Iran might be the most lied-about country on Earth. You may assume I’m talking about crude axis of evil stereotypes – headlines that reduce Iran to terrorists, turbans, and uranium. Those, as it happens, are real, but they are not what I find most dangerous.
The real distortion is subtler, more insidious, and far friendlier to the Islamic Republic itself. It’s the story that says: Iran is changing; the regime is quietly moving away from theocracy; secular youth and clerics are converging toward some pragmatic middle. In this story, the state and the people are blurred into one complex society that just needs time, sanctions relief, and a bit of gradual reform.
That narrative sounds sophisticated and humane. In practice, it launders the regime’s image and erases the actual Iranian people, who have been risking their lives to reject that system outright.
The Economist explains Iran (to Iranians)
The timing was truly comical. On the very day I gave a class presentation mostly devoted to dismantling Benazir Bhutto’s claims about Iran in Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West, The Economist released a video about Iran’s “fading theocracy.”
The video’s framing is familiar: Iranians living in a modern, secular society, women pushing back on the mandatory hijab, paired with the claim that the regime itself is moving away from strict clerical rule. The underlying message is that Iran’s political evolution is happening within the Islamic Republic, not against it. Secularization of society is quietly re-coded as moderation of the regime.
To me, it felt eerily similar to Tucker Carlson’s visit to Moscow: a Western media product that presents itself as challenging the narrative, but simply flatters an authoritarian state and its ruling elite.
In The Economist’s clip, the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is even described as “not an Islamic bomb but [...] an Iranian bomb” – a statement clearly belittling Iranian activist voices who call for a more holistic people-centric solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, namely toppling the regime that wants to build a nuclear weapon.
What disappears in this media framing are the chants that have actually echoed through Tehran and other cities in recent years, chants like “Death to Khamenei” and “Reza Shah, bless your soul,” shouted by crowds demanding an end to the Islamic Republic itself. These are not the slogans of a population content with managed reform. They are the language of a people trying to reclaim a history that has been stolen, rewritten, and broadcast back to them by both the Islamic regime and parts of the Western media ecosystem.
Bhutto’s Iran: the perfect morality tale
This erasure is not limited to YouTube explainers. It shows up in canonized political figures’ writing as well, like Bhutto’s book chapter, “Islam and Democracy: History and Practice.”
Bhutto’s stated goal is to rebut what she calls the “conventional wisdom” that Islam and democracy are incompatible. She argues that democracy’s failures in Muslim-majority states are not theological but rooted in Western intervention (Bhutto 2008).
That broad point is debatable and not our focus here.
But, to prove her point, she turns to Iran, and the story hardens into a morality play. For Bhutto, Iran became the “seminal case” where a CIA-backed coup in 1953 “destroyed democratic governance,” turned a promising parliamentary experiment into a client monarchy, and sowed generational distrust of the West.
The later Islamic Republic then appears as a kind of tragic but understandable consequence – a Frankenstein the West created by its own hypocrisy.
The problem is not whether Western intervention happened or whether it matters. The problem is that in Bhutto’s narrative, almost everyone with agency is either a Western government, an oil company, or an Islamist. Ordinary Iranians appear as a generic mass who oscillate between being colonized, manipulated, or radicalized.
There is no space in her account for monarchist or nationalist Iranians, for women who fought against Khomeinism, or for the millions today who want freedom from a velayat-e faqih state. By flattening Iran into a morality lesson about Western hypocrisy, Bhutto reproduces what she claims to oppose: a story in which Muslim societies never truly govern themselves. (Note: it would also be a great disservice to call today’s Iranian society a Muslim society.)
When critical narratives still serve the regime
David Held, in his book chapter “The transformation of political community: rethinking democracy in the context of globalization,” traces how the modern international order was built on the Westphalian model: a world which “consists of, and is divided by, sovereign states which recognize no superior authority,” where cross-border harms and conflicts are treated as “private matters” between governments, not peoples (1999, 84–111).
In that system, states are the units of analysis. Democracy itself gets imagined as something that happens within those containers, while relations between them are a realm of “national interest,” diplomacy, and strategic bargaining. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee how it shapes coverage of places like Iran. Western media and political discourse consistently treat Iran as the Islamic Republic and its diplomats, nuclear program, and Revolutionary Guard, because in the Westphalian imagination, that is what Iran is.
Held then proceeds to claim the Westphalian world has been shattered by modern globalization, particularly the globalization of telecommunications, “linking nations and peoples in new ways.” One would think this globalization would bring the voice of the Iranian people to the media. Yet, we still see takes like that of Bhutto, published nine years after Held’s chapter, and like that of The Economist, seventeen more years later.
This brings me back to the claim that Iran is the most lied-about nation on Earth. The lie I’m concerned with is not the cartoon of bearded fanatics with nukes, it’s the polished, liberal-sounding narrative that: treats the Islamic Republic as the inevitable expression of political culture in an Islamic society; explains away its violence as the West’s punishment for 1953; and portrays secular, anti-regime Iranians as either naive, marginal, or invisible.
In this narrative, saying “Iran is not just mullahs, it’s a complex society” ends up meaning “we should take the regime seriously as a partner and accept that the people’s aspirations must be negotiated through it.” It is a short step from there to arguing that maximum support for Iranian protesters is destabilizing, while sanctions relief or diplomatic rehabilitation of the regime is responsible realism – claims that then skew the perspective of those influencing policy.
Ironically, the Western outlets that once helped make Khomeini a household name, giving him a platform in the lead-up to 1979, now replicate this newer, softer lie. They present the revolution as an authentic eruption of the people against the Shah, then fast-forward to an Islamic Republic that is somehow still the custodian of that revolutionary legitimacy. The many Iranians who never consented to clerical rule, or who now openly call for its abolition, are treated as noise rather than data.
Yet the evidence is everywhere if we choose to look: videos of anti-regime (and often pro-monarchy) Iranian protesters and of young Iranians regularly rejecting theocracy, all at risk of their own lives.
So, every time we read or watch a piece on Iran, we should ask a simple question: Whose voice is missing, and who benefits from that silence?
References
Bhutto, Benazir. 2008. “Islam and Democracy: History and Practice.” In Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. New York: Harper.
Held, David. 1999. “The Transformation of Political Community: Rethinking Democracy in the Context of Globalization.” In Democracy’s Edges, volume excerpt.
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