A simple exercise in dispelling media propaganda
The case of the three-day nationwide strike in Iran that never was
For weeks now the Iranian expat opposition, made up primarily of monarchist and far right fascists on the payroll of the US, Israel and the Saudis, have been promoting three days of nationwide strikes in Iran, set to begin yesterday. So yesterday, today and tomorrow the entire country of Iran, with a population of over 85 million, is shut down. Every shop, workplace, factory, public transit, busses, trains, trams, metros, kindergartens, middle schools, high schools, universities—it is all shut down, and the evil Islamic regime is on the verge of collapse now.
At least, that’s what every media outlet has been spewing since yesterday, from the Guardian to the BBC to German and French state media. It’s over. Rejoice, the Great Iranian Revolution of 2022 has been completed. The son of the fascist monarch who was overthrown will return gloriously to sit on his rightful throne again, and everyone will cheer and celebrate as the oil industry is handed over to Shell and Exxonmobil and Chevron. Democracy has returned, finally.
Just see for yourself:
My favorite is France24’s ‘The tipping point isn’t far away’, because of course it has already been proven beyond doubt that the entirety of Iran has been shut down since yesterday, and today, and will be tomorrow. That’s a given. You don’t even have to question that.
But there’s a slight problem with this, and it’s called reality. I know it’s a terribly annoying thing, this reality, it would be so much easier if we could just live in the world of Western media propaganda. There everything is blissful and perfect and ideal and it all goes to plan. Reality is annoying, it’s dirty, it’s evil, it’s gross, you don’t have to deal with reality as a journalist, that’s icky. No, make your own reality, your imagined reality, and disseminate it so that people will believe that’s what is actually happening, and it can alter their behaviors accordingly. You see, if the regime is about to fall, the tipping point is near, why not go out on the street and throw a Molotov cocktail? Why not go and set fire to a building? You won’t face any consequences, the regime is over. The work is already done. Go brave young Iranian and just give it a slight push and it will crumble around you. Oh wait you just ended up destroying your life based on lies you read on Western media and expat fascist Iranian social media boosted by bot armies? That’s tragic, but it makes for good fodder for more content for them, so your sacrifice was worth it for another quick media hit. Too bad you had to lose your life over it though, but you know, that far right opposition figure got another CNN appearance out of it so it’s all good.
Well, that is the point of these headlines and reports and the fake reality they carefully construct and disseminate. And it’s done in service of the State Department and CIA, who have been engaging in these kinds of psy ops for decades now, as explained by themselves in the clip below, and also in the clips added later in the thread:
But I want to go back to the nationwide strikes in Iran, and the simple exercise to dispel this particular media propaganda psy op campaign. It’s very easy. You are not in Iran, I’m not in Iran, so we can’t directly verify it ourselves. Even if we were in Iran we would only have a partial sense of what’s going on based on our immediate environments, so that doesn’t go that far either, but at least we can penetrate the absurdity of a “nationwide strike” by just taking a stroll outside and looking at whether shops are open, workplaces are open, the busses are running, trains are running, etc. etc.
But what if we can magnify that in scope and look at it directly ourselves with our own eyes. That would be amazing right, because then we’d know whether the entire country of Iran was actually shut down yesterday, and today, and tomorrow. What possible tool that is so hard to find can give us this knowledge, this hidden, secret ability to verify this claim that I’ve been calling propaganda. Surely if this tool existed a New York Times, BBC, Guardian reporter would have figured it out by now right? I mean surely they’re not just writing these deranged headlines and creating these alternative realities with this tool being available to them, right? That would be absurd.
There are more cameras in the world today than ever before in history. Many have a phone with a camera. Many have HD 4K capable cameras. Many Iranians have those cameras. Many Iranians are also active on social media, including YouTube. Many Iranians are also vloggers, going outside on a regular basis and just filming without any edits, without any cuts, just filming whatever is happening on the streets of their particular cities and villages. And they then upload it on YouTube.
And we, lucky us, have the ability to watch that unedited footage which goes on for sometimes hours on a daily basis. Remember, these are apolitical citizens of Iran who have a YouTube channel where they just vlog on a regular basis, giving us the materials that destroy the fake realities carefully constructed in the newsrooms of the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, NBC, ABC, and all the other Western media psy op networks that masquerade as legitimate journalistic operations but are in fact merely an appendage of the Western capitalist class advancing its imperialists interests.
So the claim in report after report from these psy op networks was that the entirety of Iran had heeded the call of the fascist expat opposition and shut down the entire country yesterday, today, and they will do it again tomorrow. The entire country is shut down, you read it in the headlines. You maybe saw a viral bot boosted tweet from one of those expat fascists claiming it, showing some empty street from who knows when, who knows where, or some photo like in those reports of shuttered shops. And you may have thought to yourself: "Wow, it really is nearing the tipping, this Great Iranian Revolution of 2022, it really is almost over now!” You started to believe that their fake reality, was reality.
Now watch these vlogs from yesterday and today from a variety of cities inside Iran, and tell me what you see with your own eyes. Do you see a nationwide strike as was reported in all those outlets? Do you see chaos? Do you see mass protests? Do you see a revolution that is so great that even the French revolution pales in comparison to it, as told to us by the esteemed BBC and New York Times? Or have you been lied to. Have you been sold a reality that only exists in the deranged minds of elite media class cretins sitting in offices in London, New York and DC? Your own eyes won’t lie to you, and you can see reality as it is. Iran is a country of over 85 million people, and the very notion that the entire country has shut down is so deranged, so unbelievably fucking insane, that you should feel insulted that these depraved scumbags didn’t even flinch before deciding to sell this bullshit to you. That’s how little they think of you and your ability to reason. They think you’re worthless scum, when in reality all they have to do is look in the mirror to see that.
So again, watch these vlogs, and I suggest you do the same regularly whenever there’s an uptick of deranged claims in the media about Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, wherever, and just look at reality.
Just a final note before you watch the actually quite beautiful daily life in Iran (including many women without veils on, and it’s considered perfectly normal). Here is a piece by the New York Times from October 12th:
Do you see the title? Read it again carefully: Protests in Iran spread, including to oil sector. That second part is the key part, because if the oil sector goes down, a significant part of the economy goes down as well, which would actually be an important event to take note of. But that was almost two months ago now, and the oil sector didn’t go down. In fact, as the Financial Times admitted in a piece on November 20th, protests and strikes have not reached the oil sector at all. In fact, it has not been able to reach the working class more generally:
Go do a search for “Iran oil strike” on Google and Twitter and see how many verified bluecheck “journalist” hacks attached to the BBC and New York Times and all these other propaganda psy op networks helped fabricate this lie. All their articles and posts are still up. No one will ask them whatever happened to that fake oil strike. No one will hold them accountable for their deranged lies. Because when it concerns and Official Enemy, you can spew whatever you like, no ones cares. You can post guides on how to kill officials and do terror bombings and make Molotov cocktails and your posts go viral instead of you getting arrested for being a terrorist as would have been the case if you dared say the same shit about your own Western countries. There is full impunity to do and say whatever you want.
People often ask me in replies on Twitter how you can see through propaganda, and I always try to give resources, point to books, videos, lectures, documentaries, not just as a way to dispel propaganda in specific cases, but to also show how you can develop the skills to do so yourself by looking at how others do it. That’s the main purpose of everything I put out, including here. I’m not saying don’t read Western media, I saw that NYT piece on the oil strike, and instinctively knew it was fucking bullshit, and verified it with other sources. And then, lo and behold, the Financial Times comes out with a piece admitting it was a lie. Admitting it was all just fucking bullshit propaganda. And I read that too. So it’s not about ignoring what is in the BBC and these other propaganda rags, it’s about knowing how to recognize the propaganda in the framing, the use of language, the structure of the text, of the editing of videos. For more case studies focusing on the New York Times see here and here.
I also highly recommend following the content of people related to whatever a psy op campaign is being waged against, in this case Iran. Find leftist anti-imperialists and see what they’re saying. Here is a great account with a great post about this mirage of a nationwide three-day strike, and there are more in his following list that you can check out as well:
I’ll leave you with scenes from what Western media called the greatest nation-wide strike in history, a part of the Glorious Iranian Revolution of 2022. Believe your own eyes. There’s some final thoughts at the end of the embedded videos below.
If you go to each of those channels and just search for something like “Iran vlog” on YouTube you’ll find much more footage going back to the beginning of this Great Iranian Revolution of 2022. People walking about on the streets of major cities with no protests, shops open, workplaces open, busses, trains, everything running normally, nothing out of the ordinary. No mass protests, no chaos, everything is not on fire, the country is not on the verge of collapse, 85 million people are not constantly out on the streets protesting.
This channel is pretty interesting. It’s someone I think from Pakistan who has been holidaying in Iran for the past few weeks. The poor guy doesn’t get any views on his videos, it’s a very small channel, but he’s a vlogger, he likes to post his daily life and now he’s in Iran so that’s what he’s posting about. These are primary sources that allow us to see what’s actually happening, if the media psy op version of reality actually conforms to the reality of this country. Just watch some of this guy’s vlogs and see if you see in it a glimpse of the Great Iranian Revolution of 2022 as proclaimed by the New York Times and BBC.
No, it’s the same as all the others. Daily life going on as usual. Ironically, it’s not even close to what we saw in the US during the BLM protests, which were the largest in US history. No one in the media and political class proclaimed the end of the US regime because of that. No one said that the US was nearing the “tipping point” of its collapse. But Iran, where literally nothing is happening that is out of the ordinary, not even mass protests of the kind we saw in the Green Movement of 2009, is undergoing a momentous revolution in the deranged minds of the Western media and political class.
I posted on the same day that a few people in China started protesting and immediately the psy op campaign started up and proclaimed it a heroic revolution that this was deranged and no such revolution would happen, and of course I was right. And I will say the same now regarding Iran: There is no Iranian revolution happening. It is a deranged mirage concocted by fascist expats who work for the US, Israeli and Saudi regimes. The fact that this derangement has been pushed onto people for nearly 3 months now with no signs of it stopping shows you how shameless these cretins really are, that they are lying straight to your face and expect you to just accept it even as their claims keep being disproven by reality over and over and over again. The three-day strike didn’t usher in a monarchist revolution? Oh who cares, that was last month’s psy op focus, we’ve moved on to the new thing now. And then the new thing, and then the other one, and so and so forth, until this bullshit cyber revolution is in its 10th year and still nothing has happened.
That’s what we’re getting now in the new era of cyber revolutions led by bot armies on social media. Revolutions that go on indefinitely in virtual space, but have no existence in physical reality. The endless revolution, or to put it more accurately: the endless psy op.
My rule is that whenever the government and the media tell you something, especially about a foreign power that's an official enemy, you should operate under the assumption that they're lying unless you can independently verify it.
Great piece exposing more US/Western propaganda in the Middle East.
Really well written and informative article.
You know when all of the western media write about the same thing there's a 99.99% probability of them lying through their teeth.
They're readying Iran for war.