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Propaganda as a Part of Invasion
Research Unit for Political Economy
Even those waging outright wars of aggression are frequently at pains to justify their actions with falsehoods and distortions. This helps to prevent others from coming to the aid of the victim of aggression. The onslaught of false propaganda becomes, in effect, an important part of the war of aggression. And those participating in such propaganda thereby become participants in the aggression as well.
Nazi Germany was well aware of the importance of propaganda. Before Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, it loudly claimed that the German-speaking minority in that country was being persecuted. Meanwhile, it secretly funded a puppet pro-Nazi party which claimed to represent the German minority of Czechoslovakia (the ‘Sudeten Germans’). Indeed the ground for the German occupation of Czechoslovakia was laid in the name of democracy and minority rights. The leader of the ‘Sudeten German’ pro-Nazi party, Konrad Henlein, was considered by the British Foreign Office to be moderate and reasonable; meanwhile, in his meetings with Hitler he secretly agreed that “we must always demand so much [from Prague] that we cannot be satisfied.”[1] The purpose of Henlein’s provocations was to elicit suppressive measures from the Czech government, which measures were promptly portrayed by Germany as atrocities.
In his September 12, 1938 speech at Nuremberg, Hitler accused the Czechoslovakian government of exterminating the German minority, driving them from their homes, repressing their democratic rights and executing German prisoners. This was followed by an uprising by the Sudeten Germans in mid-September 1938. Later, the Sudeten ‘volunteer’ forces (created on Hitler’s direct order, and sheltered, trained and equipped by the German army[2]) carried out terroristic raids on Czech government institutions.
The propaganda that the Sudeten Germans were being oppressed and exterminated provided sufficient cover for Britain and France to treat Hitler’s demands as legitimate. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain drew a fine distinction: he did not want Hitler to take Czechoslovakian territory by force, but by peaceful means.[3] So Britain and France issued the Czechs an ultimatum to cede the German-speaking territories to Germany. After occupying the Sudeten region “peacefully”, Hitler proceeded to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia militarily. In this manner, manufactured propaganda about the oppression of the German minority in Czechoslovakia served to subjugate the entire country.
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Recently, when for two or three weeks protests broke out in Iran at the end of last year, world attention was focussed on these protests, the Iranian government’s response to the protesters, the subsequent acts of violence and turmoil, and the statements and actions by the US and Israel in connection with these developments.
The western media version was explicit from the start: that Iranian citizens staged a peaceful revolt against a governing dictatorship; that the regime responded with a massacre of thousands of protesters (evidence-free estimates go up to 40,000 fatalities and over 300,000 injuries) and communications black-out; the US-based Reza Pahlavi (son of the erstwhile Shah of Iran, who was overthrown by the Iranian revolution of 1979) emerged as the leader of the people’s movement; the Iranian regime was fragile and near collapse; brutal repression finally quelled the movement, for now.
Intervention
Other commentators have brought out a very different reality. The protests began as the voicing of genuine popular grievances regarding the dire economic situation, a situation which had been created precisely by US sanctions on Iran. The Iranian government acknowledged the legitimacy of the protesters’ grievances, and called for dialogue.[4] However, at this point (around January 8-9), the protests were hijacked by shadowy forces – trained groups of armed provocateurs and agents of the US/Israel. Indeed, the Israeli spy agency Mossad posted social media messages in Farsi claiming it was “with the protesters in the field”, and urging them on. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them,” wrote former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the social media. The provocateurs committed arson, lynched over 100 police or security forces, and killed many ordinary Iranians.[5] US President Trump called on Iranians to “take over” their institutions, adding that “Help Is On Its Way”. Meanwhile, CIA-backed outfits and the Western media peddled bogus figures of fatalities and government atrocities.
However, the vast majority of Iranians, including those who are critical of the government’s policies, opposed the rioters, and dissociated themselves from them. Millions of Iranians attended rallies to condemn the rioters and the sinister forces that backed them, specifically the US and Israel. In a nutshell, the second phase of the recent Iranian protests, as well as the international propaganda about the protests, were a form of imperialist intervention in Iran’s political life.
A ‘third position’
Against this background, several persons widely considered leading personalities of the ‘Left’ in the West claim to have taken a position distinct from both the above versions. These personalities include Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Sahra Wagenknecht, Yanis Varoufakis, Tariq Ali, Owen Jones, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders; similar positions are taken by the US magazine Jacobin, the website Drop Site and the European political platform DiEM25.[6] These personalities and platforms broadly reproduce the account of the western media (a people’s revolt against authoritarianism, brutally repressed), but they oppose intervention by the US and other western countries. They say the Iranian people must determine their own future, and the US and other western countries should only support their aspirations from afar.
At first this seems to be a significant demarcation from Trump, Netanyahu, Macron and other western leaders. However, in fact this is only seemingly a distinct position.
An essential preparation
An essential preparation for foreign intervention in, bombing of or invasion of Iran is precisely the international propaganda about the events there. Such propaganda has indeed been an essential part of every imperialist invasion by the US and its allies, whether of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Gaza or any other. The world was told that Iraqi forces invading Kuwait tore babies out of incubators in hospitals (which became famous later as the “Nayirah testimony”); later that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons; that Gaddafi of Libya gave his troops Viagra and encouraged them to commit rapes in rebel-held or disputed areas; that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on rebel-held areas; that Maduro rigged the Venezuelan elections, and that he smuggles drugs into the US; that Hamas killed Jewish babies on October 7 by putting them into ovens, and committed mass rapes of Jewish women; and so on. Such stories were succeeded by unimaginable horrors inflicted on the people of those lands by US imperialism.
The latest such propaganda-before-invasion is that Iran is committing massacres and atrocities on its own people. None of the estimates can be traced to a specific source inside Iran. Rather, the sources are unnamed Government officials or unnamed witnesses cited by the Western media; Iran-focussed NGOs located in the US, which receive funding from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy; organisations of overseas Iranians; a Saudi-funded satellite channel located in London, and so on.
Second, it is not in dispute that the US and Israel have an extensive network of agents in Iran, who are capable of carrying out mayhem. For example, this network has carried out targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists for more than a decade. Five were killed between 2010 and 2020 by car bombings or shootings; at least 10 more were killed in the Israeli air strikes of June 2025. Clearly the US-Israeli network of agents in Iran is sizeable, armed and deadly, and it is very credible that they hijacked the protests and carried out mayhem. The alternative is to imagine that this network passively watched events unfold and took no action.
The fundamental question
Fundamentally, however, the question does not pivot on the specific number of people who have died, or the repressive action taken. Once it is clear that both the post-January 8 riots and the propaganda about them were an imperialist intervention in Iran, and an attack on Iran’s sovereignty, there can be only one consistently democratic position: namely, to categorically oppose the riots, the propaganda, and the war designs of imperialism.
This is so because, whatever criticisms anyone may have regarding the social, economic or political policies of the Iranian government, imperialist invasion and occupation is the most complete form of despotism, over which the Iranian people have no control in any form. Therefore in the given world constituted of nations, national sovereignty is a pre-requisite of any people exercising their social, economic or political rights, and when the sovereignty of a Third World country is attacked by an imperialist power, the primary duty of those who cherish democracy is to support the country under attack.
The attack on a country’s sovereignty may come clothed as democracy. Take a recent instance: It is reported by the New York Times that a “ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers pierced Iran’s digital barricades” by smuggling in 50,000 Starlink satellite terminals – each at a cost of $700-800 – and spread them throughout the country, at discreet locations. (NYT presents this children’s fairy tale with a straight face, and it appears there are some adult children who believe it.) Elon Musk’s Starlink normally provides internet connectivity for a price, but the generous Mr Musk announced in January that all Starlink services in Iran would be free of charge.[7] The Starlink network would thus enable US agents to communicate with one another in the field, and also enable the spread of western propaganda inside Iran. In this fashion, what is presented in the western media as the spread of democratic communication is actually imperialist intervention in Iran’s political life.
It does not appear that the ‘Left’ personalities mentioned above have independently applied their minds to the claims being circulated by the western media and CIA-backed institutions. One ‘alternative’ website posted a video of a “rare interview with Iranian protester and crackdown eyewitness”, said to be a member of the Iranian diaspora who had visited Tehran. The interviewee (whose anonymity was protected by pixellating her image and distorting her voice) said: “I know that there’s a lot of discussion of who could hijack the movement, the freedom movement of the people of Iran and it’s very possible, but I can tell you this, the way that the Government of Iran has responded to the protests, every single person in Iran would happily join any intelligence service to end this regime.”[8] Even if we take the anonymised speaker to be a real member of the Iranian diaspora, and not an AI manufacture, her propaganda is manifestly against the Iranian people and their sovereignty.
Conscientious objectors
No doubt, as we noted earlier, these ‘Left’ personalities and platforms do not support plans for a US invasion or military strikes. That merely means that, while they are effectively participants in the propaganda war, they are conscientious objectors in the military war.
Apart from the material damage in human lives, buildings, ambulances, buses, and so on, the propaganda war has inflicted damage on Iran’s political reputation. Such damage was inflicted on the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian people underwent a civil war, and eventually, after they faced 14 years of bloodshed and sanctions, the US and its allies installed a Muslim fundamentalist regime in Damascus. In the process, an important and reliable support for the Palestinian struggle was destroyed, and the US and Israel have even been able to occupy swathes of Syria. The propaganda war against Assad helped lay the ground for this outcome, and this outcome has laid the ground for the attack on Iran.
However, the riots in Iran have ended, and it is not possible for outside forces to revive them very soon. The ‘Left’ critics of Iran have been useful, but their usefulness has been exhausted for the moment. Trump has moved on. Discarding his talk of sending “HELP” to Iranian protesters, he now declares that he has despatched an ‘armada’ which will destroy Iran if Iran does not dismantle its nuclear programme:
Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal – NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS – one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence! As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again.
While the methods may change from time to time, there is evidently a continuity in imperialist aims, for those who wish to see it.
Notes
- Mark Cornwall, “The Czechoslovak Sphinx: ‘Moderate and Reasonable’ Konrad Henlein”, in Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady, eds. In the Shadow of Hitler, Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, 2014. ︎
- “Sudetendeutsches Freikorps,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetendeutsches_Freikorps ︎
- Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, 1997. ︎
- Even an establishment newspaper unsympathetic to the Iranian government reported:“The regime’s initial response — at least by its own brutal standards — appeared restrained, as officials sought to appease the demonstrators’ economic concerns.” Mehul Srivastava and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “How Iran’s Regime Retook the Streets”, Financial Times, January 16, 2026. ︎
- Passages such as the following in news reports should have given any conscientious reader pause to think: “Residents have shared accounts of burned buses, mosques and police stations across their cities, while officials have accused armed agitators of hiding among the demonstrators.” — Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “Dispatch from Tehran: The week the Iranians revolted against the regime”, Financial Times, January 13, 2026.
“Testimonies from the scenes of the unrest — some spoken directly to the FT, in addition to those smuggled out through intermediaries — reveal a muddied account of the turmoil itself, in which agitators mingled with genuine protesters. Clashes claimed the lives not just of unarmed citizens who formed part of the leaderless crowds, but of well-equipped security personnel.
“‘There were groups of men in black clothes, agile and quick,” said one demonstrator in Tehran. “They would set one dustbin on fire and then quickly move to the next target.” Another witness in western Tehran told the FT he saw about a dozen fit men, “looking like commandos”, dressed in similar black clothing, running through the area and calling on people to leave their homes and join the protests. ‘They were definitely organised, but I don’t know who was behind them,’ he said. — Mehul Srivastava and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “How Iran’s Regime Retook the Streets”, Financial Times, January 16, 2026. ︎
- For example: Bernie Sanders: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-statement-on-protests-in-iran/; Zohran Mamdani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltDxqutI410; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: https://x.com/RepAOC/status/2010468396966572324Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2026/01/iran-protests-israel-trump-war; Jeremy Corbyn: https://x.com/jeremycorbyn/status/2010812363637752037; Zarah Sultana: https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/2010800541274948037; Owen Jones: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/13/iran-protesters-western-intervention-us-israel; Tariq Ali: https://x.com/TariqAli_News/status/2010064262140723349; Jean Luc Melenchon: https://x.com/JLMelenchon/status/2011395237936070680; Sahra Wagenknecht: https://x.com/SWagenknecht/status/2011477892434190346; Yanis Varoufakis: https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/2010261958965318103; Diem25: https://diem25.org/irans-future-must-be-decided-by-iranians-not-by-bombs-or-sanctions/; Verso books: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/notes-on-campist-internationalism; Drop Site: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/rare-interview-with-iran-protester ︎
- Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Sheera Frenkel, “Inside the Fight to Keep Iran Online”, New York Times, January 15, 2026. ︎
- She also refused to disapprove of the burning of mosques. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/rare-interview-with-iran-protester. The Iranian diaspora is indeed a rich source for insights: one doyen of British left intellectuals retailed the views of his Iranian-born hairdresser as authentic reportage of the protests: https://x.com/TariqAli_News/status/2010064262140723349 ︎
[Courtesy: Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), a Mumbai based trust that analyses economic issues for the common people in simple language.]
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The Biggest Threats the Iranian People Face Are America and Israel
Stan Cox
Demonstrator silhouetted against a street fire waving the Lion and Sun flag, 9 January 2026 – CC0
Israel’s longstanding campaign to lure Washington into war with Iran seems to have fizzled once again—for now, anyway. But in their attempt to invent a casus belli, their spy agencies employ tactics—disinformation, infiltration, and incitement of rioting—that help sustain the patently false impression that Tehran, not Tel Aviv, is home to the Middle East’s cruelest regime.
“We Are with You in the Field”
In late December, people in several cities across Iran took to the streets in nonviolent protest over the crushing economic conditions spawned by US attacks on Iran’s currency and the further intensification of US sanctions. Police were deployed, but the protests were peaceful, so they stayed on the sidelines.
Then, suddenly on January 8, shocking violence broke out across Iran, and most of the peaceable protesters vanished from the streets. They’d been displaced by young toughs, many of them armed.
Video (released by both government and anti-government forces) showed arsonists setting fire to businesses, mosques, a fire station (killing the firefighters inside), and other buildings, as well as public buses. Roving gangs, reportedly armed by Israeli agents, gunned down hundreds of people.
Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone reported,
“In Kermanshah, where anti-government rioters shot and killed 3 year-old Melina Asadi, groups of militants were filmed firing automatic weapons at police. In cities from Hamedan to Lorestan, rioters have filmed themselves beating unarmed security guards to death for attempting to impede their rampages.”
Suspecting foreign incitement, officials in Tehran shut off all internet connections beyond Iran’s borders. Sure enough, the violence ended as suddenly as it had started two days earlier.
There soon emerged more evidence that the riots had been orchestrated from abroad. Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has many agents and collaborators on the ground in Iran, had put out the following message through its Farsi-language X account: “Go out together into the streets. (See especially Justin Podur’s Jan. 27 analysis, “The Iran Insurgency: A review of the available evidence”) The time has come. We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” In an interview, Yoav Gallant, a former Israeli defense minister, was quite clear: “The regime in Iran must fall . . . At this moment, when what matters most is the mass action on the ground, we need to stay in the background and steer things with an invisible hand.“ Even former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got in on the action, posting, “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets … also, to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”
US sanctions had ruined Iran’s economy, bringing people into the streets in protest. Israel took it from there, using the nonviolent demonstrations over economic issues as cover for whipping up deadly riots against the government.
On January 20, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pulled back the curtain a bit more, boasting that the sanctions and currency manipulation inflicted on Iran had been highly successful, because “their economy collapsed,” so “people took to the streets” and now “things are moving in a very positive way.”
(Helena Cobban, president of the non-profit Just World Educational, has pointed out that Bessent was saying, in effect, that the Iran sanctions “were intended to inflict such harsh pain and misery on entire populations of civilians that those civilians take action to change their government.” And, she added, that fits the definition of state-sponsored terrorism. Israel’s role in converting peaceful protest into armed uprising was a further terrorist act.)
As the violence in Iran was peaking, Reza Pahlavi, son the last Shah of Iran, tweeted support for the riots from his place of exile in the Washington, DC suburbs: “Our goal is no longer merely to come to the streets; the goal is to prepare for seizing the centers of cities and holding them.” Pahlavi has longed to retake the throne in Iran ever since his father, a brutal tyrant, was overthrown in the revolution of 1979.
Corporate media coverage of events in Iran has been abysmal—light on facts and heavy with Israeli propaganda. Social media were hijacked, too. Data analysis by the staff of Al Jazeera showed how a #FreeThePersianPeople hashtag that went viral during the riots
“…appears to be a politicized information operation constructed outside Iran and led by networks linked to Israel and its allies. The campaign successfully hijacked legitimate economic grievances, reframing them within a broader political project that links the ‘liberation of Iran’ to the return of the monarchy and foreign military intervention.”
Sina Toosi of the Center for International Policy wrote for The Nation that given Washington’s seemingly unlimited tolerance for the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza,
“What animates US and Israeli policy is not outrage at repression but hostility toward an adversarial state that resists their regional dominance … The claim that the United States has suddenly discovered a principled concern for Iranian lives is not merely implausible. It is an insult to the intelligence of anyone paying attention.”
Much of the American public does have sincere concern for the safety and wellbeing of the Iranian people. But the best way to help them is to demand that Washington end the sanctions on Iran, not instigate societal conflict and collapse.
Israel: The Bully’s Little Sidekick
The US and Israel have been trying and failing to topple Iran’s government for decades. But now, the Zionist regime is more tightly focused on Iran than ever. Its fraudulent “ceasefire” with the Palestinians, and its colonial “Board of Peace,” will simply be the final phase of the genocide, ending (in their fantasies, at least) with expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
This last phase is to be quieter, more bureaucratic, than what came before—and managed by the US and some of its other client regimes. The butchers in Tel Aviv hope they can then devote more of their own effort toward asserting dominance over the entire region. And that means taking down the government in Iran.
Afraid to launch an all-out war against such a large, militarily powerful state, Washington and Tel Aviv have long bombarded the people of Iran with sanctions, financial attacks, propaganda, and psychological warfare, hoping to impose enough misery to spur a mass uprising capable of overturning the government. As Middle East Eye put it, they have sought “regime collapse without the costs of a direct military intervention”—with just a little exchange of bombs and missiles from time to time.
As recent events have shown, that was wishful thinking. Authentic protests in Iran remained nonviolent, and no one called for installation of the much-hated, much-ridiculed Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s leader. Clearly, external stoking of violence and chaos was required to convince the world that Iran is imploding, and that’s what we’ve now seen.
Israel and the US may be feeling their oats right now, but they have made themselves pariah nations with their genocide of the Palestinian people and their aggression against any society on any continent that refuses to comply with their neocolonial ambitions.
Polls show that the numbers of people around the world who hold negative views of Israel have risen dramatically. Last year, Pew found the regime to be 33 points underwater on that question, with 62% of responses unfavorable and 29% favorable. Pew also found a dramatic increase in unfavorable views of the United States, largely related to our economic, military, diplomatic, and media sponsorship of the genocide in Gaza.
For the past two years, Israel has ranked dead last among the world’s countries in the Nation Brands Index, a national-reputation score. Furthermore, institutions around the world are divesting from billions of dollars in Israel Bonds, which are essential to sustaining its economy. The global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is snowballing.
And crucially, writes Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies,
“Gone, at least for now, are the days when Saudi Arabia viewed Iran as its foremost enemy, when Qatar saw Saudi Arabia as its principal threat, or when Egypt treated Qatar as the chief source of regional instability. Increasingly, Arab regimes, with perhaps the exception of the UAE, now view Israel as the region’s most destabilizing force.”
The loathing that most of the world has for Israel is richly earned. For many, the genocide—not only the raw death toll but also the sadistic relish with which the Zionist regime has tortured an entire society for the past 28 months—was the last straw.
The one element of the state that once drew the most respect, its much-vaunted military, has proven once and for all to be a pathetic fraud. The Israeli Occupation Forces are cowards. Against Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, everyone, they attack mostly or entirely from afar, with shelling and bombing and drones and cyberattacks and, yes, beepers. They rely heavily on clean, safe, white-collar warfare: espionage, propaganda, and sabotage. But they’re picking fights they can’t finish.
When they have dared to engage in battle on the ground, as in Lebanon, they’ve been routed. Their troops’ attempts to invade, capture, and hold ground in Gaza also have been totally hapless failures, except during “ceasefires”, when only the Palestinian resistance ceases and only the IOF fires.
Then, whenever Israeli forces gin up the “courage” to bomb the elephant in the region, Iran, they usually act like a bully’s little sidekick: picking fights, then running and hiding behind Washington’s skirts, crying, “Save us, please!”
We Americans must accept that our government and its client Israel are rogue states. Together, they will continue posing a threat to the rest of the world until we force our own government to stop funding and start sanctioning Israel—and to end our own attacks, both military and economic, on other nations.
[Stan Cox is the author of seven books, including The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can and Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World. He lives in Salina, Kansas. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]
