“Ignorance is bliss” is a saying truer than we care to admit. And orchestrated ignorance is perhaps the most reliable tool for controlling slaves, especially when they are unaware of their status and are treated just well enough to keep them from rebelling. Especially when they can be kept divided and polarized, fooled into thinking they have a meaningful voice in their own lives. Especially when they can be turned against those who seek to free them.
During the academic year that started in the fall of 1976 and ended as summer approached in 1977 I was a student at the graduate division of New York University’s school of law working on my LL.M in international legal studies. My classmates in that endeavor included students from all over the world. The best and the brightest. One was a member of an African country’s supreme court, two were Lebanese legal scholars and several were Iranian jurists. There were others but those were the ones I most remember; my apologies to the rest. The academic aspects of that experience were very important, especially those that dealt with comparative constitutional law, but much more important were the eye opening experiences shared with me by my classmates. Real people who introduced me to the real world rather than the one to which I’d been exposed as a student and then replicated as a lecturer in history. History as to which I had been abysmally misled, especially with reference to Iran and Islam, topics now all too relevant.
During my time at my alma mater, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and for the bulk of the decade that followed my graduation in June of 1968 while I was an instructor at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York, I was a devout supporter of Israel. Israel, the purported David amidst a sea of Goliaths. And I was also an admirer of the Shah of Iran, Israel’s greatest and perhaps only ally in the Middle East. Islam, I had been taught, was the greatest threat to world peace and Zionism the savior not only of Judaism but of Christianity as well (I had never heard of the Toledot Yeshu or of the Zionist tradition of spitting on Christians). The world was purportedly evolving following the defeat of evil in World War II, the second war to end all wars, and international law was to be the norm that made Kant’s aspirations for perpetual peace possible. And that was what I was specializing in.
As reality demonstrates, I could not have been more wrong. False narratives impact us more than anything else, they always have, and false narratives were what I’d been fed. What we’d all been fed and what most of us continue to be fed. We were taught that we were a benign force seeking to share freedom and prosperity and democracy with our less enlightened neighbors, not that we were rapacious looters of their natural resources. Or at least that some among us were, most of us were merely useful tools.
In our high school and undergraduate studies as they touched on modern Persia, on Iran, we were not taught about the coup on the 19th of August in 1953 when democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown because he’d dared to place the interests of his people over those of British and United States oil interests, an industry he’d nationalized after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had refused to account for the income it had consistently looted. That coup against democracy, decency and the right to national self-determination was not unusual. It was what the United Kingdom and the United States had always done and still do when faced with the desire of any people to control their own destinies threatens to become a reality. In hindsight it’s become clear that World War II was not about preventing genocide or saving the world for democracy, the German genocide could not compare in breadth or scope to that engaged in for a century by the United Kingdom and the United States and Belgium and the Netherlands and France, etc. It was about preserving the right to loot and enslave of the billionaire class which ruled us all as though possessed of Tolkien’s One Ring. And International Law? A useful delusion for a while.
The CIA and MI6 and Mossad orchestrated Iranian coup of 1953 restored the power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch without a monarchical background who had ruled and would again rule Iran with an iron fist under the direction of the United States CIA, the British MI6 but, most of all, the Israeli Mossad. The Shah who, as the figurehead for United Kingdom, United States and Israeli interests, brutally ruled the Iranian people through the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (the Savak), an agency modelled on the German Gestapo and the Soviet KGB but under the ironic tutelage of the French intelligence service and, according to a declassified CIA memo, run by the CIA which provided the Savak with both funding and training, albeit on behalf of the Israeli Mossad.
Unlike all too many of my contemporaries, my blissful ignorance was not destined to last forever. My new acquaintances at the International Legal Studies program at NYU (doctoral students or post-doctoral students all), especially the Iranian jurists (who were actually part of the Shah’s regime), provided me with a narrative completely at odds with everything I’d been taught and which I’d been parroting to my own students for almost a decade. I listened to them during our conversations, listened uncomfortably but politely, but refused to believe what they were telling me (the way my contemporaries refuse to believe the truths I seek to share with them now). I refused to believe them at least until the fall of 1979, two years after I’d earned my LL.M and was no longer in contact with any of those who’d sought to open my eyes to uncomfortable realities. Until the Iran I thought I knew, a Muslim anomaly purportedly peopled by a happy and grateful populace, exploded and seemingly from one day to the next turned into a mass of seemingly ungrateful monsters who hated the hand that had “fed them” for so long. Until the Shah I’d been taught to admire was cast out without a shot being fired and a religious theocracy was established under a long exiled religious cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, something seemingly out of Frank Herbert’s imagination on the Planet Dune
It was only at that point that I decided that perhaps I should do my own research given that the Iran in which I’d believed seemed to have been replaced by the Iran about which I’d been warned, and my own research confirmed the worst that I’d been told about the Iran I thought I knew, the Iran that sent its purported best and brightest to study in the United States, including at the Citadel. Research was more onerous back in the late 1970s and early 1980s than it is today but it was possible. Today, despite increasing censorship of information by Zionist ownership over most means of communication, it is still possible for those who care about truth to engage in adequate personal research, even if only on Wikipedia which is not the most reliable of sources but is frequently adequately accurate. I found several relevant articles there just now and it took less than ten minutes. As of today they can be found at the following links: the 1953 coup d’état: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#:~:text=On%2019%20August%201953%2C%20Prime,AJAX%20Project%20or%20Operation%20Ajax.;
the Savak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK; the Iranian Revolution of 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution. But I recommend that you conduct your own research.
As in the case of the myriad Middle East monarchical dictatorships that exist today as vassals of Israel and the United States, or the myriad dictatorships imposed by the United States in Latin America during the past century, the common people in Iran during the fall of 1979 had no reason to love the United States and certainly not Israel, something that became evident when, in an orgy of rage, Iranian students seized control of the United States embassy in Tehran and held United States personnel there hostage until after the United States presidential election of 1980. Ironic given current United States and Israeli organized student demonstrations against the government their parents and grandparents founded. But as to Iran, history for most of the current generation in the United States only started when that embassy takeover occurred, just as the history of the Palestinian conflict only purportedly started on October 7, 2023 (rather than in 1948 when Israel initiated its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing).
It comforts the current successors of the United States’ mid-nineteenth century American Party (self-described for non-pejorative reasons as the “Know Nothings”) to study history in that manner, or rather, to be taught history in that manner. The exclusion of inconvenient truths, like the genocide of indigenous Americans, or slavery, or child labor, or orchestrated mass pedophilia makes looking in the mirror much easier and facilitates cheering for the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America at ball games followed by the honoring of heroes who kept and keep us free and safe. And it certainly makes it much easier for us to sanctimoniously attend Sunday religious services where we can repeat memorized prayers and hymns while ignoring the real messages that underlie them. We are taught to fear Iran because it purportedly seeks to join the nuclear armed club of which the United States and Israel are members and would then be in a position to not only defend itself, but also to defend all the Muslim countries in the Middle East whose lands Israel covets and intends to incorporate into a Greater Israel. The fact that Iran, unlike Israel, has under both international and Islamic law renounced such ambitions is ignored. As is the fact that the prophecy that Iran is within several weeks of acquiring nuclear weapons and must thus be destroyed now before it destroys us, destroys us because it hates our freedom not because of anything we’ve done, is an utter fallacy, one personally spread by Israel’s genocidal prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during over two decades (making obvious its deceptive nature). But perhaps now that the author of that prohibition, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has been assassinated by the United States and Israel that false prophecy may become a self-fulfilling reality. His Fatwa, an edict prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons, may have died with him as more realistic Iranian leaders may decide that in a world bereft of law, nuclear weapons may provide the only source of national security, something North Korea has apparently demonstrated. And if it does, nuclear proliferation is likely to spread, and if it does, a nuclear holocaust may well become a reality.
My ignorance certainly comforted me during most of the first half of my life. It comforted me as I self-righteously engaged in all of the fascist nationalist tapestry so comforting for my contemporaries, hymns and parades and demonization and dehumanization of opponents all in the name of liberty and democracy, and especially of war in the name of peace. As I engaged in activities the way most of those with whom I attended school still do. Unfortunately, my eyes were forced open and I chose to keep them that way. I was educated under an honor code that I took seriously but that perhaps should have included another vow, one not to engage in gratifying self-delusion.
There is a joke popular in the areas surrounding retirement communities in South Florida about the “driving dead”. Old people who continue driving, albeit at a snail’s pace, unaware that they’ve passed away. A similar joke may, in a sense, apply to neoliberal citizens in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe who are blissfully unaware that they’ve already been conquered, politically, economically and intellectually, not by the hordes of Muslim immigrants fleeing the countries they, at the behest of Israel, have gleefully bombed into oblivion, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, the Sudan and now Iran, but by the Zionist billionaire class who have seemingly acquired the One Ring of which Tolkien once wrote.
Unfortunately, the reign of Sauron, or perhaps of the anti-Christ, is upon us and we have no Bilbo Baggins or Samwise to bail us out as we pontificate with our eyes wide shut.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 