Her uncle was a Communist, who had apparently allied with the Communists in Azerbaijan in an effort to subvert Iran. This part is glossed over in the movie. What I read is that Azerbaijan was a “member” (conquered nation) state of the Soviet Empire by 1920. The Soviets wanted, and got, the oil.
The Soviets also wanted Iran as a whole. The Russians had invaded and subdued the Iranians before, in two wars, in 1804-1813 and again 1826-1828. Georgia and Azerbaijan were once a part of Iran.
Thus, the threat of a Communist takeover through Mossadegh was not a fantasy. They wanted Iran’s oil, and they wanted a warm water port.
And as the protagonist points out in the movie, where the Shah had 300 political prisoners, the Mullocracy had 3,000, most of whom were eventually executed. Everything got worse under the Mullahs. Had the Shah stayed in power, eventually international pressure would have liberalized everything. America backed the right side, although I will not excuse our arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq War. What an ugly thing. War is ugly, and the war business even worse.
The point I wanted to make, though, was twofold: 1) virtually every repression in every nation in the entirety of the 20th century was the outcome, direct or indirect, of Communist efforts to create a global imperial regime. When Pinochet performed a coup and executed thousands, it was to prevent a Communist takeover. When right wing death squads operated in El Salvador, it was to prevent a Communist take-over.
Nearly every civil war in nearly every nation the entire planet over was the result of Communist efforts at global conquest. Even World War 2 could not be imagined if Hitler had not had the Bolshevik menace in Germany to create a reaction to.
Arab Terrorism, even, was the result of a policy of the Communists to use Israel as a means for generating a wedge between the Arab nations and the United States. They used careful, long term, and well planned propaganda to stir up ethnic and national hatreds which had been dormant for a long time, and provided the training in terrorism to make such activities effective.
In my mind, I can see no conflicts which did not involve Communists. Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola, Guatamala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, World War 2. Perhaps the Indian War of partition, which was the fault of the British. OK: granted the 1948 War of Israeli existence.
This however brings me to point 2: Communism, as a global imperialistic enterprise, really cannot be seen separately from the British colonial period. The British invaded everywhere in the whole freaking world. There is a difficult Sporcle quiz: name the 22 modern nations the British have not invaded.
As one example, I thought surely to God they never invaded Iceland: I was wrong.
It is significant that Marx wrote his work in London, at the height of British power and hubris. I have never read Das Kapital, and have no plans to, but psychologically it is difficult not to think that Marx had in mind a way to bring down the British, specifically, and that much of the emotional underpinning of the exhortations to resist “Capitalistic aggression” and to support–for a time, until you realized what was really going on–the “People’s” aggression, was the knowledge so many nations had of being trodden on and used by the British. It was a very wide pool of players to manipulate.
But I will comment that Marjane’s uncle–to return to the movie–Anoosh, continued to believe until his death that one day the “Proletariat will rule”. With Communism, the Proletariat NEVER EVER EVER rules. In Russia, when Lenin executed his coup and won his civil war, there hardly was a proletariat. It was less than 10% of the population, and that population never did anything but work and die when he and his successors said so.
Communism is a hook. It is a hook which appeals to real problems, real abuses, and which became skilled early on at enlisting sympathy, pathos in general, and the outrage of good people, all to be subverted, serpent-like, to new, worse rulers. It is a creed of the Lie. Communists are People of the Lie, to use M Scott Pecks term. You cannot not be a sociopath and be a sincere Communist. There is no other option.
When we see Communist flags in America, the sentiment behind it exists at the comic book level, but people also thought of Hitler as Charlie Chaplin. We need to assess the threat as real, because the evil history behind that symbol ruined countless lives, and continues to immiserate a billion or more in China to this day. To be sure, they seem to be building shopping malls, and theme parks to Americanize their people enough to hypnotize them into sleep, but the reality is that they are moving pieces to be manipulated at will by an invisible and omnipotent hierarchy, and that for every shopping mall, there is a place in hell in their Laogai.
China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos: all ruled by gangsters vastly more corrupt than Al Capone.