Episode 117: All the Shah's Men

We keep coming back to the same places, don't we? History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Stephen Kinzer's book All The Shah's Men was published in 2003 and then updated and republished in 2008. The update included "The Folly of Attacking Iran" essay. 

So why are we there again? Is it, as Whitney Webb suggested, insider trading combined with a distraction from mass surveillance? 

Housekeeping items:

➡️ I have been shadowbanned. If you enjoy this podcast or any of my other work, please share it. 

➡️ If you're a publicist, please be advised that we discuss conspiracy theories here. (Duh.) Don't pitch someone who isn't interested and/or acts like a flake. 

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Mini%C3%A8re_du_Haut-Katanga

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14229543

https://youtu.be/qNMR6Ayfj4Y?si=C71NR1HVEmQ9ygo3

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18417740

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses Stephen Kinzer's book All the Shah's Men, which explores the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran, its impact on the Middle East, and the rise of anti-American sentiment. Causey highlights the book's argument that the coup, aimed at nationalizing Iranian oil, led to long-term instability and the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She also addresses her own shadow banning and the challenges of promoting her work. Causey connects the coup to current tensions between the US, Israel, and Iran, emphasizing the role of corporate interests and the manipulation of public perception. She concludes by urging listeners to read the book and form their own conclusions.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Shadow banning, word of mouth, Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men, 1953 coup, Iran, oil nationalization, CIA, Operation Ajax, Shah Pahlavi, SAVAK, Islamic Revolution, anti-American sentiment, Cold War, corporate interests.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Stephen kinzer's book, all the Shaw's men, an American coup, and the roots of Middle East T word. It was published originally in 2003 the edition that I have, let's see, it contains a new preface called the folly of attacking Iran, and it was published, I believe, in 2008 and yet, here we go again. Just keep coming back to these same places over and over again, don't we? It's like the cliche that history might not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Before I get into the meat and potatoes of tonight's episode, I have a couple of housekeeping items that are important. A number one, to the surprise of no one, probably no one. I have been shadow banned. We cannot count on new listeners coming strictly through organic means, one of the chief ways that this podcast has grown to be in the top 25% of all podcasts hosted by Buzzsprout is through word of mouth. It's been through good people like you who say, I like this and I want other people to know about it. So please, if there's an episode that speaks to you, share it. Or if you want to just share the podcast in general, please do that. It really is through word of mouth, people telling friends, family members, like minded folk, or even if there's somebody you know that, quite frankly, needs to have the scales removed from before their eyes, they need to see a little bit clearer than they have been. Share it. We will get the word out by sharing. I have also been shadow banned for my hammer shoulder work. Also, to the surprise of absolutely no one, you can always find information about any and all of my books at my author web page, Sara causey.com you can find my hammer should work more specifically at decoding the unicorn.com. That's home based, not only for decoding the unicorn the book, but also for my upcoming release simply DAG. I have a blog there with a lot of great information and articles about DAG, his life, his legacy, and I have absolutely learned the hard way that even optimizing for SEO, Geo, AEO, etc. Yes, those things can work, and they take a while before they do. But when you're actively being suppressed, you have such a huge mountain to try to climb. So if you're ever interested in that facet of the work that I do, please make sure that you bookmark Sara causey.com and decoding the unicorn.com and again, if you know of anybody that might benefit from the work that I do, please share that information, because trying to get it out there organically, it's not going to happen. It's going to have to be through real grassroots efforts as well as paid ads. That's the reality. Secondarily, if you are a publicist who dips into this podcast occasionally and you want to pitch a guest, that's fine, please know that I decline 97 to 98% of the requests that I get because most of them make no sense. It's clear to me that you haven't been listening to this podcast and you don't know what's going on. So if you're going to pitch somebody, you need to know what this podcast is and what it's about. We do talk about conspiracy theories. If whoever it is that you're pitching feels like that topic is beneath them, don't come here. Also have your stuff together. If you pitch somebody and they ghost me, or you ghost me and nothing ever gets scheduled, I will block you. I will not listen to you again. It is a one time, only time offer, and if you waste my time, that's the end of the road. Now, with the housekeeping out of the way, let us sit down, get our frosty beverage of choice and saddle up and take this ride.

Just a reminder, Sara is award-winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now, back to the show.

I'll have to bounce around a little bit in this episode, because there's a lot going on, there's a lot to discuss, there's a lot to unpack. Essentially, all the Shaw's men gives us an account of the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran, which is supposedly the first time. Time that the Charlie India Alpha ever overthrew a foreign government, we can just broadly wink at that. One of Stephen kinser's main arguments is that this particular event was a catalyst, and it changed the entire landscape of the Middle East. And it also planted the seeds for what would become the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and then in turn, the rise of anti American, anti western world sentiment in that region. I wanted to read this book and have the opportunity to record a podcast about it, because gestures broadly. Here we are, the mess that's going on between the US, Israel and Iran, and then all the finger pointing to go along some people who say it's all Israel's idea, and they are basically in charge of the United States. The United States is along for the ride. Other people who say it's that, but it's on the opposite end of the spectrum. The US is in charge, and Israel is just going along with it. Conspiracy theories about whether Netanyahu is even still alive, and when you see his image, it's a hologram or something that's AI generated. You may have also seen the meme that's been going around social media of all these presidents, like from Carter on forward, saying that Iran is a nuisance. They're a menace. They're a problem. Someone should do something about it. And then the orange MAN steps up in Righteous Fury to finally right the wrong and you have right wing Maga people who are like, You should support the Orange Man, because he's anti war. He's not going to get us in these perma wars, forever wars, like when Poppy said, Read my lips, no new taxes. Yeah, he really meant that, didn't he? Well, here we go again. And some of the same people, not all of them, to be clear, but some of the same people are now like, well, he's anti war and pro peace. So if he's going to war with somebody, there has to be a damn good reason for it, really. At some point, recording an episode about the apparent civil war within the Maga movement might be interesting to do. There seems to be a lot of people at each other's throats to decide the nature of the movement and where it goes next. It's hard to record those types of episodes without getting partisan, and it's also difficult to record those types of episodes and not get thrown off the air. You know, there are just certain things that I I can't. Have to be careful. You know, I have to talk and code, and I know that that's frustrating for some of you, but it has to be done. As I said in the housekeeping section, I'm already fucking shadow banned. I I don't want to get kicked off the air and not have any platform at all, so I have to be careful about things like I don't want to be quote, unquote safe, but I don't want to push the limits either. But it is interesting to me to see some people falling on one side or the other about this war. And then you have certain individuals that are loyal to the orange MAN No matter what, and then others that have finally said, Wait a minute, why are we in Iran? What is this all about? I'm going to try to get to that question as well, because it's important, but I don't want to pull too much away from all the Shaw's men. So one of the key factors that launched this whole situation back in the 1950s oil and nationalism follow the money. We can get complex about things sometimes, but that's not always necessary. Money isn't everything, but it does count for a hell of a lot, especially in the theater of war. So in the early 1950s Iran was a fledgling or burgeoning democracy that was led by Mohammed Mossadegh, and he was this charismatic, articulate nationalist style of Prime Minister, and that is an important part of the central conflict of the book, Because the central conflict, essentially, of the book revolves around most a day and the Anglo Iranian oil company, a, i, o, C, which is now known as wait for it, B, P, I shouldn't tell you this on the air. I really shouldn't, but I'm going to anyway. I'm going to spill some tea. There was a lady who, speaking of publicists, there was this lady who pitched me some bull crap. In my opinion, that's what it was. It was, it was bull crap. In my opinion, about AI has displaced a lot of workers, but I know somebody who's trying to use AI to get people back. To work after AI has displaced them, which reminded me of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Remember if you caught the patty culliver episode? That's one of the things we talked about academics who quote each other in some fart filled echo chamber, and that is just reminding me of the Ouroboros. Yet again, you've been laid off and displaced by AI, but don't worry, AI will be your friend again when it helps you find your next job. I responded back to her and said, I'm not interested in this because it sounds like what BP did, which was a reference to when BP dumped all that oil and made a huge environmental mess and then tried to do like some you know, good publicity, feel good environmental cleanup shit. And I'm like, no thanks. Britain holds this monopoly on Iranian oil, and it pays Iran only a fraction of the profits, while it maintains this sort of colonial style control over the oil refineries, most a day is not a fool, and so he seeks to audit the documents of the a, i, o, C, to find out, are they paying us what they have been contracted to pay us, or are they shorting us? He also wanted to limit their control over the Iranian oil reserves. However, the a, i, o, C, refuses to cooperate with the government, so the parliament votes to nationalize Iran's oil industry and also to expel foreign corporate representatives from Iran. Oh, this doesn't sit well with the Western world. Now I want to pull off the track just for a second and talk about union mini air, because this is another example in history. Union mini air controlled and operated the mining industry in that copper belt region of the Congo. And you have to understand that when we are talking about large corporate interests that are making millions, or, adjusted for inflation, potentially billions of dollars in a potential industry in a particular area of the country or area of the world, they don't just roll over. They don't take kindly to anyone or anything that can put a damper on their money train. And these powerful interests are not above doing whatever it takes to make sure that their interests are not compromised. We will see this again with what happens in the Guatemalan coup d'etat. The Guatemalan coup d'etat in 1954 involved the toppling of Jacopo Arbenz because the United Fruit Company did not want their banana business to be compromised in that part of the world, I recorded an episode about it as one of the early episodes that I did on this podcast, and I will make sure that you have a link to it. I'll put a link to it in the write up for the write up for this particular episode. But it's like corporate interests don't give a shit. All of this is really amoral. It's like whatever we have to do to keep making crap loads of money, that's what we're going to do. We don't give a fuck about some democratically elected leader. We don't care about the citizenry. This is all a very cold, calculating behemoth, and what happens to the people who have to suffer the consequences from what we do is of no consequence to us. This is all about the money, the power and the control. Whenever I figured out that this podcast did in shadow band and my work about Dag hammarsk had been shadow band. I was like, Well, shit. You know, I've been down this road before. Whenever I just had one of my daytime broadcasts, the Causey consulting podcast, I talked for quite a while about the job market and about the lies, just the fucking bullshit lies that we're being told, 3.5% unemployment rate turning and burning, doing great to open jobs for every one unemployed person. This is just ripping and roaring. And I'm like, No, the fuck it isn't. It isn't. Before shadow stats gave up on trying to measure unemployment and left the scene. They were talking about unemployment at like 30 to 35% and I'm like, yeah, that tracks, but people don't want to hear that. They think that would be like the Great Depression. People would be standing in bread lines and soup lines, and we would have this overt poverty. I also made the argument that. We're in a silent depression. They're not reporting on it. They're not telling you, hey, shits bad out there. It just is. And I'm saying all this to say corporate America doesn't give two shits about you. So I understand if you're here on the regular then you're smarter than the average bear, and you already know that. But maybe somebody who's brand new just tuning in, just waking up to reality needs a reminder. They care about the shareholders, the board of directors. They don't answer to me and you okay, and whatever they got to do to keep getting that money, they'll do it. So most a day, nationalizes the oil industry in 1951 under a very coherent argument, quite frankly, that Iran's resources belong to its own people. The nerve we've seen how that has played out across the continent of Africa as well. The Western world has treated Africa like it's a vault to be raided or or a casino like the people there, are marginalized and not even treated as people. It's all about, what can we raid out of that continent's natural resources? It's just really disgusting the way that they have been treated. The British reaction to this nationalization obviously not good. They have this attempted economic blockade, and they unsuccessfully try to overthrow Mosa day, they infiltrate with spies. I think I can say that. Probably, yeah, I can probably say that without getting kicked off. They infiltrate with spies, but the spies are flushed out of Iran. So what do the Brits do? They turn to good old Uncle Sam for help. Entre view operation Ajax, when the Charlie India Alpha steps in. So initially, the Truman administration is sympathetic and somewhat friendly with Mosa day. But when Dwight Eisenhower takes over, the British were able to successfully finesse him better, and they reframe the issue. So instead of it being like we're pissed because of our profits, we want that money we got. We got to get that bread. Yo, instead of instead of it being about money, the argument they make to Eisenhower is that most of the day is weak, and Iran has this treasure trove of resources, and it is at risk of falling to the Soviet Union. Here we go the good old Cold War days. If we can convince Uncle Sam that Iran will fall to the Soviets, and they will be able to raid the treasure chest and get all of this good oil, then maybe they'll do something. So the Charlie India Alpha dispatches Kermit Roosevelt, and he was the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, so Kermit goes off to Tehran to lead operation Ajax. One part of the strategy is to use literal suitcases of money to send Kermit Roosevelt with suitcases of cash money to bribe whoever he needs to military officers, journalists. Imagine that. Imagine the need to bribe the mainstream media in a country to do your bidding. Imagine so he goes with a suitcase of money to try to bribe military officers, journalists and even just local heavies, mafioso type dudes, and he coordinates these fake pro communist riots to scare the public, and then he follows these fake pro communist riots with fake pro Shaw counter protests. Let's also just take a beat here and think about where else have we seen this kind of strategy. Remember, with Oswald? Oswald is like, out on the street corner busking for Castro. And it's like, wait a minute, what? On August 16, 1963 Oswald goes out to distribute these fair play for Cuba leaflets on the street in New Orleans, and he has like two hired helpers, and he's outside the international trade March there. The two other dudes that were with him as his helpers were like some unidentified Cuban man, and then also a man named Charles Hall Steele Jr, who supposedly, Oswald found at an like an unemployment office and paid like two bucks for 15 minutes of his time, and he goes on the radio the next day and gets interviewed by a disc jockey who's probing his background. And this all is used as later evidence that he. Was, in fact, some kind of communist sympathizer, Castro fan. So this notion of orchestrating pro communist rhetoric to scare the public, it wasn't anything new by the time that that strategy was utilized with Lee Harvey Oswald, there's a kind of initial failure of Operation Ajax. Kermit Roosevelt ignores orders from back home to leave, and he just doubles down on August 19 of 1953 the Charlie India Alpha backed forces successfully storm most a day's house and arrest him. I'm going to hop over to Wikipedia for a minute on their tab about the 1953 Iranian coup just just to give a little bit of a counterpoint here, according to you Wilford in his book published in 2013 and that, by the way, is a reference to the book called America's great game. So according to Hugh Wilford and his book published in 2013 despite the Charlie India alpha's role in creating the conditions for the coup, there was little evidence to prove that Kermit Roosevelt Jr, or other Charlie India Alpha officials were directly responsible for the actions of the demonstrators or the army on August 19. It has even been suggested that Roosevelt's activities between the 15th and 19th of August were primarily intended to organize stay behind the networks as part of the planned Charlie India Alpha evacuation of the country, although they allowed him to later claim responsibility for the day's outcome. End quote, right. Okay, sure. Even though it's kind of like, you can believe that, if you want to, it's a free country, think what you want to think that, oh, there's little evidence. Okay, sure, of course, stay behind networks. God damn it, yet again. It's like, haven't we seen this movie before. I hope that you have listened to the trilogy of episodes that I recorded about the BBC documentary on Operation Gladio. It remains to this day one of the most disturbing things that I've ever seen. You know, it's like the question people ask, what radicalized you? For me, it was Dave McGowan's book program to kill. I do intend to record a series of episodes about that book, but it's not something that I can do contiguously. I have to dip into that book, maybe, like, read one or two chapters and then dip out for a while, because it just disturbs me. The subject matter is disturbing, the details of murders and true crimes, horribly disturbing. It's not something that I can just sit and read and dwell on after you read from it a little bit. You have to go and hold a fuzzy puppy or a playful kitten. You're like you need to see that the grass is still green and the sky is still blue after you've been in it. The second thing that disturbed me to the core was that BBC documentary about Operation Gladio to find out that we were paying shit tons of money to people like Klaus Barbie and the Black Prince. I just I can't imagine it. You think about the people living in poverty, in the US, people struggling to find food to eat, homeless veterans, people who, whether you agreed with whatever war they fucking went off to or not, people who said, I'm willing to make the sacrifice and go to war, and they come home and they don't have a home, but yet you can pay all this goddamn money to the butcher of Leone and the Black Prince. Oh, my God, even talk about right now, God, damn it, that shit makes me mad. So, all right, anyway, to organize stay behind networks. This shit just it keeps on going, man, it just keeps on going. All right, so with most of day removed Shah Pahlavi returns from a brief exile to assume power, and not only to assume power, but to assume absolute power. Over the next like 25 years, the Shah turns Iran into this pro Western, secular but increasingly oppressive autocracy. Disturbingly, he also creates the say back, which, for all intents and purposes, was like the secret police of Iran, in a way we could compare it to the Gestapo or the squats put together by somebody like Augusto Pinochet in Chile. So the Shah creates the Save act with help BT dubs from the Charlie India alpha and Mossad, and the Save Act becomes notorious for torturing and silencing political dissidents the United States increasingly. Views the Shaw as this quote, unquote, pillar of stability in the Middle East. They turn a blind eye to the domestic resentment towards his rule and his western world backers. Now one of kinser's primary arguments is that the 1953 coup was a short term success. And I'm I'm using very liberally here, huge Eric quotes around the word success. It was a short term success that led to a long term catastrophe. Kinser believes that by crushing the more secularized democratic movement led by most a day the US left Iranians with only one avenue for dissent, and that was the mosque, and that in turn, paved the way for someone like the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Islamic Revolution also anti Americanism. The 1979 hostage crisis was not a random act of aggression, but rather a direct reaction to the memory of 1953 protesters were afraid that the US would plan another coup to reinstall the Shah. Kinser traces a direct line from the coup in 1953 to the radicalization of the Middle East, and he suggests that the roots of the T word mentioned in the title are found in the destruction of the Iranian democracy for the sake of oil, and to a lesser degree, Cold War geopolitics. In a way, he portrays Mosa day as a tragic hero, a man who believed in western democratic ideals only to be crushed by the nations that supposedly stood for them, nations that preached them but didn't really practice what they preached. The book serves as a cautionary tale about the unintended, decades long consequences of regime change and foreign intervention. There is a passage on page 204, of the paperback copy that I have the world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression, as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the west and to Western oil companies that helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and towards dictatorship. I'm also now going to read just the little beginning part here of the preface to the 2008 edition the folly of attacking Iran. More than half a century has passed since the United States deposed the only democratic government Iran ever had. This book describes that fateful operation and reviews its disastrous consequences. It tells a story that should serve as an object lesson. Violent intervention in Iran seemed like a good idea in 1953 and for a time it appeared to have succeeded. Now, however, it is clear that this intervention not only brought Iran decades of tragedy, but also set in motion forces that have gravely undermined American national security as militants in Washington urge a second American attack on Iran. The story of the first one becomes more urgently relevant than ever. It shows the folly of using violence to try to reshape Iran. In 1953 the United States sought to promote its strategic interests by attacking the Iranian regime of which it disapproved. The results were exactly the opposite of those for which American leaders had hoped. End quote, the powers that be, like warfare. They like bloodshed. They like stirring people up. They like divisiveness. When you have any kind of conflict like this in the Middle East, we see the same old things that play out every time anti semitism and Islamophobia. It's like that just the ordinary citizens of these countries become demonized. Everybody gets lumped together and demonized. All Jews feel this way, or all Israelis feel this way, or all Arabs feel this way, or all Iranians feel this way, or all Muslims feel this way. And it's like you know that that isn't even true, but it makes for one hell of a headline, and it makes people scared. It gives them a boogeyman. It gives them somebody to say, that's our enemy, that's the problem, and it's true on the other side of the spectrum as well. All Americans are like this. Everybody in the decadent west behaves like that, which that isn't true either. So what are we even doing there? This time, I saw a video recently on YouTube published by only the savvy. I'll drop a link to it, obviously in the write up for this episode, so you can go and watch it yourself. Where they they interview Whitney Webb, who's written pretty extensively about TEFRA. Epstein, and she makes the accusation that Trump is swinging the markets. He's doing insider trading. He can post something on social media, or truth social, or whatever, and really say anything, make any accusation, and then profiteer in the interview, she also brings up Peter Thiel, and that evidently, from what we know from the Epstein files, he and old Epstein were planning to create a secret site society together. I plan to do an episode maybe here in the next month or two, to ask the question, why is Peter Thiel obsessed with the Antichrist? Does anybody else find that fucked up and scary, just saying, she talks about wealth transfer as well as the devastating effects that this type of war will have on the economy. It's like the other cliche, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Whitney also points out that Dawn Jr sits on the board of a company that allows people to bet on world events. In addition to all of this, because she she points out that, in her opinion, the Orange Man is just turning the white house into a giant trading desk. And if you did not catch the episode that I recorded about the prescience of Bob Roberts. I'll drop a link to that as well. Please go back and check it out. It's a long episode, but totally worth it. That movie is so on the nose. It's not a wonder that it's difficult to find. In addition to that, the insider training the rich getting richer, and making sure that people are getting their cash from driving up prices, driving down prices, shorting stock, betting on major world events and so forth. She also brings up the psyop part of this, like it's a distraction while you're paying attention to who's really in charge. Is this all happening because of Israel? Is it all happening because of the US? I'm against this country. I'm against that country. Blah, blah, blah. Well, you're paying attention to all of that. You have mass surveillance happening through AI and all of these data centers getting shit out, taking up land and water and resources, driving people's electric bills through the roof. And smart cities, as she says, What is it really going to matter whether you're living in a Jeff Bezos Smart City and Elon Musk Smart City, a Sergey Brin smart city, like six and one half a dozen the other they're talking about mass surveillance and making jokes about like, whenever we get our smart cities in place, and AI is constantly surveilling you. You better really watch what you're what you say. Well, obviously that's the type of thing that it said with a wink, but it's not meant as an actual, real joke, in any case, on and on, this goes turning people against each other, making sure that there's not enough unity to really get anything going. Because imagine if there was, I've said before, you're not going to beat the system if a sitting US President couldn't do it, if a sitting UN Secretary General couldn't do it. John and Jane Q Public are not going to be able to do it either. What I would add to that is alone, we can't united. We bargain. Divided, we beg. Except in this case, we don't want to bargain. We want some real change. We're tired of forever wars. We're tired of people being crippled in the economy, whatever happened in the middle class. Man, the American dream, like George Carlin said, it's called the American dream, because you got to be asleep to believe it. I think, as Whitney says, part of this is a distraction, and part of it also is insider trading. You can bet that somebody in the halls of power is making a crapload of money off of this. I think that where I might, let me think about how I want to say this, where, where I might skew a little differently from Stephen Kinzer, you know, his idea is the coup in 53 seemed to be a success initially, but it led to a lot of long term divisiveness that, in turn, gave way to the Islamic Revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I don't think that any of those types of things happen on accident. And I also don't think that Uncle Sam looks at it as a negative or something that takes away from the original mission. Mm. What I mean by that is they set up a system so that it doesn't matter who wins or who loses. They still win. They play both sides against the middle, and they don't care. I did an episode quite some time back about GI Joe, Rise of the cobra, and one of the things that Destro says in that episode, that's so true is it's not that you don't sell arms to both sides, it's that you don't get caught selling arms to both sides. So like, even in Hollywood action movie schlock, they're telling you how the world actually works. And then when you point out, hey, they're telling you how the world actually works, then it's like, Well, that wasn't a silly Hollywood schlock movie. You're You're ridiculous to take that seriously. Okay, sure, whatever. It's not that you don't do it. It's that you don't get caught doing it. They win either way. So this idea of, oh, it was just, it was a broadside to Uncle Sam. What happened in 1979 I would argue that it wasn't because, look at how much pay dirt they've hit on all of that conflict, Jew versus Arab, Jew versus Muslim, Israeli versus Arab, on and on. This shit goes. It's like, can you imagine if everybody unified and said we're not taking it anymore. We're not listening to the division. We're going to come together and not let religious differences separate us. Because one of the things that I've noticed, and I have been to symposiums before locally that involved all people of the book, Jews, Christians and Muslims. And when you get people sitting in a room talking, it's not like all this insanity that you see on television, what you find is that you have stuff in common with other people that are not part of your faith, but they don't want us to have those types of conversations. They don't want us to figure out like, Hey, I actually like you, and you actually like me, and we have some things in common. We might not believe in the same scriptures, or we might have differing ideas about God, but at the end of the day, we do have some things in common vis a vis the human experience, the conflict, the bloodshed, the genocide. They make money off of that. And we can go deeper. We can go into something that's more esoteric than that, more occult, if you will. You have people that like violence and bloodshed for its own sake, in kind of a chaos magic type way. But you also have people who look at it more like a ritual, an occult ritual like a death cult. They like death and destruction and bloodshed. It feeds them. It feeds what they believe they're worshiping. So no, I would differ from Kinzer in that I don't think that, oh, this just this 1979 revolution with the Ayatollah Khomeini happened, and then it set Iran back all these decades, and it led to a more oppressive regime. I don't think that that happened on accident, or that it was, Oh, my God, like, who could have seen this coming? And and, wow, let's all be surprised by it. I don't think that any major thing like that happens on accident. Just my two cents, all the Shaw's men is definitely a book worth reading. It is interesting. It's worth your time and your money to track it down. Come to your own conclusions. As always, do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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