It was a gray afternoon in Tehran when a new mural appeared near Darvazeh Dolat, a crowded crossroads where the metro empties streams of commuters into streets heavy with exhaust and drizzle. The image showed a young soldier in uniform, backlit by green light, his eyes lifted toward a promise that no one could name. Beneath him, a slogan read: “We give our lives so the homeland endures.” A few people glanced up. Most walked past. Phones glowed in their hands, umbrellas bumped shoulders. After years of loss and propaganda, Iranians have learned not to look too long at official images. The state keeps producing new scenes in its film of martyrdom, though the audience has already left the theater.
This is not disbelief born of cynicism but fatigue. For more than four decades the Islamic Republic has been in post-production mode, cutting and redubbing its founding story of sacred defense. The Iran-Iraq War gave the regime its emotional grammar: a small nation under siege, redeemed by sacrifice. That war built the state’s identity as much as any constitution. But the generation that once believed in it has aged, and their children have inherited only its slogans.
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The institutions behind this memory economy remain powerful. The Bonyad-e Shahid, or Martyrs Foundation, still determines who qualifies as a martyr and whose family receives benefits. Hozeh-ye Honari commissions the films and exhibitions; Soroush Media distributes them. Schoolbooks still teach the same story line of heroism and loss, so that children learn to mourn before they learn to question. The system functions with bureaucratic precision, as if grief itself were an administrative duty.
Over time, the regime’s myth-making techniques have grown more polished and more hollow. The war of the 1980s is constantly grafted onto new conflicts. The “Sacred Defense” theme now stretches from the battlefields of Khorramshahr to Syria, Iraq, and Gaza. When Iranian troops die abroad, they are recast as Defenders of the Shrine, modāfeʿān-e haram, so each loss fits neatly into the same moral template. The human details disappear. Doubt, fear, or fatigue are edited out. The photographs of teenage volunteers once printed in neighborhood newspapers have been replaced by glossy posters with halos and perfect symmetry. The faces are beautiful but empty, stripped of history.
Erasure also takes physical form. The Khavaran cemetery, where victims of the 1980s mass executions of political prisoners were buried, has been fenced off and partly covered.The once-visible Lot 41 section of Behesht-e Zahra has been paved into a parking area. Tehran’s urban plans treat memory as clutter. Even graves are managed for efficiency.
The twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025 revealed how fragile this machinery of belief has become. Human-rights organizations reported over 5,600 people killed or injured across twenty-eight provinces. The Health Ministry acknowledged roughly 600 deaths. Kurdish monitors counted 1,082, including many civilians and children. Every number hides a name. Many of those killed were teachers, drivers, or hospital staff, ordinary people with no political role. Within days, state television framed the losses as national sacrifice, highlighting Revolutionary Guard officers as symbols of resistance. Funerals were televised, slogans recycled, grief repackaged.
But this time, many Iranians resisted the script. Some memorials were quietly defaced. Others simply drew no crowd. In private, the question was no longer who died for the regime, but why ordinary people always pay the price. Most Iranians do not want another war. They fear bombs, shortages, and another wave of funerals. Yet if the country itself is attacked, nationalism still stirs. It is an instinctive defense of home, not of power. That emotion is both protective and dangerous. The same impulse that drives people to help each other under fire can be used by the state to demand loyalty. The regime knows this well. It relies on genuine patriotism to sustain an artificial sense of unity.
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At the same time, disbelief has become the quiet form of opposition in Iran. People may perform faith in public yet withhold it in private. They attend state funerals, bow their heads, and move on. They no longer measure truth by official words. Disbelief weakens the regime’s emotional control, but it also carries a cost: fatigue, detachment, and fear that nothing will change. Still, disbelief is not apathy. It is self-protection in a country that has seen too many sacrifices demanded and too few explained.
Since the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in morality-police custody in 2022, the government has used the language of martyrdom to criminalize dissent. Security forces have killed hundreds of protesters—at least 550, including dozens of minors, according to independent monitors. Trials are swift and closed. Young men like Mohsen Shekari and MajidrezaRahnavard were executed within weeks, one in public, one in private. A later wave of executions brought the annual total to 853 in 2023, the highest in eight years, and over 900 in 2024, according to UN and Amnesty reports.
Each of those names belonged to someone before it became a slogan. Their families were pressured into silence, their funerals filmed by security agents. The state called them rioters; the public called them martyrs. That quiet reversal of language is significant. It shows how memory is slipping out of official hands.
Re-editing, in this sense, is not just propaganda, it is state control over truth. The government reshapes the record, changing captions, cropping photos, inventing context. Even the most revered war heroes have been re-narrated over time, their doubts deleted. The goal is not persuasion but consistency. The story must always lead back to the same conclusion: endurance through obedience.
Yet another story is being told from below. Ordinary Iranians record protests on their phones, share funerals online, and whisper names that the state tries to erase. Mothers speak directly to the camera, unmediated, unafraid. These fragments form a counter-archive—unsteady, imperfect, but real. When state TV labels the dead as traitors, social media restores them as witnesses. Even silence has become expressive: young people skate past the Martyrs’ Museum without looking up, refusing to give the performance its audience.
A state that defines itself through sacrifice now faces a generation that wants to live. That contradiction cannot be edited out. Disbelief alone will not dismantle the system, but it exposes its moral emptiness. The regime continues to produce images of devotion because it must convince itself that belief still exists. The machinery keeps running because stopping it would mean admitting failure.
For Tehran’s leaders, the myth of martyrdom remains politically useful. It ties clerics, commanders, and bureaucrats together in a shared identity. It projects resilience abroad, to allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and gives domestic hardship a sacred frame. But the cost is growing isolation from the public. The more the state repeats its old script, the more detached ordinary Iranians become from the voice that claims to speak for them.
Nationalism, however, is not dead. It lies beneath the surface, shaped by centuries of invasion and defense. If Iran is attacked, people still rally to protect the country itself, even if they despise those in power. That distinction, between loyalty to land and loyalty to rulers, has never been clearer. The regime exploits it, but it can no longer fully control it.
What replaces the old narrative is not yet a new ideology, but a quiet shift in moral priorities. The emerging script values dignity over death, truth over heroism. It grows in small acts: naming the executed, rejecting forced mourning, telling the truth even when it cannot be published. Iran is moving from a revolutionary mindset to a testimonial one, from sacred defense to simple remembrance.
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For now, the projector still hums. Murals are repainted, banners hung for the next Sacred Defense Week, and the same green glow spreads across new portraits. But the audience has changed. Many Iranians now film their own version of events, while others look away altogether. The state keeps the reels turning, yet the film no longer holds the country together.
When the lights rise, no one applauds. The editors in the control room adjust the color on an old reel, convinced the story can still be saved. Perhaps it can, but not by them.
Fatemeh Aman has written on Iranian, Afghan, and broader Middle East affairs for over 25 years and advised US and non-governmental officials. A former non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a writer, producer, and anchor at Voice of America, and a correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, her work has appeared in Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and the Stimson Center’s Middle East Perspectives. Follow her on X: @FatemehAman.
The opinions presented here reflect the author’s personal analysis and experience, which may not fully align with the publication’s editorial outlook.