for more than argo's hollywood history of Iran, read this book.

 Hollywood History seems to be the order of the day.  Here is  what one should try to read if one has to understand Iran .Understand it more deeply than the Hollywood history depciton of Iran in Argos.

Ben Affleck was asked by Rolling Stone magazine, “What do you think the Iranians’ reaction is gonna be?” to Affleck’s movie Argo, which depicts a side-story about six embassy employees who, in 1979, avoided being taken hostage.  Affleck, mixing bits of truth and mythology, just as in the movie itself, replied:

“Who the FUCK knows – who knows if their reaction is going to be anything? This is still the same Stalinist, oppressive regime that was in place when the hostages were taken. There was no rhyme or reason to this action. What’s interesting is that people later figured out that Khomeini just used the hostages to consolidate power internally and marginalize the moderates and everyone in America was going, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with these people?’ You know, ‘What do they want from us?’ It was because it wasn’t about us. It was about Khomeini holding on to power and being able to say to his political opponents, of which he had many, ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the Americans’ – which is, of course, a tactic that works really well. That revolution was a students’ revolution. There were students and communists and secularists and merchants and Islamists, it’s just that Khomeini fucking slowly took it for himself.”

The takeover of the embassy is an action virtually no one would advocate in retrospect, but asserting that it lacked rhyme or reason requires willful ignorance of Iranian-U.S. relations.  Claiming that nobody knew what the hostage-takers wanted requires erasing from history their very clear demands for the Shah to be returned to stand trial, for Iranian money in U.S. banks to be returned to Iran, and for the United States to commit to never again interfering in Iranian politics.  In fact, not only were those demands clearly made, but they are almost indisputably reasonable demands.  A dictator guilty of murder, torture, and countless other abuses should have stood trial, and should have been extradited to do so, as required by treaty.  Money belonging to the Iranian government under a dictatorship should have been returned to a new Iranian government, not pocketed by a U.S. bank.  And for one nation to agree not to interfere in another’s politics is merely to agree to compliance with the most fundamental requirement of legal international relations.

Argo devotes its first 2 minutes or so to the 1953 background of the 1979 drama.  Blink and you’ll miss it, as I’m betting most viewers do.  For a richer understanding of what was happening in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s I have a better recommendation than watching Argo.  For a truly magnificent modern epic I strongly encourage getting ahold of the forthcoming masterpiece by M. Lachlan White, titled Waking Up in Tehran: Love and Intrigue in Revolutionary Iran, due to be published this spring.  Weighing in at well over 300,000 words, or about 100,000 more than Moby Dick, Waking Up in Tehran is the memoir of Margot White, an American human rights activist who became an ally of pro-democracy Iranian student groups in 1977, traveled to Iran, supported the revolution, met with the hostage-takers in the embassy, became a public figure, worked with the Kurdish resistance when the new regime attacked the Kurds for being infidels, married an Iranian, and was at home with her husband in Tehran when armed representatives of the government finally banged on the door.  I’m not going to give away what happened next.  This book will transport you into the world of a gripping novel, but you’ll emerge with a political, cultural, and even linguistic education.  This is an action-adventure that would, in fact, make an excellent movie — or even a film trilogy.  It’s also an historical document.

I asked White about Argo, and she said she’d watched it three times and taken notes.  “As history,” she told me, “it’s worse than sloppy.  The depiction of the students at the embassy is way off, as are several other thing.  Public hangings were over with long before November 1979.  They occurred mostly in February 1979, and were mostly the upper echelons of SAVAK.  The six Americans were being rescued in January 1980, almost a year later.  Those things were not happening.  Just the opposite — the Resistance was underway.”

White finds fault with other details: “Even the suggestion that the students were using ‘kids’ or ‘sweat shop children’ to piece together the shredded embassy documents is wrong. They had high school and college students doing it, mostly their own younger brothers and sisters.  Kids of the age shown would not yet have been able to read Farsi, much less English!  There is no way such children could piece together those documents.”

White objects to the general depiction of ordinary Iranians in the film: “Most troubling is the depiction of people in the Bazaar going after the Americans.  That would never happen.  Anyone visiting Iran would be treated as a ‘guest.’  The tradition of ‘the guest’ is so deep in Persian culture — dating back to the caravans of the silk road — that it reaches almost absurd proportions.  But it precludes any such behavior as that depicted in the Argo Bazaar.  Iranians, unlike Americans, don’t blame the people for their government’s policies.  Iranian men, in particular, would never approach an American woman that way, with such aggression, and speak about politics.  They might politely inquire why they were in Iran, what they thought of the country, and they might even offer them tea!  They would never behave as depicted.

“Likewise, the banging on the car windows.  On the contrary, cars were so thick in Tehran that crowds could not be in the streets at the same time.  Also, the burning cars were long gone by January of 1980!  In Argo, the crowds are shown shouting ‘down with the Shah’ long after the Shah was overthrown.  The crowds in the streets were, increasingly — as in my book — from the Resistance!”

White continued: “There’s another troubling depiction in Argo that I question, but I have no way to prove this.  It’s the scene showing mock executions.  I doubt they happened.  The reason I doubt this is that when the hostages were released, they had one ticker tape parade (as noted in my book) and virtually disappeared — no talk shows, no endless interviews, no lecture circuits.  Why?  Wouldn’t Washington have wanted to publicize the worst features of their ordeal?  If the hostages had really been subject to that level of torture, why keep silent about it?  A) Reagan’s deal with the Ayatollahs?  B) they weren’t tortured.  Both A and B would be my guess.  The students voted on their policies.  They were a mixed group, but torture had been ruled out.  I believe that is the case.  Captivity, obviously, is a human rights violation, but torture is something else.  Again, however, I have no way to prove this definitively.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/waking-up-in-tehran/5318481