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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

TBF the big shots have been putting their mouths into Iran much earlier than that. The British and USSR even had a plan to invade Iran because they were close to Germany back in the day. Of course German posing itself as the liberator because it wants the oil but Britain was blocking it from do so.

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The British and Soviet Union did invade and occupy Iran during the war. It was focused on controlling the railroads, but it led to the then Shah to abdicate.

Ah yeah my bad memory.

And let's not forget the great famine of Iran thanks to the British and Soviet invasion of Iran during WW2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_famine_of_1942%E2%80%9...

* 4 million Iranians died as a result. Not a single mention of them on media, movies, etc.

Interesting aside about Germany from that time, but the word “Iran” is a reference to a people called Aryans that lived there, and the latter remains a not-uncommon name there. As a Westerner I found this a bit confusing since I don’t associate Iran with the kind of people over here that would use the term Aryan

That's because you don't know any esoteric nazis (lucky you). Look into Savitri Devi. It's a common trope to think that neo-nazis only like caucasaians to the exclusion of everyone else; in reality a lot of them are into ethno-pluralism as long as its combined with separatism and oppression of 'inferior' ethnic groups. The same people that grumble about race mixing being degenerate (by other people) will also endorse scientific selective breeding for the production of superior genetic stock (by themselves). A lot of political extremism is rooted in reproductive frustration.

It’s a whole thing with white supremacy in general to try to claim direct lineage with these early civilizations that are considered great as a proof of superiority [1][2]. Unfortunately much of the conceptual framework of race was not at all limited to Nazis at the time; generally Western anthropologists assumed racial superiority of whites and claimed Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc as white civilizations and evidence for that belief [3].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_archaeology

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

That's because Hitler co-opted the term "Aryan" to refer not to an Indic people but to his preferred Nordic blonde white archetype. Since then the word has been closely associated with Nazi ideals of racial superiority in the west.

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