The Islamic Republic notoriously spends billions of dollars every year spreading Islamist, antisemitic, and anti-Western propaganda. The message that they send seems to have an effect on Westerners who are completely out of touch with how the region works or the plight of the Iranian people trapped under the bootheel of an oppressive regime. It is shocking to see American young people waiving the flags of oppressive regimes in anti-Israel protests or to see quick clips from American university campuses in which they are blindly regurgitating what they see in Instagram reels.
The regime, however, can only do so much to counter the fact that social media is democratized. There are good and bad aspects of that, but one of the more hopeful things that is a part of wide-spread access to social media at least for Iranian young people is their ability to creatively fight back against the propaganda war.
Most of the readers here are likely not immersed in Iranian social media. That’s too bad, because it can be a very hopeful place especially among Gen Z. The leaders of the Islamic Republic are aging, so much so that they may not even know that platforms like Tik Tok even exist–literally.
This week, in courageous acts of defiance, Iranian young people have created a viral trend of videos of them singing along with “Pahlavi,” a song named for their Crown Prince and his father, the last Shah before the Islamic Revolution. The words are roughly translated, “My fellow Iranians, stand together. Pahlavi means heritage, justice, and integrity.” It celebrates the civic virtues they long to enjoy–freedom, progress, prosperity.
It is hard for someone reading this from the safety of the West to understand just how fearless these young people are and how dangerous it is for them even to listen to this music, not to mention to sing along with it. The lyrics reject the regime’s orthodoxy that the West means them harm as they declare that they hate the Revolutionary Guard, the way of life imposed on them, and their realization that the regime means them more harm than any foreign country, which includes both The Great Satan and The Little Satan.
If the West ever decides to show the same courage as these Iranian young people, we can be certain that there will be millions of allies who long for a prosperous Iran and a future that includes a respected place on the world stage rather than the pariah status that the religious fanatics of the Revolution have secured.