A government truly secure in its power would not need to perform it so relentlessly.
In Tehran and across Iran, a government under pressure is rewriting its own story — trading the language of Islamic revolution for the older, deeper grammar of Persian nationhood. The shift is not merely cosmetic; it signals a regime sensing that faith alone no longer binds, and that survival now requires borrowing symbols it once condemned. What looks like confidence — the rallies, the weapons, the imagery of military triumph — may be better read as the restless performance of a power that fears what stillness would reveal.
- Iran's rulers have abandoned their decades-long reliance on religious ideology, pivoting sharply toward nationalist symbolism — Persian historical figures, unveiled women on state television, and imagery of military victory — in a bid to widen a shrinking base of support.
- Beneath the staged spectacle, the country is fracturing: the economy is nearing collapse, recent protests have been met with mass killings, and the clerical establishment is visibly ceding ground to Revolutionary Guards commanders.
- The regime has real victories to point to — closing the Strait of Hormuz and surviving strikes from the United States and Israel — and is using them to blur the line between loyalty to Iran and loyalty to the Islamic Republic.
- Citizens across the political spectrum remain unconvinced: a young graduate sees the rallies as theater masking economic desperation, while a hardline student finds the loosened social codes a betrayal of the revolution's promise.
- Analysts warn that the relentless display of armed force and nationalist pageantry reveals insecurity rather than strength — and that when the war ends, the same machinery now pointed outward will turn inward once more.
Tehran's walls are covered in images of triumph — Revolutionary Guards hauling in American warships, the Strait of Hormuz weaponized as symbol and reality. The government stages near-nightly rallies, mass weddings in military vehicles, weapons training in mosques. On the surface, a nation unified and defiant. Beneath it, something far more fragile.
For decades, Iran's rulers drew legitimacy from Shi'ite religious ideology — martyrdom, revolutionary fervor, Islamic resistance. That language no longer moves people. So the regime has pivoted, dusting off Persian historical symbols it once dismissed as monarchist relics. State television now shows unveiled women at rallies, a sight once unthinkable. The message has been repackaged to seem inclusive: we are all Iranians, and we stand together.
But the intensity of the campaign betrays what the authorities would never admit. The economy is approaching collapse. Protests have been crushed with mass killings. Analysts see in the propaganda shift a deeper structural change — the clerics losing ground to the Revolutionary Guards, a theocracy quietly becoming a military state. A retired government employee in Shiraz named Narges looks at the new nationalist banners and sees only a temporary unity, one that will dissolve the moment the war ends.
The regime does have genuine victories to leverage. Closing the Strait of Hormuz and surviving American and Israeli airstrikes are real achievements, and they give the propaganda real weight. By framing the conflict as a war against Iran rather than against the Islamic Republic, the authorities have made dissent feel like betrayal.
Yet skepticism cuts across every demographic. A young graduate in Yazd sees the rallies as theater designed to project support the system hasn't earned. A hardline student in Tabriz believes the patriotism is real, but is unsettled by the loosened social codes on display — this is not what the revolution promised, he says. Even the faithful are divided.
The imagery carries its own unintended confession. Ballistic missiles painted flamingo pink, weapons drills in houses of worship, armed wedding processions — these are not the gestures of a confident government. They are the gestures of one that needs to remind its own people, night after night, of its capacity for violence. When the war ends, the nationalist symbols now aimed outward will find new targets. The economic crisis will remain. The repression will remain. For now, the regime has papered over its fractures. Whether that paper holds is the question no one can yet answer.
Tehran's streets are papered with images of national triumph these days—Revolutionary Guards hauling in American warships in fishing nets, the Strait of Hormuz cinched like a noose across Donald Trump's face. The Iranian government is staging near-nightly rallies, mass weddings in military vehicles bristling with machine guns, and weapons training sessions in mosques where men and women learn to strip and fire assault rifles. On the surface, it is a country unified, defiant, victorious. Beneath it, the picture is far more fractured.
The propaganda push represents a deliberate shift in strategy. For decades, Iran's rulers drew power from religious ideology—Shi'ite imagery of martyrdom, revolutionary fervor, the language of Islamic resistance. That message no longer moves people. So the regime has pivoted toward nationalism, dusting off Persian historical symbols that the Islamic Republic once dismissed as relics of monarchy. State television now shows women without headscarves at rallies, a sight that would have been unthinkable in Iranian media years ago. The old revolutionary iconography has not disappeared, but it has been diluted, repackaged, made to seem more inclusive. The message is simple: we are all Iranians, and we stand together.
Yet the very intensity of this campaign suggests something the authorities would never admit—they are afraid. The economy, already in crisis before the current war, is approaching collapse. The government has crushed recent protests with mass killings and continues to expand its apparatus of repression. Analysts who study Iran closely say the shift in propaganda reflects a deeper transformation in how power actually works. The clerics are losing ground to the Revolutionary Guards commanders. The theocratic system is becoming a military one. When a retired government employee in Shiraz named Narges looks at the new banners celebrating national heroes, she sees something else: a temporary unity that will evaporate the moment the war ends, replaced by the old machinery of control and punishment.
The regime has achieved real military successes. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which much of the world's oil flows, and it has absorbed airstrikes from the United States and Israel without collapsing. These victories are genuine, and they have given the propaganda campaign real ammunition. By framing the conflict not as a war against the Islamic Republic but as a war against Iran itself, the authorities have managed to blur the line between regime and nation. When you attack Iran, you attack all Iranians. That is a powerful message, and it has some resonance.
But skepticism runs deep. A twenty-three-year-old recent graduate named Arshia, who studied French in Yazd, sees the rallies as theater—a performance designed to convince the world that people support the system, when what people actually need is economic relief. A hardline student named Mohammed, twenty-six, from Tabriz, believes the patriotism is genuine, but he is disturbed by the sight of unveiled women mixing freely with unrelated men at the gatherings. This is not what the revolution promised, he says. Even among those who might be expected to embrace the regime's message, the unity is fractured.
The imagery itself carries an unintended message. Weapons training in mosques, ballistic missiles painted flamingo pink, mass weddings in military vehicles—these are not the signs of a confident government. They are the signs of a regime that feels threatened, that needs to remind its own people of its capacity for violence, that is reaching for every tool available to hold itself together. The authorities stage these displays night after night, but analysts suggest they reveal insecurity rather than strength. A government truly secure in its power would not need to perform it so relentlessly.
What happens when the war ends is the question that haunts everyone. The propaganda will not disappear, but its purpose will shift. The nationalist symbols that now unite Iranians against external enemies could easily become tools of internal control. The armed forces that are being celebrated will still be there. The economic crisis will still be there. The repression will still be there. For now, the regime has managed to paper over its divisions with images of unity and strength. Whether that paper will hold is something only time will tell.
Notable Quotes
The old ideology of the Islamic Republic no longer really had much traction within the society. And therefore there was a need to draw on other elements of Iranian identity that could mobilize masses.— Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group
It's all a game, a performance meant to show the world that people are with the system. Instead of these displays they should fix the economic situation.— Arshia, 23, a recent French-language graduate from Yazd
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why would a government shift away from the religious messaging that founded it? That seems like abandoning its own identity.
Because that identity no longer works. The Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology had power in 1979, but decades later, most Iranians have grown up under it. It doesn't inspire them anymore. The regime realized it needed to reach people who weren't moved by clerical authority—so it borrowed from something older and deeper: Persian nationalism, the idea of Iran as a nation with a history that predates the revolution.
But doesn't that weaken the regime's claim to legitimacy? If it's not about Islam anymore, what is it about?
That's exactly the problem. It's about survival. The regime is trying to be everything to everyone—revolutionary enough for the hardliners, nationalist enough for the waverers, military enough to remind people of its power. But you can't actually be all those things at once. The cracks show immediately.
The woman in Shiraz—Narges—she seems to understand something the propaganda doesn't account for.
She does. She's lived long enough to see the pattern repeat. Unity in wartime, repression in peacetime. The banners celebrating national heroes will become tools of control once the external threat recedes. She's not cynical; she's experienced.
What does it mean that power is shifting from clerics to military commanders?
It means the system is transforming into something different from what it was designed to be. A theocracy becomes a military state. The language changes, the symbols change, but the fundamental question remains: how do you rule people who don't believe in you anymore?
Can propaganda alone hold that together?
Not forever. It can work in wartime, when there's a real external enemy and real military success to point to. But propaganda is a tool for managing perception, not for solving economic collapse or creating genuine legitimacy. Eventually, people need their lives to improve.