In the scent of tear gas hanging over Tehran's Grand Bazaar, a shopkeeper shuttered his stall, his life’s work undone by a currency that collapsed to 1.4 million rials to the dollar. His protest was a spark that, within days, became a wildfire.
But before his story could be told, the internet went dark, phone lines were severed, and the familiar machinery of Western narration whirred to life.
From thousands of miles away, a narrative was being crafted: This was not complex social unrest but the final act of the Islamic Republic, a prelude to liberation.
This is the empire of the lens at work. Its contemporary tools are not just sanctions or Stratotankers, but digital platforms that replace a nation’s flag emoji with a discarded royal symbol, and algorithms that amplify one exile’s voice above a silenced populace.
As protests over soaring prices and vanishing medicine ripple across more than 100 Iranian cities, a parallel battle rages for control of the story. It is a battle the West is destined to lose, because it fights with the short memory of sound bites against a civilization that thinks in centuries.
The longue durée in a time of blackouts
The Western script is seductive in its simplicity: Economic suffocation leads to protests, protests reveal a regime’s fragility, and external “liberation” becomes inevitable.
Donald Trump’s threats to “hit them very hard” if protesters are killed and promises that “the US stands ready to help” are the latest lines in this tired play. They are predicated on the idea that Iran is a passive subject of history, not its author.
Western media, with institutional histories shorter than a single chapter of the Shahnameh, remains determined to reduce Iran’s epic to a two-dimensional thriller. They operate on the rhythm of election cycles and quarterly markets.
Iran, by contrast, lives in the longue durée. This is not romanticism; it is survival. The 1953 CIA-engineered coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh is not a footnote in Tehran -- it is the foundational trauma that taught a nation the hollowness of Western democratic rhetoric when it conflicts with imperial interest.
The United States now places itself, as one regional observer noted, “in the category of powers that have launched direct military aggression against the Iranian homeland -- alongside invaders such as Genghis Khan and Saddam Hussein.” Such marks do not fade from civilizational memory.
This is why the current protests, while a profound challenge, defy easy categorization. They are driven by genuine, crippling economic despair -- prices rose 52% in 2025, making basics unaffordable.
Chants of “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, may my life be sacrificed for Iran” reflect anger at resources spent on regional policy instead of at home. Yet, this domestic fury exists alongside a deep-seated suspicion of foreign intervention.
When Iran’s parliamentary speaker warns that US military bases and Israel are “legitimate targets” for pre-emptive strikes if America attacks, he speaks to an audience that understands such rhetoric as deterrence, not madness.
The exile’s shadow and the digital battlefield
Into this volatile mix steps Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old exiled “crown prince.” From the United States, he has issued calls for coordinated protests, urging Iranians to carry the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag.
His voice, amplified by Farsi-language satellite channels and social media, has become a central node in the Western narrative. Some protesters have chanted, “This is the last battle, Pahlavi will return.”
But who is hearing this chant? The answer reveals the modern face of narrative warfare.
Western-owned digital platforms are not neutral public squares but arenas of power where geopolitical influence is extended through code and design.
The recent replacement of Iran’s official flag emoji on platform X with the historic royal symbol is not a technical glitch but a symbolic erasure of the current state, a subtle but potent act of narrative shaping that declares which Iran “counts” in the digital sphere.
This digital bias is systemic. Research shows social media companies spend 87% of their misinformation budget on English content, while most users live in the Global South. AI moderation tools, trained on Western data, fail to grasp cultural nuance, flagging common Arabic phrases of prayer as extremist or missing hate speech in Bengali.
When platforms bow to political pressure or apply a uniformly Western “community standard,” they silence non-Western realities and dissent. The information blackout inside Iran creates a vacuum that these biased, external narratives rush to fill, presenting Pahlavi -- a man who left for Texas flight school in 1978 and has not returned since -- as the face of Iran’s future.
Many Iranians, especially the youth navigating this digital siege, are not waiting for a saviour from the West or its preferred exiles. They speak of self-reliance -- a “resistance economy” built on internal production and barter with non-Western allies. Their struggle is for sovereignty in every form: Political, economic, and now, digital.
The awakening of the Global South
The struggle over Iran’s story is a microcosm of a larger global rupture. The Western monopoly on storytelling is being challenged from Caracas to Dhaka.
In July 2025, delegates from 50 countries launched the “Journalists’ Alliance for Communication of the Global South,” a permanent space to fight for informational sovereignty.
As Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil declared, in the face of “media imperialism, our voices have to be increasingly stronger.”
This represents a fundamental shift: The move from being objects of the West’s gaze to subjects of our own epic.
The fight is to build resilient, sovereign digital strategies and communication networks that are not vulnerable to the whims of Silicon Valley or the political agendas of Western capitals.
Without control over our own digital infrastructure, political sovereignty in the 21st century is an illusion.
The stories that endure
The Persian epic, the Shahnameh, begins with a lesson on the difference between good and evil. The current narrative war is a modern version of that ancient struggle. It is a fight between the rich, layered, and enduring truth of a people and the simplistic, self-serving fable crafted by an empire in decline.
As a new media alliance rises from the Global South, as Iranians navigate both internal repression and external manipulation, and as alternative corridors of trade bypass Western chokeholds, the empire of the lens finds its focus blurring.
The story of Iran cannot be reduced to centrifuges, exiled princes, or trending hashtags. It is the story of a nation whose identity is forged in a long civilizational memory, a people who have absorbed, adapted, and outlasted empires for millennia.
The empires of the lens, like those of clay and stone, will eventually crumble to dust. The stories of the plateau, however complex and contested, will continue to be told by those who live them.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His email address is [email protected].
