Word: vision
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Iran's opulent embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington has long been famous, perhaps even notorious, as a dazzling showcase for the Shah's vision of the good life...
...pattern is familiar, or ought to be, for it follows that of earlier American adventures in Iran, Greece, Cuba, and most disasterously in Vietnam. The forces of evil differed from country to country, but the American response remained constant. Whenever American vision of how a nation ought to function was challenged, the U.S. responded with generally anti-democratic, repressive attempts to alter popular movements seeking to influence the political life on their own lands...
...Shah with intransigent religious fanatics whose opposition to the Shah was based on medieval social concepts. The Islamic religion is so clearly alien as to arouse the fear of press writer and reader alike. References to the veils worn by women and Ayetollah Khomeini's orthodox beliefs reinforce this vision of difference, and hence, subtly, inferiority. Newsweek, for example, noted that Khomeini appeared to be a "xenophobic, anti-American, anti-Semitic religious fanatic who would turn the clock back by centuries--and possibly even foment instability throughout the Middle East...
...LINE with this dark vision of Iran's potential leadership, the American media wrote of the mass opposition to the Shah in loaded, pejorative terms. Americans read of mobs rampaging, and Newsweek reported that "thousands of hysterical Iranians" wept for their dead. In contrast, the Shah emerged was the force of reason, and the only force that the United States could conceivably support to block the rising tide of anarchy...
...only a very short leap to make in advocating all-out support for the Shah. The New York Times concluded that "political change is clearly overdue," but ignored the depth of opposition when it called for support of the Shah because his modernization program best suited the Times's vision of Iran's needs. The Christian Science Monitor went even further when it excused the Shah for establishing a military government on the grounds that the opposition's vehemence left a solution to the crisis (one that would be welcomed by the United States), in the hands of the Army...