This is a picture of Muhammad Mossadeq, the Iranian prime minister overthrown by British and American intelligence agencies in 1953 for the unspeakable crime of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (so named because the Iranians did all the work while the British took all the profits). How would you caption it?
Well, if you worked for the Economist way back in 2011, perhaps the most prestigious publication in the world, you’d caption it “A nose for power.” Yes, you would. Because it’s clever to make fun of wogs.
Afterwords
“Wog” is Colonel Blimp era slang for “dark-skinned foreigner”. But, hey, at least he isn’t Jewish, right? Would the Economist caption a photo of Charles De Gaulle “a nose for power”? I don’t think they’d be quite that stupid.
The photo accompanies a review of Darioush Bayandor’s Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited. The Economist’s discussion of the whole affair scrupulously avoids mention of the fact that Great Britain, not the United States, was the prime mover in the overthrow of Mossadeq. In particular, the Economist does not quote Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s remark that the British were “destructive, and determined on a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran.”
