ABSTRACT
On 4 November, 1979, a group of young Iranians stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and therewith began an ordeal that would last well over a year. People in the United States found the happenings to be inexplicable. This puzzlement was “because almost none of them had any idea of the responsibility the United States bore for imposing the royalist regime that Iranians came to hate so passionately” (Kinzer 2003, 202). When one of the hostage takers said to chief U.S. diplomat in the Embassy, Bruce Laingen, “You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953,” most Americans did not understand this point either. 1 Indeed, the 1953 U.S. coup to overthrow the democratic and popular government of Mohammad Mossadegh had come to be part of a ‘forgotten history’ in the United States.
