When the sun beats down
Homeless people suffer particularly from the heat in large cities
The heat in large cities is unpleasant for many people – but it can be seriously dangerous, especially for homeless people.
[This article posted on 7/3/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/27/hitze-obdachlose-grossstaedte-wenn-die-sonne-knallt.]
No escape. Whether at outdoor swimming pools, shopping centers, or even train stations, homeless people have few options for escaping the heat.
It’s actually quite simple, says Janina B. to Jungle World: “To combat the heat, we need everything that helps everyone else in summer.” B. is involved with the Homeless Foundation, a network of homeless people.
She knows from her own experience what homeless people need most in summer: they often search in vain for a place to fill up water bottles for free or for shady spots and cool places where they can stay without being chased away by security guards.
“It’s cool in train stations, but you can’t stay there for long. Homeless people are thrown out immediately,” reports B. In the few places of refuge, such as those run by the city mission, there is often a rotation principle: after a maximum of one hour, you have to make room for the next person and are sent back out into the heat. Homeless people often don’t have access to small items such as sunscreen, sunglasses, appropriate clothing, and headgear, says Janina B.
“It’s cool in train stations, but you can’t stay there for long. Homeless people are thrown out immediately.” Janina B., Homeless Foundation
Some media outlets have warned of a ‘century’ or even a “hellish” summer this year. Reputable forecasts, such as those from the Max Planck Institute, are more cautious, but do indeed assume that this summer will be hotter than average. Heat poses an enormous health risk, especially for older people and those in poor health. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the heat in Germany has claimed around 3,000 lives in each of the past two years.
It is usually even hotter in cities than in rural areas – and homeless people suffer particularly badly. Many have pre-existing conditions, suffer from malnutrition or are dependent on temperature-sensitive medication and psychotropic drugs. People living on the streets have little access to shade, cool places and drinking water.
All of this increases the risk of dehydration, burns, and heatstroke and makes wound healing more difficult. Homeless people also generally do not have health insurance and are therefore excluded from standard medical care. The doctors’ offices and emergency rooms available to them are underfunded and do not come close to meeting the demand.
Heat protection plan contains only recommendations
In 2023, the Federal Ministry of Health presented its first heat protection plan. However, it contains only recommendations, and implementation is the responsibility of the states and municipalities. Apart from emergency shelters that are open during the day and offer showers and recreation rooms, some large cities—such as Berlin—have heat buses during the summer months. Staff from various social services organizations use these buses to make rounds in places where homeless people often gather, providing them with water, sunscreen, and first aid in emergencies.
However, the Hamburg street magazine Hinz und Kunzt recently criticized the city-state’s “heat action plan.” It said the plan provides “hardly any protection measures explicitly for homeless people,” such as “cooled rooms for people without homes or at least emergency shelters that are open all day on hot days.”
The Hamburg heat action plan does highlight homeless people as a particularly vulnerable group. At the same time, however, it lists places that are recommended to the population for cooling off, but to which homeless people have little access: shopping centers, libraries, and museums, for example.
Keep emergency shelters open throughout the summer
This is also confirmed by Stefan Schneider, one of the managing directors of the Homeless Foundation. In an interview with Jungle World, he adds that heat relief services specifically aimed at homeless people are often set up in places where they do not cause any disturbance. Some municipal assistance services therefore even contribute to the displacement of homeless people from public spaces.
The Federal Working Association for Homeless Assistance (BAG W), the umbrella organization for emergency housing services and facilities, has long been calling for emergency shelters to remain open throughout the summer. Currently, they often only offer lounges, showers, and meals for a few hours a day and almost never at night.
Berit Pohns from the BAG W emphasizes in an interview with Jungle World that this demand is not just about protection from the heat: “We are talking about all extreme weather conditions. This also applies to sudden thunderstorms, for example. People must have the opportunity to retreat at any time and dry their wet clothes, for example.”
“Heat has long been an environmental issue”
In addition, according to Pohns, there are many general demands from homeless services that would make a big difference in the upcoming hot summer. For example, the BAG W has long been calling for homeless people to be included in standard medical care, thus enabling them to visit doctors without bureaucratic hurdles.
Pohns says it is positive that the issue of heat is receiving more attention: “Heat has long been an environmental issue,” but it is only in recent years that its significance for health policy has been taken seriously. However, more needs to be done at the federal level. The BAG W proposes a nationwide heat fund, and local authorities should also be legally obliged to draw up heat protection plans.
“Expanding cold and heat assistance is something that citizens can get behind, because then there’s no need to talk about the actual problems and solutions.” Stefan Schneider, managing director of the Homeless Foundation
Janina B. notes that cold and heat assistance is not available all year round: Cold assistance is available from October to April, heat assistance from June to August, and there are no services in between.
However, the Homeless Foundation also emphasizes that the focus should not only be on expanding existing measures. These are often “window dressing,” says Stefan Schneider: “Expanding cold and heat assistance is politically palatable because then there is no need to talk about the actual problems and solutions.” He and the Homeless Foundation are calling for a different approach: “We need to talk about the right to housing. Only an apartment means real protection.”
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04%2F03%2F05%2F1542249&mode=thread&tid=25
https://www.ghandchi.com/iranscope/Anthology/Kazemzadeh/kinzer.htm
All the Shah’s Men
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All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
| Author | Stephen Kinzer |
|---|---|
| Subject | 1953 Iranian coup d’état |
| Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
| Publication date | July 18, 2003 |
| Pages | 272 |
| ISBN | 978-0-471-67878-6 |
All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror is a book written by American journalist Stephen Kinzer. The book discusses the 1953 Iranian coup d’état backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, was overthrown by Islamists supported by American and British agents (chief among them Kermit Roosevelt) and royalists loyal to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.[1]
Summary
In 1933 Reza Shah signed a deal selling Iranian oil extraction rights to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Though Iran was officially neutral at the start of World War II, its monarch was friendly towards the Axis. Following the 1941 Allied Invasion of Iran, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Shah, who upheld the oil agreement with APOC, which by then had been renamed the “Anglo-Iranian Oil Company”. When the first democratically elected parliament and prime minister in Iran took power in 1950 they planned to seize the oil assets in Iran that had been developed by the British, violating the still running oil contract with British Petroleum. The British government followed to court in the Hague‘s International Court, but the Court did not rule, as it did not have jurisdiction. Britain reacted by blockading the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, halting Iran’s trade and economy. At this point Mohammad Reza Shah escaped Iran and took refugee in the West and the whole power went into hands of the elected government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The US was concerned that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was seeking help from the local superpower, the Soviet Union, against Britain. The Eisenhower administration agreed with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill‘s government to restore the pro-Western Shah to power. In the summer of 1953, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 arranged a coup in Tehran. Mossadegh was successfully overthrown and spent the rest of his life on his country estate under house arrest, and Iran remained a staunch Cold War ally of the West. After more than 20 years of the Shah’s rule, there was a bloody revolution in 1979 and brought into power an Islamic republic, which has ruled ever since.
Regarding US policy as it developed towards Iran in the early 1950s, the book portrays it as having been variously driven by the fear of annoying the British, an attempt to be an honest broker, or an effort to stop the spread of Communism. The fact, stated at the end of the book, that US companies were granted the majority of the oil concessions from the Shah’s government after the coup, does not feature significantly in the earlier part of the narrative.
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All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
4.29
10,712 ratings1,198 reviews
Half a century ago, the United States overthrew a Middle Eastern government for the first time. The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the dangers of foreign intervention.In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer gives the first full account of this fateful operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes with an assessment of the coup’s “haunting and terrible legacy.”
Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection.”It is not far-fetched,” Kinzer asserts in this book, “to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.”Drawing on research in the United States and Iran, and using material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car. Roosevelt,the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded three days later.The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of “Gang Busters,” who flew to Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup’s main sponsors.
Brimming with insights into Middle Eastern history and American foreign policy, this book is an eye-opening look at an event whose unintended consequences – Islamic revolution and violent anti-Americanism–have shaped the modern world. As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the Middle East, it is essential reading.
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With a thrilling narrative that sheds much light on recent events, this national bestseller brings to life the 1953 CIA coup in Iran that ousted the country’s elected prime minister, ushered in a quarter-century of brutal rule under the Shah, and stimulated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Selected as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and The Economist, it now features a new preface by the author on the folly of attacking Iran.
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All the Shah’s Men
David Henderson
On my summer vacation, I read more books and fewer blogs. The first book I’ve read this vacation is Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It’s excellent.
I saw Kinzer speak at a Future of Freedom Foundation event in northern Virginia in 2008. I spoke there also, as did Glenn Greenwald, Bob Higgs, Sheldon Richman, Jonathan Turley and a number of others.. Kinzer’s speech–I think it was about Cuba–was excellent. Kinzer was a long-time New York Times reporter.
Kinzer tells the story, in great detail, of how Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of TR and an employee of the CIA, set in motion the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s. It’s fascinating and disturbing: I found Roosevelt even more evil than I had expected.
I remember that when the Iran radicals had taken over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, they chanted and had signs about the CIA. Shortly after November 1979, I learned the connection with the 1953 events, but I had just assumed that they were angry about the CIA’s role in 1953. Kinzer suggests an even more direct connection. He writes:
The hostage-takers remembered that when the Shah fled into exile in 1953, CIA agents working at the American embassy had returned him to his throne. Iranians feared that history was about to repeat itself.
In the back of everybody’s mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d-etat had begun,” one of the hostage-takers explained years later. “Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible.”
The whole story is tragic. Iran was a fledgling democracy stopped in its tracks by the U.S. government at the behest of the British government. When the Iranians finally overthrew the Shah, they got, not another liberal democracy, but a vicious theocracy.
The motivation for the coup was to get back the oil company that Mossadegh had nationalized. I don’t defend nationalization, but overthrowing a government to reverse it is too extreme. I think Americans would be justly upset if, in response to the U.S. government’s nationalization of an Iranian firm, Iran’s government fomented a coup against the U.S. government. Moreover, as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, of the Labour government, had said at the time: “What argument can I advance against anyone claiming the right to nationalize the resources of their country? We are doing the same thing here with our power in the shape of coal, electricity, railways, transport and steel.”
Three other highlights, two economic, one not:
Incentives: “When the British government insisted that he [Reza Shah, the brutal self-proclaimed prime minister after a coup, from the 1920s to 1941] hire European engineers to build the rail line that was one of his grandest dreams, he did so on the condition that the engineers and their families agree to stand beneath each bridge they built when a train passed over it for the first time.”
Misunderstanding of trade, on Kinzer’s part and possibly on the part of the British, especially Churchill:
“Oil had been discovered around the Caspian Sea, in the Dutch East Indies, and in the United States, but neither Britain nor any of its colonies produced or showed any promise of producing it. If the British could not find oil elsewhere, they would no longer be able to rule the waves or much of anything else.”
Not true: they could buy it.
Woodrow Wilson, whom I’ve generally regarded as one of the three worst U.S. presidents:
“The United States sharply criticized the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement through which Britain acquired colonial powers in Iran. That same year at Versailles, President Wilson was the only world leader who supported Iran’s unsuccessful claim for monetary compensation from Britain and Russia for the effects of their occupation during World War I.”
Go Woodrow!
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All The Shah’s Men
by Stephen KINZER
Written for the Light Millennium
Fifty years ago this summer, in a bold and far-reaching covert operation, the CIA overthrew the elected government of Iran. My new book, “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” tells the full story of that plot for the first time. My work on this book led me to conclude that although the coup seemed successful at first, it left a haunting and terrible legacy.
– Stephen KINZER’s new book, “All The Shah’s Men” published in July 2003
– Author’s portrait
The phrase “regime change” has been much in the news this year as the United States launched its campaign to depose President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Given the huge inequality between the forces of the two countries, there was never any doubt that the campaign would succeed easily. On May 1, President Bush announced the end of hostilities in Iraq, effectively declaring victory.
There are already some signs that this victory was less than complete. How will it look from the perspective of later history? The American experience in Iran suggests that it may go horribly wrong.
Fifty years ago this summer, in a bold and far-reaching covert operation, the CIA overthrew the elected government of Iran. My new book, “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” tells the full story of that plot for the first time. My work on this book led me to conclude that although the coup seemed successful at first, it left a haunting and terrible legacy.
President Mohammad Mossadegh headed the last democratic government Iran ever knew. He thrilled his country by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had been earning huge profits for the British while most Iranians lived in terrible poverty. The British were outraged, and began to plot Mossadegh’s overthrow. He learned of the activities of British agents in Tehran and responded by ordering the British embassy shut. All British diplomats, and with them all the secret agents who were plotting the coup, had to leave Iran.
Desperate to be rid of Mossadegh so they could reclaim their oil company, the British asked the United States for help. President Harry Truman, who sympathized with nationalists like Mossadegh, refused. But in 1953, Truman left office and was replaced by Dwight Eisenhower. British agents easily persuaded the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, Allen Dulles, that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup’s main sponsors.
Allen Dulles sent one of the CIA’s most resourceful agents, Kermit Roosevelt, to Iran to carry out the operation. Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded three days later, on Aug. 19, 1953.
The story of Operation Ajax is a cloak-and-dagger tale of spies, saboteurs and secret agents. In my research I learned about staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the Mohammad Reza Shah and Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car.
Among the colorful characters in this drama were the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of “Gang Busters,” who flew to Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who has been largely forgotten by history but who was in his time a titan who shook the world.
Operation Ajax reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection. It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.
This was the first time the CIA ever overthrew a government. Emboldened by its success, the agency went on to carry out a coup in Guatemala the next year. Later it launched covert operations against governments from Cuba and Chile to Vietnam and the Congo.
At the time, Operation Ajax seemed like a triumph. Fifty years later, we can see that it led to disaster. This episode is a vivid message about the long-term dangers of foreign intervention. Today’s world leaders would do well to study it before deciding to order “regime change” in faraway lands
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Advance Praise for “All The Shah’s Men”
“Remarkable, readable and relevant “All the Shah’s Men” not only reads like an exciting, page-turning spy novel, it deals with the hard issues of today.”
–Senator Richard Lugar, Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“A well-researched object lesson in the dismal folly of so-called nation-building. British and American readers of today should blush with shame.”
–John le Carre, author of “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” and “The Tailor of Panama”
“Stephen Kinzer’s brilliant reconstruction of the Iranian coup is made even more fascinating by the fact that it is true. It is as gripping as a thriller, and also tells much about why the United States is involved today in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.”
–Gore Vidal, author of “Lincoln,” “Burr,” and “1876”.
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Jan 24, 2020
Book Review: All the Shah’s Men
In light of recent events, and the constant evolution of US-Iranian tensions, understanding their origins should be a priority for military leaders and critical thinkers. In a chaotic era of poor, cowardly leadership and “subject matter experts” who never wore the uniform, but shout hyper-opinionated word vomit like John Bolton on a cocaine-fueled twitter storm, sifting through the rubble for meaningful, reliable content becomes difficult. That’s why I’d like to share what I believe to be the best, digestible book on the first modern Iranian revolution–the revolution that the US started and the Islamic Regime exploited.
All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer, which was on the recommended reading list at the Defense Language Institute’s Persian Farsi school, thoroughly details the US-backed overthrow of the democratically elected President of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Dr. Masoud Kazemzadeh, an Iranian-American professor of Political Science, writes “[Kinzer’s] book is not a journalistic recounting of events with superficial explanations. Kinzer’s book presents essential information and raises important questions for international-relations scholars interested in U.S. policy towards Iran.” Kinzer indeed keeps an intense, facts-driven narrative throughout the book, making it easy for readers with a short attention span to stay engaged.
One of Kinzer’s main theses in this book is that the 1953 Iranian coup was orchestrated by Americans, not to counter the Soviet Union’s desire for oil fields and influence in the region, but rather to consume and sell Iranian oil. Kinzer also argues that the players in the 1953 coup were easily able to sell the idea to the West’s staunch anti-communist leaders, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, while simultaneously organizing the redistribution of resources to Western oil companies. The book was published in the summer of 2003 not long after the invasion of Iraq as America started to gain a reputation for oil wars.
Kinzer’s account goes into great detail, sometimes providing an hour by hour narrative, about the joint CIA-MI6 operation to overthrow the beloved President Mossadegh. Mossadegh was elected on the platform he would nationalize Iranian oil and other natural resources and use the funds to update Iran’s infrastructure and social programs. A short, fragile man, Mossadegh’s enormous smile, loud laughter, charisma, and charm combined with his passionate speeches on democratic reform and an Iran for the people elevated the elderly aristocrat to presidential status, blowing his opponent out of the water and landing himself a place as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951.
Predictably, Mossadegh’s nationalization of resources did not sit well with Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, who had been paying off political elites to take the oil far below market value. Britain took Iran to the newly established International Court of Justice at The Hague where President Mossadegh led his country’s legal defense from the front. Iran won an enormous victory when the international court found them well within their rights to manage their own state resources. The US and Britain were furious. To protect their interests, the CIA and MI6 assigned Kermit Roosevelt to lead a coup in Iran. Kermit, who was President Theodore Roosevelt’s great grandson, had already orchestrated a successful coup to remove the Egyptian monarchy code named Project Fat Fucker. Kinzer writes about Kermit Roosevelt’s leadership in the Iranian coup, even going into fine details about how he managed his agents and used code words broadcast on public TV shows to mobilize military, police, and street gang forces. As we know, the coup was a success, and Mossadegh was forced to cede to the Western-friendly Shah and his puppet government.
In Iran, the 1953 coup is commonly known as The Day Democracy Died. President Mossadegh was a national hero akin to George Washington and Gandhi, who also stood up to imperial Britain so their countries could flourish. Knowing the implications of the 1953 Iran coup helps makes sense of the anger Iranians felt toward the West when an agitated population of Persian nationalists stormed the American embassy in 1979. Being micromanaged by a puppet Shah with a notorious secret police force, called the Savak, did not sit well with the Iranian people. Any politically aware Iranian citizen knew that their hard-earned democracy was thwarted by the US and Britain. The mullahs played heavily on the CIA coup in 1979 during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, successfully stoking the fires of unrest and uprising in a vulnerable populace. More about the Islamic Revolution of 1979 can be read in the fascinating book A Time to Betray by Reza Kahlili.
Reading All The Shah’s Men helped me understand the justified anger many Iranians feel toward the West, and also reinforced my stance on staying critical of my own government’s actions. In these turbulent political times, knowing as much as we can about the origins of the present situation will help ourselves and others have an educated conversation and possibly even inform decisions that could pave a forward pathway to peace.
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