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They’re definetly winning the meme war so far…
The embassy in South Africa has been particularly good since the war started. Funny thing is that Iran always was very stale, buttoned up and intellectual in it’s communication before this war. Former president Khatami infamously referenced Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America, remarking that it was a text he was “sure most Americans have read” in a CNN interview in 1998. Now they’ve realized that most Americans can barely read, so it’s been memes and Lego videos during this war, and they’ve demonstrated that they are better at braindead propaganda too. Quite impressive.
The concept of “mass anti-intellectualism” was probably a major culture-shock to most people.
Iran has always been good at memes, they’ve just kept them in Farsi. But Gen Z speaks significantly better English than older generations so it’s easier to get the message across now.
Should’ve specified that I meant internationally. Unfortunately, I haven’t followed the internal stuff. Before this war, the international public diplomacy was very academic and formal as far as I’m aware. I guess it’s to be expected that the social media generations would excel at memes, Iranians tend to excel at most things they take seriously. That’s apparent even outside Iran, where Iranian minorities in the west are generally more ambitious in most areas compared to the majority of immigrant communities.
Yes you’re right, communication from within Iran has been almost exclusively formal, with the occasional journalist that tends to interview anonymous subjects quite naively and almost always with a heavy bias.
Unfortunately it’s difficult to keep up with their discourse if you’re not immersed in the culture. Iran is a bit of an island, and unless you’re physically within the country I think it’s pretty much impossible to keep up to date with everything even if you read the news, watch TV all day and read Whatsapp/Telegram all night.
I’d love to see communication restrictions and internal repression loosen up a bit. Information warfare has been a huge factor for Iran over the past 20 years so I can see the desire to guard against that (especially in this last war when they basically physically pulled the plug on the internet because the communication infrastructure was compromised and was being used to stage military strikes and disable the electrical grid). But ultimately I think those restrictions backfired over time, causing confusion, misunderstandings and security holes as people found ways to circumvent the restrictions anyway (as they tend to do). Repression is seldom the answer.