Roberta Rivolta Source: Al Mayadeen English
Roberta Rivolta argues that Iran’s wartime media campaign has broken through Western narrative dominance by speaking directly to younger global audiences in the language and aesthetics of US popular culture, marking a historic reversal in which Washington’s own communication tools are being turned against it.
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The scale of this phenomenon is more significant than it appears at first glance, because this operation undermines one of the most strenuous and fruitful efforts undertaken by the United States since it adopted an aggressive imperialist foreign policy on the international stage.
This is why almost all Western articles, after expressing lukewarm appreciation for the quality of the videos, invariably go on to try to denigrate them—insinuating possible affiliations of the creators with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, or attempting to debunk their content ("the great Persian empire has nothing to do with the repressive, fanatical and religious obscurantism of the Iranian theocracy," reads an editorial published by a major Italian newspaper. The BBC takes care to point out that the videos would be “littered with factual inaccuracies”).
The problem is that all these attempts to contain the success of the Iranian operation fall flat, because they ignore—and this in itself is a significant fact—that the audience to which Iranian communication primarily addresses is not the same audience that reads BBC or Washington Post articles. It is a younger audience, one that has not yet absorbed decades of Western propaganda and is therefore still relatively open to different points of view. Unsurprisingly, this is the audience that, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center, is showing an increasing hostility towards the blatant violations of every civil and moral law committed by "Israel", particularly in the last two and a half years.
On March 26, Forbes recorded 145 million views and tens of thousands of shares of the Lego videos produced by the Iranian enterprise Explosive Media.
On X, there has been a surge in the number of followers of Iranian embassies. Among the others, the most active, and therefore most popular, seem to be the embassy in Zimbabwe, with 87,000 followers and the embassy in South Africa, that boasts over 160,000 followers.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has nearly 600,000 followers, and Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi over 700,000.
And all of them are gaining about a thousand new followers per day.
Viral has been also the video in which Ebrahim Zolfaghari, the Iranian military spokesperson, mocks US President Trump by turning two of his famous catchphrases against him: "You're fired" (from the TV show The Apprentice) and "Thank you for your attention to this matter" (the usual ending of Trump’s posts on Truth).
Similarly, photos of messages and dedications on drones and missiles by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have gone around the world. Especially those carrying the slogan "One Vengeance for All," linking the Iranian cause to a broader global struggle. The slogan was launched by a video, also viral, in which a missile strikes the Statue of Liberty, bringing a smile to the face of all the victims of US imperialism throughout history: from Native Americans to the Minab elementary school, via Hiroshima, Vietnam, Yemen, Gaza, Epstein Island, and ending with General Qassem Soleimani and Sayyed Ali Khamenei.
Meanwhile, Iranian President Pezeshkian published an open letter to American citizens, explaining the true causes of the war and correcting the misperceptions about Iran induced by US media and politicians.
All these messages, which simultaneously use multiple channels of dissemination, share common traits: they are in English and use narrative and aesthetic canons typical of US entertainment products: a cartoonish graphic style, made of bright colors, sharp outlines, caricature figures; the speed and brevity of social media communication; simple messages, devoid of nuances, two-dimensional characters, clear lines of demarcation; rap music as a musical accompaniment.
It is a total appropriation by Iran of the languages and communication strategies that the United States has used since the founding of Hollywood to impose its narratives on the world.
Iran appears to have carefully studied its media strategy to launch a massive counterattack on the communication front as well as on the military one. And just as it has demonstrated great intelligence on the battlefield in making the most of its own resources and others' weaknesses, so too in the media domain it has managed to reverse the balance of power with remarkable effectiveness.
This is an operation of epochal significance, because it is the first time in history that the United States has found itself on the receiving end of a media offensive of this magnitude.
The United States has always invested enormous resources in the battle of communication.
We all know the story of the loving correspondence between the CIA and Hollywood, and we know how the US has always worked to ensure control over global information and communication flows.
In 2000, French economist Serge Latouche wrote, in his book La Planète uniforme: "There are more than a hundred news agencies scattered around the world; yet five transnational agencies alone control 96% of the global flow of information. Every radio station, every television channel, every newspaper on the planet subscribes to these agencies. 65% of the world's news originates in the United States. Between 30 and 70% of television broadcasts are imported from the center [i.e., the Global North]."
Today, the internet makes it more difficult to exercise such pervasive control; nevertheless, the monopoly over information and communication technologies still guarantees the US a dominant role in shaping Western and non-Western public opinion. There are multiple tools that US platforms resort to to silence dissenting voices: censorship of images (remember the removal of photos of General Qassem Soleimani following his assassination); deletion of posts containing flagged words; suspension and ban of disfavored accounts; reduction of post visibility; imposition of biased fact-checking; use of labels to denigrate specific sources (Iranian state television channels, for example, are labeled as "Iran state-controlled media," as are Russian and Chinese ones, but the same label is not applied to Western public broadcasters such as France24, the BBC, or Italian RAI). Besides, West-controlled search engines prevent citizens from finding results on the web from sources not aligned with Western ideology.
On the other hand, the United States invests billions of dollars each year to keep media networks operational in foreign target countries.
There are countless Western channels that publish or broadcast in Farsi to reach the Iranian people, with the aim of sowing division and hostility toward their institutions.
Social media platforms and digital media were also the Trojan horse that prepared the war against Syria.
The goal of the United States is naturally to secure a monopoly over everything that creates narrative (media, social networks, cultural products), because whoever controls the narrative controls the perception of events and determines the construction of shared meanings, thus shaping public opinion and, ultimately, defining "reality."
The very spread of the English language as an international idiom was not a totally spontaneous process.
It is worth remembering how in 1997, at the dawn of the globalization of communication networks, David Rothkopf, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, wrote: "Globalization has economic roots and political consequences, but it also has brought into focus the power of culture in this global environment. [...] For the United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the world's information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas."
Unsurprisingly, Rothkopf dedicates an entire paragraph to criticize "fundamentalist Iran" and "communist China" for not allowing easy access to US products, which he himself declares are formative for consumer culture: "American music, American movies, American television, and American software are so dominant, so sought after, and so visible that they are now available literally everywhere on the Earth. They influence the tastes, lives, and aspirations of virtually every nation."
And again: "It is in the economic and political interests of the United States to ensure that if the world is moving toward a common language, it be English; that if the world is moving toward common telecommunications, safety, and quality standards, they be American; that if the world is becoming linked by television, radio, and music, the programming be American; and that if common values are being developed, they be values with which Americans are comfortable." (David Rothkopf, In Praise of Cultural Imperialism? Effects of Globalization on Culture)
As Rothkopf hoped, English has not only definitively been established as the international language but in many cases, although to varying degrees from country to country, tends to overwrite pre-existing national languages—especially, but not only—in the fields of technology, economics, and business. Just as English has become the quintessential language of new technologies, new technologies have in turn become vehicles for its expansion. To the point that today it is hard to find a country where there is not a substantial portion of the population that daily consumes cultural and technological products in English.
But, like culture, language is not a neutral tool. Language carries with it an entire system of thought; it implies conceptual categories, values, ideals, hierarchies, and moral judgments.
And it is a medium for political content.
Consider the global spread of concepts such as "governance," "green economy," "accountability," or even "inclusivity."
After the overthrow of the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an emblematic lexical replacement emerged: in demonstrations, posts, and articles by Syrians expressing concern for their country's future, the word "inclusivity" recurred almost obsessively. Until then, Syrians had always used the image of the mosaic to describe the cultural, religious, and ethnic richness of their nation.
Yet, since December 8, 2024, the word "mosaic" virtually disappeared, supplanted by the English neologism "inclusivity." But there is a profound difference between the two terms. The metaphor of the mosaic – one of most ancient art forms – implies the equivalence of all the pieces in composing the picture.
The term "inclusivity"—not even a century old, and not coincidentally a battle horse of the US liberal left—presupposes by definition the prior existence of exclusion, i.e., discrimination. And it introduces hierarchies among different segments of the population where none existed before.
It would be interesting to investigate this phenomenon further, but in-depth analysis is not necessary to conclude that its origins certainly lie in the Western media's seizure of the narrative following the collapse of the indigenous government.
The establishment's control of public opinion through information and culture also works in the opposite direction.
If cultural imperialism aims to impose US ideology abroad, equally rigorous attention has always been paid to preventing divergent points of view from penetrating the US cultural landscape.
According to data, only 3% of the books published in the US are works of translation. 58% of which are written in French, Spanish, German, or Italian. This means that less than 1.26% of books translated for the Anglophone readers come from non-Western cultures. Non-English language movies make up about 18.8% of all movies released in North American cinemas. However, these films together gross just 1.1% of total domestic box office. The same goes for streaming entertainment services, where foreign productions make up only 3.5% of available titles.
In Europe, the situation is apparently rosier. The percentage of non-Western authors translated is certainly higher, but the war on Syria demonstrated incontrovertibly how strict the censorship imposed on content is. No cultural product introduced to the European market during the war expressed positions aligned with the legitimate Syrian government.
Likewise, all the major Iranian directors recognized by Western academies and festivals are known for their open opposition to their own government.
Alongside policies of extreme cultural protectionism, in fact, another tool for controlling public opinion is the construction of distorted images of countries under attack through the promotion of dissenting artists. Consider the success garnered in the United States by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or the clamor raised by the Russian rock band Pussy Riot, or the celebration of Iranian artists such as Shirin Neshat and Shervin Hajipour.
The promotion of these artists, combined with the disproportionate resonance given by news outlets to the voices of dissident "exiles," generates in the Western public a false sense of familiarity with these countries, making it even more hostile and impenetrable to different perspectives.
One can therefore understand how the media operation promoted by Iran during this war is unprecedented in its implications: for the first time in history, a foreign country has breached the impenetrable fortress of Western culture.
And it did so by bypassing the controls of the establishment and mainstream media and addressing the population directly.
For the first time, the English language, social networks, and even US popular culture itself have become weapons aimed at Washington.
For, while it is true that Iranian President Pezeshkian (and Sayyed Ali Khamenei before him) has not been the first political leader to address an open letter to the American public, all his predecessors had to rely on diplomatic channels or Western media outlets to disseminate their messages (think of Putin's editorial published in the New York Times in 2013 or Gorbachev's televised message in 1986). While today, the internet has allowed Pezeshkian to do without any intermediary and speak directly to the American public, in their own language.
The animated videos, the X posts from embassies, the satirical cartoons going viral online, as well as the dedications on drones—all of these also address Western audiences directly. And they tell a completely different story from the one imposed by decades of unchallenged US propaganda.
They tell of an immoral political class, centuries of looting and aggression against defenseless populations, repeated infanticides, and systematic repression of internal dissent. On the other hand, they paint a portrait of a country as ancient as it is advanced, with a refined mastery of technological tools, a very high level of education, a political apparatus far more efficient, dignified, and morally upright than that of its regressive counterpart, and of a cohesive people loyal to its institutions.
From a formal standpoint, this communication is highly effective because it relies on the infallible weapons of irony and symbolism.
Consider the power with which the cartoon of a taped-up airplane limping along with a crutch destroys the myth of American military strength.
Or consider the stark contrast between the noose-shaped pin worn by Ben-Gvir at the Knesset on the day of the approval of the world's most criminal law, and the backpack-shaped pin worn by the Iranian delegation in Geneva, to remember the 168 little victims of the Minab massacre.
Irony and symbolism are forms of communication endowed with an evocative power that penetrates where verbal language cannot reach, because they break through the resistances rooted in rational thought.
This too is a strategy not unknown to the West, where media manipulation relentlessly relies on a rhetoric of emotions aimed at the gut of the public to win them over to the cause of wars.
And who knows if there might also be a touch of fatigue in the more empathetic part of the Western population, constantly called upon to shoulder all these supposed dictatorships, and bombarded with images of suffering and injustice—false and artificially created, yet too hammering to ignore.
How liberating, then, to finally be able to laugh at the empire and the emperor. How much hope these messages of justice, of redemption of the oppressed, of the triumph of good over evil have rekindled. It is a breath of fresh air that seems to be bringing to the surface a hidden desire for emancipation from the burden of American imperialism in portions of European societies that previously dared not express, or even imagine, such a sudden turn in world history.
And so, Western media still struggling to discredit Iranian voices before an audience that does not even listen to them are the perfect counterpoint to a president completely detached from reality, who hurls rambling threats from the solitude of a social network where he stands virtually alone, while the rest of the world proclamis the Iranian foreign minister “the most loved person on the internet.”
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