> Why stop there? Why not go back to when the Greeks made Darius mad and started the Greco-Persian wars?

People often ask these questions as if they're unanswerable or as if any answer would essentially be arbitrary.

What you need to do is look at contemporary global systems of inequality and consider their roots. For this it would seem British imperialism is often a sensible place to go to, in this case almost certainly.

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ericmay a day ago | parent [-]

That seems like a different kind of criticism, one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality and injustice that were instantiated by broader colonial powers and conflict, whether that's the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, or Persian, for that matter.

We're not talking about global systems or inequality which have innumerable reasons, but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression.

	▲	AlecSchueler 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> one that unfairly singles out the United Kingdom and ignores the global systems of inequality The UK was spoken of in the particular because of its long and violent history in Iran. We could point to any number of things like Anglo-Persian oil, the 1941 occupation or the 1953 which was previously mentioned. Countries like Portugal and the Netherlands simply don't have that history in the Iranian context. Of course if we were speaking about somewhere like Indonesia then we would foreground other colonial powers. There is also of course much that should be said about broader colonial history but the question above was why do we bring up British wrongdoing rather than ancient Persian history. > but talking about Iran and their specific bad behavior "Bad behaviour" is your terminology. We're talking about why they have sanctions imposed on them. > and how authoritarian governments point to random historical injustices to justify their own repression. No-one else was talking about this but you, and it feels like it was only raised in an attempt to undermine genuine concerns about legacy issues.