This is a vignette from “Narrative of Victory,” an AI-generated short broadcast by Iranian state media on Mar. 10. It has been viewed millions of times on social media, and has been written about, with mounting awe, by analysts in Washington, London and Tel Aviv. The Islamic Republic, we are told, has discovered something new: a state weapon disguised as a provocation, a viral artifact the United States and Israel cannot match.
Iran, we are being encouraged to believe, has won the meme war. The numbers are real. The videos are good. The Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe, mocking Trump with the line “we’ve lost the keys” to the Strait of Hormuz, is funnier than any American diplomatic account has been in years.
From the first hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv set about doing in pixels what it could not yet do on the battlefield. Consider Volodymyr Zelensky in his drab-olive T-shirt, filming himself in the streets of his capital; the @Ukraine and @DefenceU accounts trolling Russian bloggers in three languages; the Saint Javelin meme economy; the Snake Island postage stamp; the North Atlantic Fella Organization, a leaderless army of Shiba Inu avatars that a recent study at Nottingham Trent University called “a form of soft power in warfare.”
Tehran has clearly been taking notes. The underdog framing, the embassy accounts running wild on X, the cultural-reference dunking on a bloated American president—these are Ukrainian moves, transposed to a different war. The mimicry is so close it almost qualifies as flattery. But the Ukrainian playbook worked for two reasons that have no Iranian equivalent.
The second reason is more important: the Ukrainian memes were consistent with the underlying reality. The witty, defiant, democratic Ukraine of the embassy accounts was the same Ukraine that journalists and diplomats and refugees and weapons inspectors all found on the ground. The propaganda did not have to overcome the truth; it only had to surface it.
The pattern of violence has persisted through the decades since: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s thugs clubbing students into submission at Tehran’s Sharif University in 1999; the crushing of the Green Movement in 2009; the slaughter of anti-regime protesters in 2019, 2022, and late last year. Add it all up, and the regime in Tehran has far more innocent Iranian blood on its hands than any of its adversaries in the current war. Beyond Iran’s borders, Tehran’s militias and proxies have run up an Arab body count in the tens of thousands, from Aleppo to Sanaa.
For that conclusion to take hold, a second proposition would also have to be proven: that Trump’s America is Putin’s Russia. That America kills children abroad and silences criticism at home. That it cannot be trusted to investigate its own crimes.
The Pentagon’s own preliminary inquiry found that US Central Command had targeted the school using outdated Defense Intelligence Agency data that identified the building as part of a neighboring military base. Republican Senator John Kennedy—no liberal—told CNN it was “a terrible, terrible mistake.” A group of Senate Democrats, led by Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, sent the Pentagon a formal letter demanding answers. And on the North Lawn of the White House, CNN’s Kristen Holmes put the question directly to the man who had ordered the war: “As commander-in-chief, do you take responsibility for that?” Trump, briefly cornered, replied: “I don’t know about it.” Ten weeks after the strike, the President was still being asked for an explanation.
This is an open society that the Islamic Republic of Iran is structurally incapable of being. There is no Iranian Kristen Holmes asking President Masoud Pezeshkian about the protesters killed in the streets of Mahabad. There is no Iranian Ipsos publishing polls on the regime’s wars in Syria and Yemen. There is no Iranian Tammy Baldwin writing letters demanding answers about the internet shutdowns the regime imposes whenever its own people get restive. The animators of “Narrative of Victory” know this perfectly well, but so does their target audience.
We do not need them rendered in Lego to remember them or to recognize the Iranian state for what it really is.
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