August 18, 1952 — The Northern Star
The Mossadegh Project | October 10, 2024 |
Lead editorial on Iran and Egypt in The Northern Star newspaper of Lismore, New South Wales, Australia.
Communist Bogey as Bargaining Weapon
CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS in trouble centres of Egypt and Persia show a similarity in tactics in that each of the respective “government” groups appears to be using the Communist bogey as a means of obtaining its objectives.
Persia, in appealing to the United States for a 50,000,000 dollar loan to get its oil industry on the move, is using the argument that the loan is necessary to combat the rise of Communism. There could be some sympathy for this
application if it could be believed that the loan would be used to improve the lot of the Persian people. But there was nothing to support such a belief when Persia was receiving lucrative oil royalties from the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The average Persian peasant then
existed on a meagre ration, no one outside the ruling class and public servants could read or write and the average income of the working class was only £30 per annum.
The question whether a dollar loan from the United States would be used to improve the lot of the Persian people, or whether it would be used as a means of helping the Premier, Dr. Mossadeq, to ride roughshod over the interests of the British Anglo-Iranian Company, is open
to grave doubt.
Similarly, the Egyptian Commander-in-Chief General Naguib, appears to be employing the familiar pattern of flirting with Communism as a means of forcing his claims on the British. [Mohammed Naguib]
This is indicated by the fact that the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Communists has been given some encouragement. But any trend towards a softening of the feudalistic Egyptian system by improving the miserable existence of the
peasant class is contradicted by the fierce suppression of the strike riots in Egypt’s “Little Lancashire,” near Alexandria, where armoured forces caused a heavy toll in dead and injured and made some 500 arrests.
Both Egypt and Persia have forfeited much of their claim to world sympathy for their national aspirations by the tactics they have employed. Both countries would have achieved far more by enlightened government of their downtrodden
peoples than by their obvious endeavours to exploit Britain’s weakness resulting from the ruinous effect of her long participation in the last world war.
Related links:
What Will Persia Do Next? | The Northern Star, October 24, 1952
The Miseries of Mossadeq | As the Earth Turns, Aug. 29, 1952
Egyptian Crisis More Menacing Even Than That Faced in Iran (1951)
MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”




