Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

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> diaspora Iranians in LA

Mostly Jewish Iranians. Not an entirely representative demographic.

> the CIA and/or US State Dept. also complains

Only if your game documents the visit by American General Huyser [1] in the winter of '79 to Tehran and his direct communication to the Iranian generals of Washington's position regarding the future of Pahlavi regime.

You will understand nothing about world events since mid-70s until you wrap your head around US's decision to throw the Shah under the bus and prop up the Ayatollah regime. (Little hint for you here: have you noted IRI's enemies, Sadaam, Taliban, etc. falling off like flies at the hand of America while the robbed ones maintain their retarding [2] regime in Iran?)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Huyser

[2]: Simply can not even imagine where Iran would be today if it had not suffered from more than 3 decades of sanctions, an entire generation maimed and killed in Iran-Iraq war, the continuing brain drain, and crippling sanctions based on the sock puppet regimes duly voiced "death to America" idiotic chanting. But you can be certain that it would be a very serious player on the world stage.

See also:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19780808&id=...

http://masoudbehnoud.com/weblog/s2.pdf

Regrettably this is in Farsi but here is the "playboy" "dictator" giving his ultimatum to Western Oil companies and nations regarding what to expect in 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM8R8Noe1w8

>You will understand nothing about world events since mid-70s until you wrap your head around US's decision to throw the Shah under the bus and prop up the Ayatollah regime.

Yes, the United States replaced a friendly regime with a hostile one, that makes sense. The Shah was doing so well, much beloved by the Iranian people, so believed that his secret police force SAVAK in some ways compares unfavorably to the SS and the NKVD in terms of forms of elaborateness and systemization of torture.

The narrative you're suggesting doesn't have internal coherence, unless you're saying that Jimmy Carter conspired with Ronald Reagan to lose the election and that when the western powers did arms deals with Iraq in the 1980s they didn't really sell them any weapons, somehow...it just doesn't make any sense to anyone in possession of even a few facts that a neutral party would consider undisputed.

The Shah was a brutal, incompetent, and out-of-touch dictator who paid lip-service to western values while committing countless crimes, going agains the wishes of the overwhelming majority, and failing to invest in even the most basic infrastructure.

And this game looks great, precisely because it deals with the complexities involved in being an average person having to balance two very different forms of dictatorship, neither of which believes in free association, free speech, or free elections, and is willing to commit mass murder to get it's way.

> Yes, the United States replaced a friendly regime with a hostile one, that makes sense.

Read up:

https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Chessboard-American-Geostrategi...

> SS and NKVD [and "brutal"]

This sort of b.s. psychological manipulations could be passed around before the internet as agitprop but those days are over. SS ran concentration camps, among other things. Kindly point to documented events that would even remotely approach the atrocities of SS or NKVD. (Google may also have some nice ultra violent pictures for your viewing pleasure courtesy of US armed forces and intelligence services in Iraq. From what WAPO published back in the day, when select members of US congress got to see the unpublished pics after Abu Gharaib hit the fan, they emerged "shaken", "pale", and "speechless".)

> the western powers did arms deals with Iraq in the 1980s

And Israel funneled American arms to "hostile" IRI during the same period. Regardless, the essential requirement was, and remains, for instability in the region.

Shah was a nationalist and that didn't fit in with the Globalist agenda.

> brutal & mass murder

Even the sum total of all state violence of Shah's 37 year reign pales to utter insignificance compared to the 4 year record of any American president starting with the Atom Bomb dropping shoe salesman and culminating with the current Nobel Peace Prize winner.

> incompetent

Fairly, he suffered from grandiosity and talked too much. But you can google for declassified assessments of this man. Incompetence was never on the list.

Yes, and do you remember what the Iranian generals (airfare I think) said back to Huyser in front of everyone?

Lol I meant air force

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