach the Koptyaki forest. Yurovsky was furious when he discovered that the drunken Ermakov had brought only one shovel for the burial. About 800 metres (1⁄2 mile) further on, near crossing no. 185 on the line serving the Verkh-Isetsk works, 25 men working for Ermakov were waiting with horses and light carts. These men were all intoxicated and they were outraged that the prisoners were not brought to them alive. They expected to be part of the lynch mob. Yurovsky maintained control of the situation with great difficulty, eventually getting Ermakov's men to shift some of the bodies from the truck onto the carts. A few of Ermakov's men pawed the female bodies for diamonds hidden in their undergarments, two of whom lifted up Alexandra's skirt and fingered her genitals. Yurovsky ordered them at gunpoint to back off, dismissing the two who had groped the tsarina's corpse and any others he had caught looting.

Bloody commies

!anticommunists !historychads

Aevann i think this counts as rightoid infighting. Is it good? I think so.

History repeats itself. As farce and then it just keeps getting more r-slurred.

Violent protesters who ended up fleeing to the UK. Also it's CPC the Communist Party of China, if we're going to talk about social studies and modern politics let's use proper terms.

Folx, let's remember to call the Democratic People's Republic of Korea by its proper name. Saying "North Korea" is a propaganda tactic to imply there are two Koreas, rather than one proud nation sadly suffering under partial occupation by imperialist forces.

It's only the more recognized one in the US where it's actively misused on purpose to link the CPC to the now defunct CCCP. The intent behind it is to continue red scare propaganda tactics.

It's not being pedantic it's about understanding why certain groups, like the US government, speak and act in certain ways. Critical thinking and understanding intent of the author are important lessons I teach during the first month of every school year and I repeat with every single one of my ELA and social studies classes. Those skills are far more important than them memorizing the dates of when each state ratified the Constitution.

Those protestors, from the videos I've seen, were actively attacking other civilians who were counter protesting them. They were attacking them with homemade bombs and bows and arrows, and other potentially lethal devices. And if you've ever been to China, you know that the Chinese police are waaaay more non-violent than any American or EU police forces. We also know that they only moved in when the protesters started harming other civilians.

Btw, the counter protests were far larger than the protests, but the US news never seemed to cover that salient fact here in the US. So I don't blame you if you didn't know that. I'm lucky in that I know folks who live(d) in HK and were there for all of that craziness. I also know that for some reason despite protesting a bill in the HK government (the inciting incident was that anti integration HK folks were upset that a male feminist wasn't allowed to escape prosecution for a r*pe he committed on the mainland by returning to HK) where everyone both on the mainland and in HK speak and read both of the two most common Chinese languages a nice amount of the protestors' signs were in English. Now why would that happen? Why would folks in HK on one side of a protest use English signs? Does English have some sort of history with HK in particular? The Century of Humiliation? The Opium Wars? The 99 Year "Lease." No dogs or Chinese Allowed Streets in HK? British and American Colonizers (particularly the Delano Drug Cartel, grandparents of Little Ole FDR)?

A good example to compare to might be the Charlottesville protests. There American liberals blamed the police for not acting soon enough or from keeping the two groups separate. Especially when the (Nazi and racist fascists) protestors became violent and started attacking the (liberals and leftists) counter protesters.

The protestors during the HK riots were not peaceful and attacked other civilians (businesses too, but things can be replaced) and that's when the police moved in to stop them from seriously injuring or killing other people. You're good with preventing murder and assault right? Even when that person disagrees with you politically right?

(white extinction is long overdue and will come at the hands of our history teachers)

!historychads !aichads

The two girls are Polly Styrene and Siouxsie Sioux, who would both go on to be vocalists in their own bands (X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie and the Banshees respectively)

Guitarist Steve Jones (the guy in the very dapper tits T-shirt) would later stop Jimmy Saville, one of the worst human beings who ever lived, from molesting a young girl backstage at an event. Saville got the S*x Pistols banned from the BBC as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)

!art !historychads

https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/27t9ll/apparently_the_nazis_killed_the_jews_because_of/

https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1mkoiq/question_how_long_can_jews_perpetrate_the/

https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/6mo5g0/evil_jewish_zealots_kill_jesus_but_dont_control/

https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1ecy83/polls_during_wwii_had_an_astronomical_number_of/

in 1943 the nazis set up a secret weather monitoring station in canada (or the greater UK territories, i guess, cause at the time the place wasn't part of canada). weather goes west to east in the atlanta ocean, so the allies were the only ones who could get long term weather info for planning purposes. the nazis snuck in to canadian wilderness and set it up just...out in the open. they labeled things CANADIAN GUBMENT STUFF and threw american cigarette packs around to further hide that it was them and not an allied weather station. it all worked so well no one even found it until 1977 (or if anyone happened to find it before then no one cared or told anyone or acknowledged it). when it was found everyone assumed it was an allied military thing and ignored it. in 1981 some guy decided to finally ask someone in the canadian goverment/military. so this nazi weather station was there for nearly 40 years without anyone realizing. they apparently only got like a weeks worth of weather reports before it stopped working. the weather station is now prominently displayed in a museum as it's the one contribution canada made to world war 2. and sure it was a contribution for the nazis but it's all canada has to brag about!!

BUT WHAT ABOUT JUNO BEACH EH YA HOSER HOCKEY TIM HORTONS i hear you impotently screech in candian. yeah, what about it? the candians had a nice trip to the beach that day while americans did the actual fighting.

[Started as a reply to some zoomer saying something stupid and spiraled out of control.]

Kennedy and his brother were really into telling the CIA to assassinate people overseas and do that kind of covert action in a dirty way. Everything you think is bad about glowies is probably something they ordered. Which makes it especially hilarious when tards claim that he, the least likely person on a planet of 3 billion people, was shot by the CIA because he didn't want them to assassinate people.

LBJ is responsible for getting us into Vietnam in the stupidest way possible, where it's treated as a crisis in the daily news cycle, not a war we're trying to win. And yet he keeps reinforcing failure, sending more and more guys there, dropping more and more bombs, killing more and more civilians. Drip by drip, make sure we're defeated in detail. Because we're not trying to win, we're just "sending a message" to them. Sorry b-word, but the guys fighting there, the Americans, the ARVN guys, the civilians, the NVA guys, they deserved to have more with their life than "sending a message" for him. The response from Hanoi was always "no frick off, we're trying to actually win the war." And LBJ was like an neurodivergent male feminist redditor hoping that maybe if he fed more guys into the meat grinder that she'd reply.

All this for a war that he doesn't believe we can win. And every time any adult points out that we might win if we go into Laos, he pisses his pants and says that's too scary for him. There's gotta be at least half a million people killed because of his moral cowardice. Sending the guys there with zero plan at all of what that they were doing except killing and dying to "send a message".

I still see r-slurred children today saying that "Henry Kissinger was a war criminal" because that was some hippie mantra. WTF does it even mean? I think originally it was trying to deflect blame from Pol Pot onto him or something. I guarantee you none of these tards know what it even was supposed to mean.

I never hear any kid today point out that we could have avoided this huge war and all the people killed on both sides and between them if Johnson had made literally any other decision. Either get out or go big and invade North Vietnam. He was too much of a kitty for the former because it would mean admitting a mistake. The latter would be risky but probably would be like 100,000 killed instead of the millions killed in the war and the genocide in Cambodia, and the next genocide in Cambodia when the Vietnamese did it. But he was too much of a kitty for that too.

The last one is ironic (Ed: BECAUSE IT'S THE OPPOSITE, IT'S A REPUBLICAN GETTING BLAMED FOR STUFF A DEMOCRAT DID): Reagan catches all this shit for sending weapons to Afghanistan and El Salvador. You know who started that, dumbass? Jimmy Carter. The Soviets decided to throw away detente, the attempt to lessen tensions between the superpowers in the 1970s, and just go back to full Stalinist map-painting mode like they're playing goddarn Hearts of Iron. Starting huge wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua/El Salvador, invading Afghanistan, keeping their satellites going with Vietnam constantly fighting somebody. Those weapons weren't sent because Reagan, the actor who gets his face painted for his job, was more masculine than Carter, the nuclear submarine guy. It's because the Soviets started chimping out and you had to respond. But now leftoid kids think this was a bad thing so they assign blame for it to Reagan instead of Carter.

The coup and counter-coup in Korea right now vaguely reminds me of Iran in 1953.

You may have read in A People's History of the United States when your pinko high school history teacher assigned it to you, and what you've heard from every midwit in the media, that Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup plotted by the CIA to put the Shah into power because the oil companies wanted to make money. All of these things have a pretty big kernel of truth but way more important stuff was going on.

The Abadan refinery in 1950. At the time it was the largest in the world.

(I'm just gonna summarize this part really quick because it's undisputed: In 1951 Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry built and owned by Britain because they were just stealing it all and not paying royalties. The British together with the big (mostly American) oil companies organize a boycott so that other third world countries don't see this and get uppity. After two years, Iran is suffering badly because of the lack of money from oil among other things.)

Mohammed Mossadegh. He did this strange thing where he would say he was sick in bed and do his business from there. He did it even when visiting America. Maybe there was some meaning to it in his culture but if there was is it went way over everyone's head here. Or maybe it was just an extreme passive aggressive thing. You can understand why negotiating with this guy might be frustrating.

The oil nationalization thing was the big issue looming over everything, but not in the way you might think. Pretty much everyone across the different factions supported it, but there was infighting over whether Mossadegh was doing it competently. As well as a billion other issues. Iran was one of the more democratic countries in the world at the time and people had all kinds of different beliefs and things to fight over. Obviously the religious thing that blew up in 1963 with Ayatollah Khomeini didn't come out of nowhere.

Part of the fleet review for the coronation of Elizabeth II, 1953. This is the overwhelming power they were threatening to use.

Besides the situation in Iran, there was another crisis in a troubled country. Britain was still trying to figure out what its identity was after they lost India. A lot of people thought they should continue running a global empire. This wasn't some weird fringe Tory belief. Across the country there was deep resentment that they were losing their place in the world to the Americans and their anti-imperialism. Britain had been exploiting Iran's entire oil industry for about 40 years based on a deal they got through bribery and threats and paid only a tiny fraction of their profits to Iran. So Mossadegh nationalized it. The British went apeshit and told the Americans that they would have to invade because they couldn't dare lose face in front of the Orientals. So the US is trying to solve this situation without two allies going to war with each other. It's been two years now and it's deteriorating rapidly.

So Eisenhower eventually relents and orders the CIA to implement the coup the British had been begging for and partly planned. So the CIA gets together and plots with various army officers and politicians they think will back it. You can guess how well that goes. Other factions are tipped off and get their army units in the streets to put it down. The Shah flees the country into exile, presumably forever. Ironically, the whole reason why Eisenhower ordered the CIA to do all this wasn't because they wanted Mossadegh out. He was a pain in the butt but they could live with him. It's because Eisenhower was afraid the increasingly unstable, unpopular, and dictatorial regime was vulnerable to being overthrown by the communists and then everything would really go to heck. So the idea was that we would do it first.

Stuff like this was happening but with multiple factions.

But the failed attempt caused so much chaos, with tanks and various angry mobs from different factions roving around the streets of Tehran, that Tudeh (the commies) decided now was their chance and they tried their own coup, but that failed too. At the end of this game of musical chairs, Gen. Zahedi ended up in power, the guy the US had wanted all along. It's hard to say exactly how much American support helped him. The CIA was bribing newspapers and influential people in the time leading up to it which may have had some influence on events, but the actual coup they totally fricked. This all happened in 4 days.

Epilogue

Ashraf Pahlavi. Once at dinner in front of several foreign diplomats she yelled at her brother "Are you man or are you a mouse?" about some policy issue and stormed off. Would.

The Shah returned with Zahedi's permission, like a browbeaten cuck coming back from his shed. The Americans had never liked him. The CIA considered him to be a spineless coward and preferred dealing with his sister Ashraf, who was much more strong-willed and exerted a certain level of dominance over him. But something surprising happened over the next couple years. The Shah managed to lever Zahedi out of power and make himself an autocrat.

After the coup, BP was forced into giving up their monopoly of Iranian oil. They had been shamelessly screwing over the Iranians, using tactics like claiming that they couldn't pay anything because they weren't making a profit. The oil industry remained nationalized but Iran made a contract with the world's big oil companies (the "Seven Sisters") to operate it for them as a consortium. For various complicated reasons that are certainly way above your head, this meant that the Iranians got a way bigger share of the profits. It paved the way for them taking real control around 1970 and OPEC actually getting some teeth in the following years, under the leadership of the Shah to a large extent.

I dunno why monarchs these days always have to wear military uniforms. Your dad became famous for killing a lot of bandits with a machine gun when he was young, but who are you kidding?

The Shah would go on to be denounced as a puppet controlled by the US. I wish. The CIA said he had a (actual quote) "pathological fear and hatred of the British". He'd been brought up this way by his father, who had been deposed by the British. Delusional megalomaniac? Definitely. Somebody looking to be a puppet? No. CIA wasn't even allowed to spy on Iran. In the late 1970s he got cancer which he hid from his "puppetmasters" until it was too late and was overthrown. But that's a story for another time.

This is the only image of paratroopers landing in that war that Google will return now. Serious 1984 shit.

Britain, having been cockblocked out of invading Iran, was still desperate to use its (still very potent at the time) military power to thrash some wogs to show they were still dominant. This led to the disastrously r-slurred invasion of Egypt in 1956 in which the Americans spanked them and put them back in bed, ironically proving that Britain was no longer a global power that could do incredibly stupid evil stuff without American permission.

Addressing your whining

But Redactor! It was a rogue CIA operation!

Just like how sending Gary Powers out on that U-2 was a "rogue operation" until Eisenhower admitted he ordered it. This is an excuse that politicians use to protect themselves. Please grow up and don't be so naive.

But Redactor! He was democratically elected just like Allende! That should trump everything!

And then when things got tough he made himself dictator. Park Chung-hee was democratically elected. DeGaulle was democratically elected. Nixon was nowhere near a dictator but you're butthurt about him and he was democratically elected. Trump is too r-slurred to know when he's breaking the law and he's been democratically elected twice. It's funny how it's only people lefties want to identify with are the only ones who get a lifetime pass for being a dictator because they won an election once.

But Redactor! This is the reason why they hate us!

I know who obscure musician Sahba Motallevi who plays the tar is, which proves I must know what I'm talking about.

Give me a fricking break. Do you know any Iranians? They're some of my favorite people in the world but they are batshit insane about some things. I'm not usually into "Human Biodiversity" but I think they might have a genetic predisposition toward being paranoid. These are people who, when JFK Jr's plane crashed, their first question was who assassinated him. Where the Cinema Rex fire was so obviously done by Islamic militants that it must be a false flag. Where Jimmy Carter is a ruthless thug who secretly wants to stomp all of humanity under his jackboot. Where a really smart well-educated person asked me if Saddam Hussein had really gotten executed several years after it happened. They would have blamed America for something if we never did anything.

Also it's a country with a deep sense of persecution by foreign powers because they were basically colonized by Britain and Russia from ~1800-1945. Except it wasn't done openly. Everyone knew what was going on but it was behind the scenes. The kind of thing that makes you suspicious of foreign superpowers.

This kind of animosity isn't sparked by a single really complicated event. It gets into all kinds of really complicated psychology. Look at the left in South Korea and their reasons for hating America:

I wonder if a single one of these tards has ever even realized that they must have been wrong because the beef genocide never happened.

• We were really the bad guys in the Korean war. (Yet literally about 90% of people who actually lived through that think we were the good guys.)

• There was a traffic accident once and a little girl got run over by accident. (Car accidents never happen in Korea. Ajussi is totally fine to make it home after a few bottles of soju.)

• American beef has prions in it that specifically target the brains of Koreans and give them mad cow disease. (This was a real thing I'm not even exaggerating. It was a huge national issue and there were massive riots over it.)

I can't even begin to list the number of cases of people irrationally hating America when we did nothing wrong:

• British leftoids like John le Carre who were obviously butthurt that they lost their empire to America, so now they call us imperialists.

• That whole thing in France in the 1960s-1990s where their foreign policy was all about hating America.

• Indians who lived off of rice donated by America but were butthurt because we reminded them of the British or something.

• Canadians. I think that speaks for itself.

In Iran especially, their culture requires them to have a Britain to blame for their problems, so that's going to be the USA. And in South Korea they need a Japan to blame for their problems, so that's going to be the USA. (I mean seriously, hating Japan has turned into this pathogical need where some of them can't live without it.) !asians

Was it the right call?

So should we have done it? That's the $64 question, isn't it?

Eisenhower with the 101st Airborne chads before D-Day. This guy lived in a world where he had to make some extreme choices and they weren't just when to upmarsey or downmarsey.

Imagine being in Eisenhower's shoes. Stalin has just died a few months ago and presumably his heir is going to be like him. You were in a legit shooting war with the commies in Korea up until... 24 days ago. You're 8 years from leading a war on a continental level against another totalitarian regime and having to order the deaths of hundreds of thousands because that's how real shit was. There's a bunch of crises going on all over the world now. This one is especially dangerous because of the extreme strategic importance of Iran. Europe, the place you spent so much of your life fighting to protect, is dependent on Iranian oil. That war would have been a heck of a lot worse if you didn't have more oil than the other side so you know just how important this is. Given the information he had at the time and the imminent danger of WW3 breaking out, I think his decision was fairly reasonable.

Here's my view in hindsight: I don't think they should have done it. I think if there was a better understanding of Iranian culture they would have realized that there's such a large majority who will never accept communism that you don't have to worry about that unless they get invaded. They had a large portion of the population who are conservative Muslims (especially in rural areas). The educated elites liked freedom and democracy. There's actually a democratic tradition going back pretty far and while it was far from perfect it wasn't a complete joke. Beyond that, look at the virtually total failure of communist subversion throughout the Middle East. In the entire Cold War the only truly commie state they managed to take control of was South Yemen. These countries have a really good immune system against communism. Also they really really are not sympathetic toward Russia. You hear it to this day when somebody makes a deal with America and they say "It's another Treaty of Turkmenchay! !" And they are extremely nationalist. They are not interested in world socialism.

But don't take my word for it!! We have access to an actual honest assessment from within CIA about what happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kush

The Kingdom of Kush, also known as the Kushite Empire, or simply Kush, was an ancient kingdom in Nubia, centered along the Nile Valley in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt.

The region of Nubia was an early cradle of civilization, producing several complex societies that engaged in trade and industry. The city-state of Kerma emerged as the dominant political force between 2450 and 1450 BC, controlling the Nile Valley between the first and fourth cataracts, an area as large as Egypt. The Egyptians were the first to identify Kerma as "Kush" probably from the indigenous ethnonym "Kasu", over the next several centuries the two civilizations engaged in intermittent warfare, trade, and cultural exchange.

So Mr. Xi Jinping reportedly told PM Narendra Modi that he wished to visit Vadnagar, Mr. Modi’s village, as Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang once stayed there. And when Hiuen Tsang returned to China, he supposedly resided in Xi’s village.
Interesting historical link btwn the two. pic.twitter.com/gmVHxqfDjh

— Mudit (@muditfx) January 10, 2025

Ahh those were the days my friend.