Rick Steves: "Know people before you bomb them"
Even though travel writer Rick Steves is best known for his guide books about Europe, he's no stranger to the Middle East. He first traveled to the region in 1978, when he was 23, and then returned to Iran in 2009 for an episode of his PBS show.
In a conversation with Death, Sex & Money host Anna Sale, Rick explains why he made that episode and why it's important get an up-close look at a country the U.S. is attacking: "It's real people, and if 150 little school girls were killed in our country, life would grind to a halt, but if we do it in their country it's just collateral damage."
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(excerpt)
When I was in Iran, people (in the U.S.) were singing bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran like it was a a Beach Boy song, you know, and they were talking about a regime change, like it was a game. Um, we don't know the political baggage. We don't know the the mindset of our enemies a lot of times. Um, and I strive to know what is there. What are their 911s? You know, what what makes them respond to the rest of the world? And in Iran, it's incursions from the West...
Um, and I was almost I was traumatized as a TV producer at the great museum in Tehran with how skimpy the artifacts were. Where are all of your treasures? Where's Xerxes? You know, where's Cyrus? Where's the the great empires of Persia? And they go, all of our finest artifacts are in Europe in great museums in Europe. So, you can go there to see them. And they've been taken elsewhere.
And uh what's going on in Iran right now? They've got a a theocratic dictatorship. Why was that?Because in 1953 they elected a charismatic local leader um Mosedc to to run their country and nationalize their oil.
Can you imagine that? They they took control of their own oil and that person was thrown out by the United States and Britain because we needed access to their oil. And we put in a puppet, a guy who played ball with us on our terms and that was the Shah.
And uh the shah was great if you're a cosmopolitan big city Iranian with lots of money and and uh and connections with Europe, but that was the worst thing that could happen for a lot of Iranians because he was an affront to their values. They were bragging the miniskirts were shorter in Tehran than they were in Paris. Imagine that. We've got shorter miniskirts in Thran. We're so western. We're so hip. What is that? How does that resonate with the small town less educated fundamentalists?
The base, you know, and the base of Iran is the same of the base in our country right now. And they're good people, but they're they're riddled with fear and they're motivated by love and they've got a worldview and they've got baggage and uh their baggage is the shah and and they don't want another sha. So they've chosen this um m Muslim revolution, this Islamic lack of democracy because it's an alternative to the shah.
And we got to understand that. I can't fully understand that, but I know that mothers voted for the the religious takeover because they didn't want the alternative. And if an Americans were putting a person on the throne in Tehran, their girls would be hijacked from a moral point of view. They would be boy toys, crash materialists, and drug addicts. That's what they're worried about.
Uh I had a woman, I I've talked about it in my writing quite a bit, came up to me and said, "Are you an American journalist?" I said, "Yes." She said, "I want you to go home and tell the truth. We're strong. We're united, and we just don't want our little girls to be raised like Britney Spears.
And I thought, whoa, I've I've hit on something here. They're not worried about the the price of oil. They're worried about the ethics and the morality of their children. And they don't want this western hedonism. They want this very conservative, beautiful in their mind Muslim um lifestyle. And um it's a different world and we don't appreciate that and and we need to.
Rick Steves' Iran (2009)
Join Rick as he explores the most surprising and fascinating land he's ever visited: Iran. In this one-hour, ground-breaking travel special, you'll discover the splendid monuments of Iran's rich and glorious past, learn more about the 20th-century story of this perplexing nation, and experience Iranian life today in its historic capital and in a countryside village. Most important, you'll meet the people of this nation whose government so exasperates our own.
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...after a cancer diagnosis.
“I would love to be the person I was before I was a travel writer,” he continued. “I would have had a very, very beautiful life being a piano teacher, coming home every night for dinner and mowing the lawn, and joining clubs, and, you know, being regular and reliable. But I've chosen a different path, and this is a path that is — it's a mission for me.”
“I've calculated it,” he explained. “And I've got an opportunity to be what I consider extremely productive ... helping people travel in a constructive way. And I choose that knowing it's not gonna be without a cost. Yeah, I'm aware of that. And I'm in a way, I'm sad about it. But, again, you have to make a choice.”
https://people.com/rick-steves-talks-regrets-after-cancer-diagnosis-the-interview-podcast-8761695
It's on HBO Max.
Its season 4 episode 6.
He always sat down with locals too.
