All the Shah's Men Reading/Questions 2

So far, I've really enjoyed reading All the Shah's Men.  I've found it to be more readable than most other books that we read for history class.  It actually reads like a story rather than like a textbook and it isn't crammed to the brim with facts.  It allows the reader to go more than a page without having to stop to think about what happened in what he/she just read.  I just read the fourth chapter titled "A Wave of Oil" and was amazed by some of the things that I learned from it.  For instance, APOC (now BP) owned MOST of the country of Iran for a significant period of time (that time being not too long ago).  BP was basically its own country with a different name slapped on the front.

As a side note, it's always weird studying things that happened really recently for me.  Because it makes me realize how much has changed in not a lot of time.  It also makes me wonder if things like that can happen again or ARE happening and I just don't know about it.  It's a scary thing to think about as a kid.

Anyway, back to the reading.  I found it interesting that England basically forced Reza Shah into selling them iranian land by helping him when he was in trouble so that he would have to repay them somehow.  It's like something right out of the Godfather.  I hope we talk about this more in class...

Historical Interventions of Iran

Today in class, we did a fun activity revolving around a reading that we did in Iran:  Through the Looking Glass.  The activity was to write as many "overtakings" of Iran as we could using only the reading from the previous night.  We had to have the date of the new rule, the foreign powers involved, the type of intervention (military, religious, etc.), the incentive for the foreign power to overtake Iran, the role of the Iranian government in the overtaking, and the reactions of the Iranian people for each one.  Zoë and I found six different instances in which this happened.  We then discussed in class some of the major ones that we all should have had.  As a homework question / blog prompt, Mr. Moran asked us this question.

What is the cumulative effect of all of these events and how does it affect the people of Iran.  Why does this lead to a constitutional revolt?

Which got me thinking for the rest of the day about what the right answer should be.  What I've finally worked it down to is that because the people of Iran have had so many leaders with so many different cultural inputs and separate rules, nobody really knows what to think anymore.  So they revolt.  This is natural human nature even within a single person.  If the brain receives conflicting messages from different parts of the body, it doesn't know what to do so it reverts to PAIN.  If you dunk one hand in ice water and one hand in hot water, your hands both HURT REALLY BADLY.  Same thing is happening with the people of Iran.  If their constitution is so messed up from so many different people's inputs, then nobody can know what is OK and not OK.  It'd be like if every year growing up, children got a new set of parents with different rules and punishments.  The child would eventually flip out. 

     Those examples may seem a bit extreme, but in reality the people who controlled Iran were such a wide range of rulers from Native Tribes to the British and the Russians at the same time.  That'd just be crazy to try to deal with.  Hopefully, we'll continue on this subject tomorrow (today, technically)

Today in our History class, we had a long discussion about why the country of Iran is so different from the other countries surrounding it.  I made a list of ways that it was different along with my other notes, all of which are at school - unusable.  So I'll do my best to recall things from memory.  (I understand why you wanted us to use paper and pencils instead of computers, but I'm not very good at holding onto papers - especially when I don't have a binder for that class.  Anyway, I found some of the differences very interesting - things that I never knew or at least didn't remember.  Iranians are NOT ARAB.  Iran is NOT AN ARAB COUNTRY.  This is a really important fact, since there seems to be a certain negative connotation with the word Arab, at least in our part of the world.  Arabs came from Arabia, now known as Saudi Arabia (Arabia run by the Sauds).  We talked a lot about the differences in religion and how 90% of the country is Shia Muslim as opposed to Sunni Muslim (90% everywhere else in the world).  I don't know if we discussed this or not, but I really wonder WHY this country's religion is so skewed from the rest of the Middle East.  Also, we're not supposed to group the "Middle East" into one clump because it is comprised of so many different religions and countries and beliefs.  I understand that, I guess.  It'd be like if people said "The Americas" as a generalization since there are so many different cultures represented even within North America, let alone South America.  We also talked about the difference in who they think should follow up as the next Khalif - somebody chosen from a specific group of people or somebody related to the current Khalif.  Again, I don't know WHY these opinions differ, but they do. There was one more thing that I would like to look farther into the history of, and that is the origin of the word "Aryan".  Because apparently, before World War II, Aryan meant something completely different.  Maybe I'll bring it up in class again this week.

Questions about Iran

I was told that we could do a blog about some of the questions that we had regarding the topic of Iran.

1)  If it was pretty widely known that the elections were rigged, then why didn't anybody (or country) do anything?  Couldn't we have the UN supervise their elections to make sure that they were fair?

2)  What effect did the events in Iran have on the rest of the world?  I know that there were many other uprisings against governments in the middle east right around and after this happened, but was this the spark that caused all of the others?

3)  Were there other solutions to killing protestors that wouldn't have caused such a big riot?

4)  What is the deal with the Basiji?  Who are they, who pays them, and what is their exact job?

5)  What would Iran be like if the other guy had won the election?  How much would it have changed?

I'll try to answer some of these later on in the year or bring them up in class discussions because I actually would like them answered.

Iran Video Comments

Yesterday we watched a video/documentary on what happend a few years ago in Iran.  The main focus of the documentary was on the death of a 26 year old girl named Neda who was killed in a peaceful protest by the makeshift police force, the Basiji, who were present in Iran at the time of the protests.  Following the story of Neda's day, we saw exactly what was happening at the time of the protests - much of which was pretty gruesome.  The video itself showed multiple deaths straight up - no blurring or anything.  I had to look away for those parts.  But the more interesting parts of the video were the ones relating to the government and what it did to cause the protesting and what it did to stop it.  The part that most grabbed my attention was learning about the voting and the results.  It appeared that everybody who could possibly vote wanted to and tried to.  People were so incredibly excited to have a new president that they even brought their own pens in case of a pen scandal.  But then when the votes were counted, Ahmedinejad's votes towered over the other two candidates'.  And the results were released even before some of the voting booths had closed, making EVERYBODY very suspicious of how exactly the counting process happened or if it happened at all.  The entire possibility of a government deceiving its citizens is completely foreign to me since we live in a country were something like that would never happen.  I think that, at this point, it becomes the responsibility of the rest of the world to intervine and make things right in this country.  They don't really have a good excuse since Iran didn't do a very good job of keeping information inside the country.  And if this country is stuck in an unfair government, they at least need a new leader to sort things out.  If that doesn't happen, they may be stuck in repeat on bad leaders

Sorry if these blogs don't follow a very linear pattern - It's just my thoughts as they come out of my mouth and I don't think it's necessary to go back and edit them.  Unless you would like me to  - just let me know.

Iran's First Nuclear Plant

The article I found discussed the current situation in iran regarding their first nuclear power plant.  It talked about the money it would save the country and their plans for expansion.  The main goal of building the power plant was to create a peaceful way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, but this construction may raise issues with the rest of the world.  Even though the people in charge of the power plant may have good intentions, some people may not.  And with an unstable government and minimal police control, the possibilities of materials falling into the wrong hands is very possible.  In order to better understand the situation, I would need more information regarding the safety precautions being taken to ensure a secure workplace.  Hopefully everything goes well, but its against the world's better judgement to give this country any access to nuclear power.