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Coup 53: how Britain thwarted democracy in Iran
Following the release of a new film detailing Britain and the US's direction of the coup that removed Iran's first democratically elected leader and imposed a brutal monarchy on the country, NAVID SHOMALI of the communist Tudeh Party of Iran looks at the putsch's legacy
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The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
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BRITAIN was centrally and actively involved in planning and executing every aspect of the 1953 Coup to subvert democracy in Iran. The coup shaped not only Western relations with Iran for 60 years, but changed the Middle East.
Sixty-seven years ago, on August 19 1953, the anti-democratic CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup d’etat in Iran which overthrew the democratically elected and popularly supported prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and returned the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to power.
To date, mountains of articles, books, documents, and films have been published about this dark chapter in Iran’s history.
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