War, Spectacle, and Internal Repression: Iran’s Regime Between Military Weakness and Fabricated Strength
As war weakens Iran militarily, the regime turns to repression, blackouts, and spectacle to manufacture control, suppress dissent, and mask internal fragility.
While wars imposed on nations result in devastating consequences, including civilian casualties, infrastructure destruction, and widespread humanitarian crises, they also engender subtler yet profound sociopolitical shifts, especially within authoritarian regimes. Such external aggression often diminishes the agency of civil society by providing the regime with a form of legitimacy, framed as a necessary defense of national sovereignty against foreign threats (Toepler et al., 2020). It also enables heightened repression of oppositional elements within civil society, redirecting political power toward established elites and legible actors—internal and external—who prioritize their own agendas and benefits over collective interests (Ekiert, 2023). The current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is no exception. Here, both the attacking forces and the targeted authoritarian regime, in addition to the issues above, exploit the conflict as a form of spectacle, building narratives and visual displays of power to rationalize their actions and consolidate control, thereby perpetuating worldwide legitimacy and cycles of authoritarian entrenchment (Glasius, 2018). While this phenomenon manifests on both sides, the current discussion prioritizes the examination of the Islamic Republic’s way of turning this strategy into one of its survival mechanisms, masking its internal and external weaknesses.
Iran’s military position has been significantly weakened, and the regime faces a deep internal legitimacy deficit. Reuters reported on March 4, 2026, that the U.S. assault was already “ahead of schedule,” while a separate Reuters report from March 3 stated that Israel’s U.N. envoy claimed the United States and Israel controlled “almost all” Iranian airspace (Reuters, 2026a, 2026b). These reports, drawn from U.S. and Israeli sources, do not suggest that Iran has lost every capacity for retaliation, but they do indicate a severe deterioration in its strategic position. Even so, official rhetoric continues to present the regime as capable, resilient, and firmly in command. That contradiction is the center of the argument: as military weakness becomes harder to conceal and legitimacy remains fragile, the regime relies on coercion to manage the crisis materially at home and on spectacle to compensate for it symbolically, both inside and outside the country.
This is where Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle becomes especially useful. Debord defines the spectacle as a social order in which power is organized through appearances and mediated images rather than through direct and transparent social relations (Debord, 1977/1967). In this sense, the regime’s public messaging exceeds ordinary propaganda. It is part of a broader effort to manage perception, shape interpretation, and stabilize authority at a moment when material conditions are increasingly unfavorable. Under pressure, the regime turns more intensely to representation, producing an image of coherence, support, and control that can symbolically compensate for strategic loss. What is being managed, then, is not only narrative, but weakness itself.
This does not mean that everything is spectacle, or that events on the ground are unreal or unverifiable. Many developments—strikes, casualties, security deployments, infrastructure damage, and marches in favor of the regime—are materially real. The point is narrower. Here, the spectacle is the way real events are selectively framed, amplified, and reinterpreted to stabilize authority and manufacture an appearance of coherence, support, and control.
Returning to the aforementioned reasoning, the domestic situation makes the logic clearer. Reuters reported on March 3, 2026, that Tehran had become a “ghost town,” marked by fear, security checkpoints, and Revolutionary Guard patrols. The same report observed that there were no visible signs of public protests, despite expectations among some outside observers that the bombing campaign might trigger unrest (Reuters, 2026c). That absence does not indicate public loyalty or calm. It points instead to an environment in which coercion, surveillance, and armed urban control suppress visible dissent. The regime may be weaker in defending sovereignty against external attack, but it still retains the capacity to discipline movement, restrict assembly, and intimidate the population at home. This asymmetry is crucial: the regime is more capable of repressing society internally than of securing itself externally.
The broader record of repression strongly supports this reading. Amnesty International reported that protests beginning in late December 2025 were met with an “unprecedented deadly crackdown,” and that from January 8, 2026, authorities cut internet access in order to conceal the violence. Amnesty also documented repeated use of firearms against protesters, including shooting from rooftops and elevated positions (Amnesty International, 2026). Human Rights Watch later described a “tsunami” of arbitrary arrests, torture, and enforced disappearances following the January massacres, depicting a regime that responded to unrest by deepening fear and expanding coercive control (Human Rights Watch, 2026). The wartime atmosphere, then, extends an existing pattern rather than creating a new one. The government entered this conflict with a well-established willingness to use severe violence against its own population, and that coercive capacity now compensates for the fragility of its military and political position.
Social media posts from the X accounts WarMonitor and IranWire fit directly into this pattern. The indexed text of the WarMonitor post describes “Iranian regime forces shooting at Iranians chanting out of a high-rise building.” The indexed text of the IranWire post describes a video of a checkpoint on Tehran’s Ashrafi Esfahani highway (IranWire, 2026; WarMonitor, 2026). Read alongside Reuters, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, these posts make the atmosphere of intimidation more concrete: armed presence in public space, restricted movement, and visible threats directed at citizens. The same combination of coercion and staged visibility appears in a March 2 Tasnim-circulated appeal urging supporters to remain in the streets and mosques and presenting their presence as the regime’s “soft power”; read against survey data indicating that support for the continuation of the Islamic Republic is a minority position, such mobilization is better understood as manufactured public display than as evidence of broad consent (GAMAAN, 2025; Tasnim News, 2026). The regime is therefore not only suppressing visible opposition. It is also pushing a loyal minority into public view so that spectacle can stand in for legitimacy.
Although institutional cohesion, patronage, elite bargaining, and geopolitical factors also contribute to regime durability, spectacle and coercion function as complementary forms of rule in this context. Coercion suppresses dissent at the material level, while spectacle turns both repression and external weakness into an image of order, support, and resilience. If people begin chanting, gathering, or circulating evidence of unrest, the regime must contain them quickly and visibly. At the same time, it must circulate images, narratives, and symbols that imply continued authority. Control over bodies in physical space reinforces control over meaning in symbolic space. Debord’s framework clarifies that the spectacle depends not only on what power displays, but also on what it prevents others from displaying (Debord, 1977/1967). In the Iranian case, the image of order is sustained through the suppression of counter-images and the active production of images of support—often centered on a loyalist minority rather than broad consent.
The matter of internet access is central to this strategy. The Guardian reported on March 2, 2026, that Iran was once again experiencing a near-total internet blackout, and digital-censorship analysts described the outage as an intentional move by a regime attempting to preserve control under crisis conditions (The Guardian, 2026). A blackout does more than silence individual messages. It transforms the conditions under which reality becomes collectively knowable. It interrupts verification, fragments communication, and prevents people from constructing a shared and visible account of ongoing events. In a context defined by both war and repression, those effects carry major political consequences. Citizens find it harder to check information, families struggle to remain connected, journalists face greater barriers to documentation, and opposition groups lose the ability to coordinate effectively. This is one of the clearest points at which coercion and spectacle converge: by constraining what can be seen and known, the blackout makes it easier for the regime to manage what appears.
These conditions also create fertile ground for false and manipulated media content. In January 2026, The National reported that fake AI-generated protest videos were filling the information vacuum created by Iran’s shutdown and were being used to advance competing narratives (The National, 2026). This matters because it shows how spectacle operates in a platform environment. Once ordinary verification is weakened, synthetic imagery, selective editing, and misleading framing become more powerful. The result is an unstable visual field in which impressions of mass support, military success, control, or collapse can be manufactured with far greater ease. The regime does not need to produce every misleading image itself in order to benefit from this instability. It only needs an environment in which truth is harder to establish and emotionally satisfying representations travel faster than verification.
The same logic is visible in the current war. WIRED reported that, following the U.S.-Israeli attack, X was flooded with misleading posts, recycled footage, altered imagery, and false claims about the location and scale of attacks. The article also noted that pro-Iranian accounts circulated war imagery in ways that suggested successful retaliatory strikes unsupported by verified evidence (Gilbert, 2026). In such an environment, false signs of effectiveness often circulate more quickly than corrections. The spectacle no longer relies solely on state television or official press statements. It now operates through a broader media ecosystem composed of ideological supporters, anonymous booster accounts, opportunistic disinformation, and platform algorithms that reward emotionally satisfying content. That wider ecology strengthens the regime’s ability to preserve an image of power even when material evidence points in the opposite direction.
One of the clearest examples is the inflation of U.S. casualty figures. On March 4, 2026, Factnameh reviewed Ali Larijani’s claim that 500 U.S. troops had been killed in the previous days and rated the claim as severely exaggerated. Factnameh noted that Larijani provided no evidence and that the available official reporting supported only six confirmed U.S. military deaths. The same fact-check further observed that another Iranian military spokesman had cited an even larger figure by combining deaths and injuries into a single inflated total (Factnameh, 2026). Reuters similarly reported on March 3 that the Pentagon had identified four of the first American soldiers killed and that the total confirmed U.S. military death toll stood at six (Reuters, 2026d). This is a clear instance of symbolic overstatement functioning as wartime image management. A regime under visible pressure manufactures dramatic claims of success in order to project potency, retaliatory capability, and momentum where material evidence is lacking.
Other aircraft-downing stories follow the same pattern. The Associated Press reported in March 2026 that a viral clip falsely presented as a U.S. fighter jet downed in Iran was actually footage from a video game, illustrating how fabricated visual evidence can circulate as proof of military achievement (Associated Press, 2026a). The Associated Press also reported that three U.S. F-15E aircraft were mistakenly downed by Kuwaiti friendly fire, not by Iran, even though Iranian state television attempted to frame one of the crashes as an Iranian success (Associated Press, 2026b). These examples matter because they show how ambiguous or false visual material can be repurposed into a spectacle of battlefield effectiveness. The weaker the regime appears materially, the more it depends on symbolic demonstrations of effectiveness.
The regime’s image is also reinforced through English-language amplifiers who translate this narrative for audiences outside Iran. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, whose University of Tehran profile identifies him as a professor, offers a clear example. In a recent X post, he wrote that “The genocidal Zionists can’t defeat Iran’s military, so they attack the country’s infrastructure” (Marandi, 2026; University of Tehran, 2026). That formulation is politically revealing because it reframes visible damage and military pressure as indirect proof of the Islamic Republic’s enduring strength. Infrastructure strikes are presented as evidence that Iran’s military remains fundamentally unconquered. This rhetorical maneuver transforms vulnerability into resilience and loss into moral advantage. In this sense, the spectacle works both inwardly and outwardly: internally, it compensates for lost legitimacy; externally, it compensates for military weakness.
Bailey Ulbricht and Joelle Rizk’s 2024 work helps clarify why all of this matters beyond discourse alone. Their article on harmful information in armed conflict outlines a five-part typology of harms: harms to life and physical well-being, economic harms, psychological harms, social and cultural harms, and broader harms to society (Ulbricht & Rizk, 2024). That framework is especially relevant here because it moves the analysis beyond a generic concern with misinformation. In Iran’s case, blackouts, exaggeration, fabricated military victories, manipulated visuals, and narrative amplification shape how people assess danger, whether they trust what they see, and whether they believe collective action is possible. Distorted information can intensify fear, deepen isolation, weaken social trust, and make repression more effective. The spectacle has material consequences because it reshapes the conditions under which people interpret reality and act within it.
Taken together, these dynamics depict a coherent survival logic. Given the volatility of both the military trajectory and domestic politics, this should be read as a tendency of the current moment rather than as a deterministic forecast. Iran is under severe external military pressure, and the regime lacks broad internal legitimacy. In response, it relies on coercion to manage the population materially and on spectacle to compensate symbolically for what it cannot secure through military success or popular consent. Coercion suppresses unrest, disciplines movement, and limits what can be done. Spectacle produces claims of resilience, stages loyalist visibility, inflates battlefield success, and manages what can be seen and believed. These are not separate responses to separate problems. They tend to function as mutually reinforcing parts of a key strategy of regime preservation, though volatile military and domestic conditions could still lead to alternative outcomes. Debord helps explain the form of this maneuver: power endures by organizing visibility and interpretation (Debord, 1977/1967). Ulbricht and Rizk help explain its consequences: harmful wartime information produces concrete psychological, social, and physical harms that can reinforce domination (Ulbricht & Rizk, 2024).
The most persuasive conclusion is that the regime’s spectacle functions as one of its principal tools, among several, for governing weakness. As military losses accumulate and legitimacy remains fragile, the regime intensifies control over the street, communication, and the symbolic field. It suppresses visible dissent, restricts the circulation of evidence, pushes a loyal minority into public view, inflates enemy casualties, recycles disinformation, and promotes narratives of endurance through both domestic and international channels. Through these mechanisms, external vulnerability is converted into a managed image of internal resolve. The spectacle does not remove the contradiction between weakness abroad and repression at home. It organizes that contradiction and renders it politically survivable, representing a prominent tendency in the current moment rather than a fixed or inevitable path.
References
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War, Spectacle, and Internal Repression: Iran’s Regime Between Military Weakness and Fabricated Strength #Iran #Repression
