Going beyond the label of propaganda in regime media.
Parade of IRGC tank transporters. Photo by Mohammad Sadegh Heydari via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International
.A professionally produced video surfaced on Iranian social media the last week of August. A young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard stands on a train in the Tehran metro. Some young boys around him begin to beat-box and the soldier raps to the passengers:
Why are you sitting
Join me
We are all from one home
In happy times and hard times, sticking together is what endures
Our future is bright, as long as we stick together
We all have to be ready to heal each other’s wounds
Given the passengers reactions in the video it becomes obvious that the rapper and his beat-box boys have shown up unannounced on the metro train. The intention seems to be a depiction of the Revolutionary Guard as “of the people,” a soldier who at once is connected to the tired commuters as well as has the attention of the younger riders who are supposedly enjoying his rhymes. The camera focuses on ordinary passengers, who either look on amused or indifferent as the soldier raps about unity in the face of economic hardship from US sanctions. Not only do the lyrics communicate national unity in the face of domestic and international pressures, but the video forefronts passengers who are read as working and lower-middle class Iranians. The rapper is a young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard, immune from accusations of grift, corruption, and the accumulation of vast wealth that his older counterparts are widely critiqued for by Iranians today.
When the music video ends, the only credit reads: Director: Eighty Million Iranians.
How do we make sense of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – an organization now formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US government – beatboxing and producing rap videos that claim to speak on behalf of a nation? There’s nothing new about national militaries using media to conjure unity. So, what’s the big deal here?
Why is the IRGC so prolific in its media production and what should we take away from these media products? The easy answer is, “it’s just propaganda” done in the service of power.
And yet, that answer is too simple. Every state is engaged in the work of propaganda. Some states are just more adept at producing it than others—better at hiding their propaganda. Labeling something, however correctly, as propaganda closes the discussion before we can even go deeper.
What can we learn about a country, a political system, if we instead look deep and take the media work and the producers behind it seriously? In the decade that I have been researching media produced by the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, I have witnessed how their media production has gone from poorly produced films and television series that were easily dismissed by audiences as propaganda to slickly produced music videos and a popular spy television thriller, Gando, that large numbers of people across the country and in the diaspora tune in to watch. The IRGC has gone from making media that shunned anything that did not communicate religious piety, to appropriating banned popular culture, to collaborating with rappers they had arrested in the past, to finally producing their own rappers. Why this shift?
In the first two decades after the revolution, regime media producers got inspiration from Soviet propaganda films. Soon, though, younger Iranian regime filmmakers began to notice that their work had small audiences. How, they asked, could they make their work more popular?
Hollywood became the answer.
One IRGC film director said to me, “Hollywood films that focus on American wars are great propaganda. They’re slick, have a compelling storyline, and rarely do people watch them and think ‘this is propaganda.’” When I was doing my ethnographic research, copying Hollywood was just an aspiration. Only one film, Che, by veteran filmmaker, Ebrahim Hatamikia, had achieved this standard according to other IRGC producers and critics.
Labeling something, however correctly, as propaganda closes the discussion before we can even go deeper.
And so, as these producers were aiming for the Hollywood gold standard, much of the work in IRGC media studios that I observed during my research had not yet achieved their goals. What I observed was the shift in emphasis from revolutionary propaganda to one aimed at entertainment though compelling storylines and slick effects. Since I finished my ethnographic fieldwork, these kinds of productions have mushroomed—mainly because technologically, it has become easier for non-Hollywood studios around the world to emulate special effects and use higher quality cameras and editing equipment.
Iranian regime media producers have also been studying the ways the US military engages in media promotion and has since the early days of Hollywood. Emulating video advertising campaigns by the US military, the IRGC has poured money into slick short videos and is thinking of ways to sponsor live events, like the US military does with the NFL.
As I outline in my book, Iran Reframed, the IRGC is attempting to shift its focus from a military that protects the clerical elite to a national military. In doing so, media has been the key tool in communicating this change. And for the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, there’s no film industry more successful at creating entertaining propaganda about a national military than Hollywood.
This is interesting. You noticed something that others rarely noticed. I saw that short video and thought that it was something of daily Tehran changing moods. You’re totally right in that Iran’s revolutionary guard to look up-to-date and appealing. In fact this idea was shaped up in Imam Hossein University in Tehran. They first started cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence and gradually moved to improve their image and not only towards the society but within younger generation of sepahitself.
Posted by: Fereydoun | October 1, 2019 at 01:17 PM