U.S. officials and much of the American media emphasize the Islamic Republic's brutal repression of its own citizens, including the killing of large numbers of protesters, while rarely acknowledging Washington's role in enabling similar abuses in Iran's past. Twenty-five years of horrific human rights abuses under the Shah of Iran, a close U.S. ally installed in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coup in 1953, have largely escaped scrutiny. The Shah's secret police, SAVAK, was created with help from the CIA and Israel's Mossad. Human rights organization Amnesty International's 1974/75 Annual Report asserts: 'The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief.' Time magazine's August 15, 1976 cover story, 'Torture as Policy: The Network of Evil', documented the widespread use of torture by governments in order to suppress dissent. The article noted that the worst violators may have been Chile and Iran, where torture had become institutionalized by their police forces. Chile's brutal military dictator General Augusto Pinochet was another U.S. ally whom the CIA helped bring into power in 1973. The Time article further reported that Iran's torture techniques included electric shock, rape, beatings, and helmets designed to amplify victims' screams. In his 1982 book, The Real Terror Network, Edward S. Herman writes: 'In each country, a web of myths evolves that allows the loyal citizenry to feel good about their nation, that depicts its people as generous, progressive and decent to a fault in its international behavior.' This tendency to sanitize history isn't confined to the Cold War era. The Trump administration's efforts to recast national history, pressuring museums and parks over slavery, Native American dispossession and other 'disparaging' material is another example of trying to control the story a nation tells about itself. Brenda Hafera, a scholar at the conservative U.S. think tank Heritage Foundation, leads the organization's review of historical sites. In a March 2026 PBS NewsHour segment on divisions over U.S. history ahead of America's 250th anniversary, she stated: 'I think any truthful commemoration of the American story will be celebratory, because that's accurate, because this is a good country that has contributed a lot and has moved towards human freedom.' Yet U.S. support for the Shah helped sustain a regime that denied political freedom to Iranians. Adam Hochschild's book, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, ends with a chapter titled 'The Great Forgetting.' Hochschild writes: 'And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.' Hochschild's warning is fitting. What nations choose to forget affects how power is exercised in the present. For the world's dispossessed, there are memories no empire can erase. Terry Hansen is an opinion writer who focuses on human rights and U.S. foreign policy.