Propaganda usually works in a drip-drip-drip fashion. Small stories are launched each other day spreading the similar talking points over and over again
But today, due to some mix up, two of the major propaganda outlets, the New York Times and the Washington Post, launched very similar propaganda stories on the very same day.
Rage. Grief. Anxiety. The New Mood in Iran. – NY Times
Popular anger burns in Iran after crackdown, as Trump turns up pressure – Washington Post
The first story (archived), was written in New York. The second story (archived), was reported from Dubai.
The stories are about the aftermath of the recent CIA sponsored riots in Iran.
Both stories quote the same U.S. government financed Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) in Fairfax, VA, with unverifiable numbers of alleged casualties.
The NY Times:
Rights groups like U.S.-based HRANA say at least 7,000 protesters were killed and the numbers are expected to rise as more deaths are verified.
The Washington Post:
The government crackdown left more than 7,000 people dead, more than 6,500 of them protesters, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based advocacy organization for rights in Iran.
Both outlets claim that people are enraged about the government which had managed to shut the riots down.
Both start with telling similar themed “sob-stories” of anonymous people from ‘everyday life’:
NYT:
Mariam, a 54-year-old designer, said she panics whenever her teenage son leaves the house because he had friends and classmates who were shot and killed in the protests.
“The truth is that we are feeling extremely not well,” she said. “I have never experienced this kind of collective grief and instability. We don’t know what will happen in the next hour.” Like many people interviewed for this article, Mariam asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of retribution.
WaPo:
A 45-year old woman from Rasht, near Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, said security forces showed up at her niece’s school and strip-searched students for wounds sustained at protests from the less-lethal pellet ammunition fired into crowds.
“Two girls fainted from the stress,” she said. Her niece hasn’t been back to the private school since, which the principal has allowed. But at some public schools, the woman from Rasht said, absences aren’t tolerated and students found with pellet wounds are expelled or arrested.
The sob-stories are then used to ‘explain’ and justify future violence against the state.
NYT:
Protests demanding the ouster of Iran’s authoritarian clerical rulers have ended. But many Iranians say that feelings of rage against the government and anxiety about the future permeate all aspects of life, and that nothing feels normal anymore.
WaPo:
In other parts of the country, popular anger is bubbling to the surface.
…
A woman from Bandar Abbas, on the Persian Gulf, who says she participated in the protests, said she saw security forces open fire into the crowds.
…
Before January she would not have understood why someone would want their own country to be attacked, she said, as the threat of U.S. strikes loomed. “But this time it is different,” she said, espousing a view long unpopular in Iran: “The real enemy is the Islamic Republic and any country or army that can weaken or attack them is going to liberate us.”
These spiked stories about Iran come as the U.S. military is preparing to wage war on the country.
The editors of both outlets had recently endorsed further U.S. measures against the people of Iran:
The United States has no right to wage war on Iran, or to have a say who governs the country. The opinion pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, however, are offering facile humanitarian arguments for the US to escalate its attacks on Iran. These are based on the nonsensical assumption that the US wants to help brighten Iranians’ futures.
In two editorials addressing the possibility of the US undertaking a bombing and shooting war on Iran, the Washington Post expressed no opposition to such policies and endorsed economic warfare as well.
It is a bit disappointing how ritualistic and boring propaganda like this has become.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.
