Crazy Iranians

In the latest Grab and Maul, there is a long article on Iran's "democratically elected leader". In course of discussing Middle Eastern history he launches in to this odd paragraph.

We'll have to stop pretending we've done nothing to offend the citizens of the area. The Chinese and the Russians have done terrible things in the past, and have admit, but Britain and particularly the Americans are in denial acting like their actions have always been blameless.

The problem is that some powers have an overly positive view of their own history and motives that is not evil just human. However Russia and China have distorted and rewritten their own history. Both powers in the last century have engaged in have airbrushed history when certain old comrades have been forgotten or written out of a history. There was a time in the 90's when Russians actually looked at/could at their own past. See The Chekist, a horrifying movie about the early Soviet security agency, most of the film is executions. That the case for Russians, the Chinese Communist regime will not admit to or apologize for anything. The ChiCom do want to talk about what they did last week in the Sudan, propping up that government of murderous jihadis. To say nothing of the millions killed in Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward or any one of many noble sounding mass murders.

And then the article goes on about the "military" past of the Ahmadinejad. During the Iran-Iraq War he apparently ran a unit of the Basiji. These units would perform human wave attacks to clear minefield, overrun machine guns and other cannon fodder activities. The average age of these soliders were less than 15.