The Memory Hole (Shah Edition)

I've been watching tv coverage of the possibility that the Iranian president-elect was one of the captors/hostage-takers of the U.S. embassy workers back in 1979. Now, many things about this coverage strike me as odd. But the strangest thing is that no one has ever mentioned why the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries were so anti-American. I mean, the U.S. C.I.A. coup to cement the Shah's power, the Shah's brutal regime . . . not relevant to the story. Instead, the Iranian revolutionaries were anti-American extremists who hate freedom.

Not that there was freedom in the Shah's Iran.

The point is not to make excuses for the hostage-takers. The point is to think about other people's motivations in realistic terms. U.S. policy in much of the world has created blowback, like the hostage crisis. But Americans are encouraged to think that this country has never done anything bad to anybody, and thus that anti-American sentiment is irrational. In many cases, it is not so irrational at all.