Given everything going on in the world, I've been spending a lot of time reminiscing on Iran, and other countries too. Pivotal moments in their politics where the seeds of a better world were planted only to be razed, burned, salted by the machinations of western Imperialism. The Cat in the Coup is about one such case, following the nationalist, radical liberal and secularist leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, and his swift downfall two years after his democratic election.

The story is a short one, mostly used through clippings of various headlines in a collage mixed with 3D models, classical Persian art, photographs, and hand drawn sprites. You play as his black cat, a mischievous little guy knocking him down and swatting his furniture around to torment him from one headline to the next, unfolding a loose history of what happened. Not so much to actually have all of the facts, but enough to highlight what the coup of Mosaddegh, or as it's called by the west, "Operation Ajax". For more context on the depth of the coup, I recommend Killing Hope by William Blum.

In short, Iran was run by the Shah. A despotic and cruel leader who had allied himself with Nazi Germany among other things, but this doesn't begin to get into the problems of Pahlavi, too large for the scope of this game of course. Mossadegh launched the Iranian National Front, a group of liberals, secularists, islamists, and socialists all on a front meant to bring democracy to Iran and free them of imperial rule, whether it be by the Shah or the United States or the USSR. Within a few years, they would launch the first real democratic parliament with Mosaddegh as prime minister. Nationalizing their own oil economy, to take back control of their own industry and not be puppets of the United Kingdom.

You see now, this poses a problem for the United States and United Kingdom, who want to rely on that oil for their own riches and their own military capabilities to enforce the rest of the world as tyrants and international police. Nothing new for the UK, but this was during a wildfire period for the United States using its newfound power to control a handful of other nations. It meant the oil prices would go up, and not flow so freely. Modern Americans will know much of our involvement in the middle east to this day is for oil and drastically affected by oil, build around the flow of oil. The recent aggression against the IRGC, dubbed by Pete Hegseth as Operation Epstein's Fury has already done incalculable things to the economy in how it put oil prices in flux and got neo-conservative war profiteers salivating at the prospect of more. America just can't get enough of Iran and its black gold.

Mosaddegh was spared execution or life in prison, instead he was spared by the Shah and lived the rest of his life in house arrest, avoiding contact with the rest of the world; perhaps in fear of his life or those he may have been wanting to talk to. This is the price of many people with noble aims in the middle east, a place that's marked by the west as savages, while those very westerners and their governments deny them the chance to organically prosper and make progress in the way these well to do nations did. Because the progress of western, industrial nations came from the backs of colonial and imperial projects, alienated and disenfranchised labor forces. Progress for one group at the expense of another. No. We need to install our puppet leaders more amenable to prosperity for western empire, and your people are not allowed to live well, to live free. In America, we have a saying "Freedom Ain't Free." No, it's paid for by the blood of the innocent and banditry towards foreign nations. There never was anything such as democracy, rather: Kratocracy, the rule of the powerful over the weak.

In America, Nationalism is broadly understood as a chauvinistic, borderline fascist tendency. The idea of a National Front existing at all invokes the image of Nazism. To places under the thumb of imperial violence, Nationalism rather takes on a different context. Autonomy and freedom from the thumb of others. Not that it can't lend itself towards right wing tendencies, it certainly can. But I believe nationalism in the middle east is broadly misunderstood and should be shown more sympathy. Kurdish independence, Irish independence, Palestinian sovereignty and anti-colonialism. For all but the most anarchist in their aims who instead want the deconstruction of nation states as we know it, oppressed people want to live democratically and free just as anyone else does, and deserves to.

What Mosaddegh and his National Front wanted to accomplish is more something that was accomplished in Turkiye by Mustafa Kemal, called Ataturk by people who support him and his values, they are called Kemalists. I am Turkish-American and grew up in a household that largely believed in Kemalism, in this sort of secular nationalist, modernist perspective in the middle east. I got to learn from my mother the ways it drastically transformed Turkiye into a powerful, modern nation of people who value education and an adaptive politics meant to serve people and to keep the right wing and religious elements of society in check. And I know Kemal was far from perfect, I really don't agree with Kemalism at all, I'm a communist. At the very least, these sorts of regimes led to happier people and a better society. I think Iran deserved something to this effect and never really got it.

The United States and United Kingdom have this uncanny brutality to kill hope before it can even be born. The IRGC that Americans all are directing their scorn at right now in the middle of Operation Epic Chungus is a direct consequence of this meddling that started with Mosaddegh here. When you completely cripple the secular liberal and socialist side wanting social democracy, who is left? The radical islamic element, the right wing conservative nationalists. The National Front had been suppressed and practically destroyed, so during the rule of the Shah, in all of the attempts of the revolt to bring about a red revolution, or hell, even a secular one were all but snuffed by circumstance. And so in the overthrowing of the Shah, the best Iran had to work with was Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran continues to try and organically progress in the shadow of the untold amount of imperial violence it's endured throughout its entire history as a nation. Through religious institution, through crowns, through western interventionism. They would've had bigger changes, more progress, more prosperity, happier people, more children left unbombed still living with us today if the cruelty of the so called civilized world would've left them alone from the beginning. And so, the remaining secularists and leftists have to bide their time and put their trust in the IRGC, because while they may be making the life of Iranians worse in one way, they are at least concerned and capable in protecting their own people from the hostility of the United States and its vassal state, Israel. Maybe when the dust settles and people start picking apart their lives again, a new revolutionary peoples movement can grow.