211A. Prologue: A Totally Objective History of Iran

As I've bathed in and created misinformation about Iran my whole life, and billions of my fellow humans around the world are now in the same bathtub, I've decided it's time to Have the Talk.

It occurs to me that I could be the most objective person in the world on the subject of Iran. Not the most expert by far, but uniquely positioned to criticize everyone involved. Despite not having an ounce of Iranian blood anywhere in my family, we’ve been demonized, tortured, murdered, and marginalized for over a century by all three of the major factions in the current conflict. I am the last of my kind.

I’m not an emotional person, but I’m a bit irritated. Not at what has been done to me, but at what is about to be done to you. Thus it is time to drop the Truth Bomb. I dare anyone to challenge my authority on the subject.

This series is going to be similar in format to my series on China, which are papers 142A Understanding China, 143B The Importance of Supply Chains, and 144C Generational Psychological Loops. 144 talks about the price we all pay when we pass down our desire for revenge to our children. That makes it appropriate here also.

While the situation has triggered the next World War even earlier than I anticipated, the primary involved factions (that will drag the rest of us into this) are the USA, Israel, and Iran. The UK gets special mention. To quote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

If you’ve never read or studied Shakespeare, this would be a good time to start. As the curtain rises on our latest and greatest chapter of this tale, I will be your humble Prologue. Your narrator as you may, in modern English.

This Chapter Starts in 1914 AD (but the story goes back to 1406 BC)

Iran and Türkiye have taken turns over the centuries being the regional and global super powers. The Romans got a turn in the middle there for a bit. In 1914 the Turks of the Ottoman Empire are in their twilight. A new power has emerged, the United Kingdom has 25% of the world’s population under their colonial control thanks to advanced industrial technology and a lust for power.

Of course 30% would be better than 25%, so the UK invades Türkiye near Constantinople with the help of their Australian colony. This ends up being the worst military defeat in Australian history, and there are several ANZAC memorials to the event and the 8000+ Australian casualties within a short walk of my house. My immediate Turkish ancestors were very militaristic and no doubt were there. You can see ancient black and white pictures of them on my substack, looking very intimidating.

But what the English didn’t stop to consider is that the Turks and Persians have been natural counterweights throughout history. By destabilizing the Ottoman Empire, they ensured its collapse. This would have long term implications across the region for the next century.

The Bolsheviks would sweep through the region in 1918, forcing my aristocratic Azerbaijani forefathers to flee Nakhchivan and resettle in the Turkish city of Tabriz. That city would later come under USSR control but was released to Iran in 1941, likely in response to Germany’s Operation Barbarossa when they declared war on the USSR and pushed them out of Poland. The whole Western third of Iran was/is primarily ethnic Turks.

My father was born there. Some years later a cemetery was converted to a park, releasing an ancient plague. My father, in his 20s, was the oldest man in the family to survive the plague. A law was passed requiring last names so he took the name of our legendary patriarch Shokri Khan (picture in my substack) and Persianized it (to reduce persecution) into Shokrizade. My naïve young father’s choice to add those extra four letters would set off a chain reaction that would confuse people worldwide for generations.

Despite all this turmoil, at least for the ethnic Turks, a new golden age was about to dawn in Iran. The country was becoming fiercely Western and modern. It didn’t hurt that Iran has the third largest oil reserves on Earth. In 1951 Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh rose to replace the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the leader of the nation. His rule is often cited as the first Democracy in the Middle East, with a 70% approval rating. Colonial powers were not paying market rates for Iran’s oil so Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry.

While Western powers claim to support Democracy, there’s something they support more:

Oil

In 1953 the British MI6, with the help of the USA’s CIA, overthrew the Democracy in Iran in a coup called “Project Ajax”. The success here would set the template for the regime change of “uncooperative” oil rich nations worldwide going forward. The Shah was restored, more brutal than ever, as the renewed leader and Western proxy. Soon after that my father, a student at the University of Tehran and still naïve, got the brilliant idea to write a pro-Democracy slogan on a wall at the school.

He was imprisoned and tortured over the course of 6 months. One wasn’t meant to survive such situations, and my father was never the same. His wealthy family ransomed him to freedom, put him on a ship to the USA, and said “Don’t come back”.

He didn’t. Soon he was at UCLA where he met my mother, a linguist who loved anything Middle Eastern, but especially my father. My sister was born in 1959 and I came along by accident in 1966. We were both named by my very white mother, who was allowed to marry my father because she could prove noble lineage through Sir William Gray in the UK. My Western ancestors were original feminists (the ones that sacrificed to make the world better for women, instead of expecting it) and had given up on feudalism and privilege a century earlier. My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from UCLA and I would later graduate also, becoming the 3rd (and probably last) generation of graduates.

No one, for possibly over a century on my mother’s side, possessed any interest in religion. I dated a Catholic nun when I was 5 and 6 years old, and this was the first time I had even heard of any sort of Christianity. The Church intervened and relocated her before things could get serious. I was very upset about this of course and she was crying when she told me.

The next year (age 7) the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District would IQ test me for two weeks and determine there was something very odd about me. My IQ was high enough to be “indeterminant” on every test. I have since described what I (and others like me) am on my substack as an “Age Inappropriate Person” since science hasn’t figured it out yet. Essentially I was a ~30 year old scientist in the body of a small boy.

In Buddhism this is a sign of reincarnation and is seen positively. In Western religions, this is a sign of demonic possession. This didn’t go well for me being born in the USA.

Racism was always a problem for me, but people thought of me as a novelty and thought my name was pretty until 1979 rolled around. That’s when the awful Shah finally got overthrown. As is always the case with regime change, someone brutal almost always gets overthrown by someone more brutal. My entire Turkish bloodline, being aristocratic, was rounded up and executed that same year. I would assume the customary torture was involved.

No survivors, no messages, complete extinction.

I’m not a particularly emotional person, but I did take this a bit personally. I went to “Bomber” Bob Dornan (the patriarch of the B-2 Bomber) and pledged myself to help him get elected in the very anti-military West Los Angeles district. This was considered impossible by everyone including my teachers. I put all my special skills to full use, promoted heavily the Islamophobia I was typically the victim of, and it worked perfectly. He ended up winning by about 50 votes. I’m white passing, so going door to door people didn’t know I was mixed race and just automatically trusted this 14 year old. Bob credited me with the win on national television that night.

This ensured the eventual deployment of the B-2, which Bob and I always knew was for Iran. It was used recently to attack the supposed nuclear material refinement centers buried deep underground in Iran. The “bunker buster” bombs it carried are as big as a house, and much heavier.

My relationship to Bob ensured I had the two Congressional letters of recommendation for the military academy of my choice. But then my first real relationship happened when I turned 18. Since I was cognitively much older than my biological age, I left the children alone when I was in grade school. My first girlfriend was a 34 year old instructor at Santa Monica College with a Master’s degree. When she found out I was military path, she sat me down and told me about what really happened in Vietnam. All the atrocities, all the things that had been hidden from me in my military bubble.

I went to the library and confirmed what she said. There was no internet back then, and the public school history books hid all of that. I had adopted “Bushido” as my core ideology when I was 13 and this sort of behavior was just too dishonorable to accept. My nights were filled with nightmares of my using my special skills in the skies over Iran.

I would renounce my military path and take a Vow of Pacifism. Revenge was not worth the cost of my honor. The political wave which I helped create in 1980 would create intense anti-Iran sentiment across America and as a rare person with an Iranian sounding name in California, a lot of people wanted to harm me. Doors were closing in my face everywhere. I used this racism to get Bob elected and it worked so well that the template would be adopted by those that came after me in Santa Monica like Stephen Miller (another Samohi graduate).

I regret much of what I did to help shape America into the hateful society it is today. I learned that just because I can do something, doesn’t mean I should. I accepted the hate that was piled on me as a form of Karma, even though I had no formal exposure to Buddhism in the USA. I would get access to temples in Australia and I added Buddhism to my Bushido ideology six years ago.

Why Am I Objective and What is Really Going on In Iran?

My goal in this first paper is to “set the stage” for a detailed explanation of what is going on in the next paper, and then to explain what is about to happen in the third paper. Part of setting the stage is to explain how I can maintain both objectivity and familiarity in a scenario where subjectivity is usually the price of “knowledge”.

There are three warring religions at play, and that war has been going on even before the time that Christians say Jesus was born. I have never accepted the ideologies of any of these religions, but have been harmed by all three. I take full responsibility for my contribution to the hate between these factions, because I manipulated all of them for my own selfish interests when I was 14. Thus I hold myself responsible for the punishment I have received. I am not complaining about being punished for those last 4 letters in my name, just explaining how that came about.

Growing up in a world where my applications for anything (jobs, schools, even AirBnBs) were automatically put in the trash bin because my father thought putting “-zade” at the end of Shokri would be a good idea, forced me to adapt. Since applying was off the table I instead built my reputation for honor, loyalty, justice, respect, courage, compassion, and self control (key aspects of Bushido) in a world where all of these are in very short supply.

[Note that everyone in my family changed their names a long time ago. I am the last Shokrizade and I have made sure there will not be another, at least in name. I may have the world’s second largest number of biological children, behind Johnathan Jacob Meijer, but that is a tale I am not ready to tell. I refuse to change my name because I want to know who the racists are, and I accept my heritage.]

This opened the door for very unusual opportunities that demanded 100% trust such as when the UCLA and USA Olympic women asked me to be their trainer and coach in 1988. I never applied for that role. The job required me to put my hands on 50+ elite female athletes a day in fairly invasive ways so trust was everything. I had worked with many of these athletes for years so no guessing about my reputation was required.

Similarly I was Rabbi trusted and would be asked to assist the Los Angeles Orthodox Jewish community when they found themselves short of qualified instructors in their Rabbinical schools for children. I taught science in two schools until they could replace me with a qualified Orthodox instructor. I never applied for this role. You can imagine the level of trust required to invite someone with an Iranian sounding name to teach their children about the world in their Yeshivas. In the process I was exposed to information normally forbidden to outsiders (Goy).

In 2013 international regulators would ask me to help them write regulations protecting children in online environments. I wasn’t just the best source of this information in 2013, I was the only academic source of this information. In the gaming industry, exposing how we exploit children is a sure way to earn a blacklist, and I was barely tolerated due to my ethnicity as it was. Of course, given my Bushido ideology, declining the offer to protect the vulnerable would have been dishonorable. Helping regulators put me in direct opposition to the immensely powerful Disney empire, and would ultimately lead to the EU’s Digital Fairness Act 13 years later. Yes, regulators move slower than turtles, and companies count on that to normalize their bad behavior before it can be corrected.

A major theme in my life is to protect children. Not only because I was so severely exploited as a child, but because I understood exactly what was going on that whole time. I wasn’t “a child” cognitively, only physically. Despite various laws, children have very little protection in life. We count on honor to protect them and that’s in short supply. People who dare to protect children are often punished especially severely. This is why those roles have few if any volunteers and essentially no paid roles.

In the opening salvo of this war, young (under age 10) children (all girls) were some of the first casualties, slaughtered by the hundreds. This would be unthinkable in conflicts outside the Middle East, but this is made possible by the unique religious characteristics of the region. I will explain what those are in the next paper, along with the special economic factors involved.

As the curtain rises on the latest and largest scene of our play, about a war that has raged since 1406 BC, three great religions are engaged in an existential conflict that will decide the fate of millions or even billions of people. Simultaneously, the world’s largest corporations (which are largely oblivious to the religious history or implications) are themselves fighting an existential war. Winners will achieve dominance for generations. Losers will be eliminated.

Within weeks supplies of oil and urea (yes urea) will drop to critical levels worldwide, affecting the lives of billions. Calls for conciliation will go unanswered, because that is the theme and lesson of our story.

“All Are Punished”

I, your humble Prologue, am honored that you would sit to listen to me recount one of humanity’s greatest tales of woe. Hopefully, long after I have turned to dust, this account will serve as a warning to future generations.