The Silenced Third Voice: How Two Hegemonies Rewrite Iran

 If you follow Iran through international media, you have likely noticed that the story is often forced into a narrow frame. Across news cycles, op-eds, and diaspora debates, two dominant hegemonic narratives keep reappearing. The first presents salvation as something imported: it portrays the Pahlavi brand, the United States, and Israel as the natural “rescuers” of the Iranian people. The second is the Islamic Republic’s narrative, which claims that public dissent is not an independent political uprising but a foreign-designed operation, often described as a Mossad-linked project. These two stories appear to be opposites, but they function similarly: they compress a complex society into a simplified binary and leave little room for ordinary people to speak as political subjects.

This article focuses on the second hegemony: the Islamic Republic’s discourse abroad. Many people assume propaganda is mostly produced inside Iran, through state television, censorship, and fear. But the regime’s narrative machine also travels. It moves through networks in the diaspora, through “community institutions,” through self-described spokespersons, and sometimes through organizations that present themselves as neutral representatives of Iranians overseas. The point is not that everyone in these spaces is consciously serving the state. The point is that the discourse itself has a structure, and that structure repeatedly achieves the same outcome: it shields the regime from accountability, delegitimizes protest, and removes the Iranian people from the center of their own history.

Step One: Removing the Regime from the Place of Accusation

The Islamic Republic’s external discourse often begins with a subtle but decisive shift: the government is quietly removed from the position of being the primary defendant. Instead of asking what the regime has done, and why it continues to respond to dissent with violence, the narrative reorganizes the problem around “conditions.” It reframes Iran as a country under pressure rather than a society under systematic rule. The explanation becomes economic difficulty, sanctions, external threats, instability in the region. The crisis is presented as something that “happened” to the state, not something the state continuously produces.

On the surface, this can sound compassionate: people are suffering, and sanctions are real. But the rhetorical effect is political. The more the suffering is explained as the product of outside pressure, the less the regime appears as the central agent of harm. Structural repression becomes background noise. Accountability fades. The government is no longer an aggressor; it becomes a manager of misfortune, imperfect, but not criminal.

Step Two: Enlarging the External Enemy

Once the state is protected through “conditions,” the discourse then amplifies the external enemy. War, intervention, and foreign interference are placed at the center of attention. The narrative warns of chaos, collapse, Iraq-style destruction, Libya-style fragmentation. Sometimes it uses a human rights tone. Sometimes it uses an anti-imperialist tone. Often it uses both. But the function remains constant: the danger of foreign involvement is pushed so far forward that the regime’s violence becomes secondary, almost incidental, in comparison.

This is one of the most powerful manipulations in the discourse: it does not have to deny repression completely. It only has to make repression seem less urgent than external threats. It creates a moral hierarchy of harm where the regime appears bad, but intervention appears worse. The public is nudged into a false choice: accept authoritarianism or risk national catastrophe. The outcome is paralysis, and the normalization of survival under repression.

Step Three: Turning Protest into a Security Threat

From there, protest itself is transformed. Demonstrations, strikes, and street resistance are not approached as political rights or expressions of collective agency. They are framed as “security risks.” The protester is shifted from citizen to suspect. This is where language becomes a weapon.

Terms like “rioters,” “agitators,” or “foreign-backed disruptors” are introduced to create distance between the public and those who resist. Under this framing, protest is no longer a legitimate claim to freedom, dignity, or justice. It becomes instability. It becomes sabotage. It becomes something that must be controlled for the sake of “order.”

And once protest is defined as a security issue, violence becomes easier to justify. The regime does not need to admit it is attacking citizens, it can claim it is defending society. It can borrow the logic of other states, pointing to policing elsewhere and saying, “This is normal.” The moral shock of repression is replaced with bureaucratic language. The question is no longer: “Why are people being killed?” It becomes: “How do we prevent disorder?”

Step Four: Human Rights Talk that Ends in Dehumanization

One of the most cynical aspects of this discourse is its ability to mimic humanitarian language while maintaining authoritarian outcomes. In some cases, it speaks extensively about the suffering of Palestinians, Israeli violence, regional war, and Western hypocrisy. These issues can be real and important, but within the Islamic Republic’s propaganda structure, they are often instrumentalized. They become a shield, not a principle. They become a way to claim moral legitimacy without ever addressing the regime’s crimes at home.

In the most extreme form, this rhetorical strategy leads back to the Mossad accusation. Protesters are described as manipulated, deceived, or infiltrated. The goal is not necessarily to provide evidence. The goal is to contaminate protest with suspicion. When a movement is described as intelligence-linked, it is no longer seen as human struggle, it is treated as an operation. And when people are treated as operatives, their lives become expendable.

This is how a narrative prepares the ground for repression: it does not only justify violence after it happens; it shapes perception so violence appears inevitable, rational, or even necessary.

What the Discourse Refuses to Say

Perhaps the most revealing feature of this hegemonic narrative is what it omits. It does not speak seriously about torture, political imprisonment, executions, or systematic sexual violence. It does not confront censorship, internet shutdowns, or mass surveillance. It avoids the regime’s deep corruption and rent-based economy, where wealth is extracted through power rather than produced through accountability. It does not name the everyday cruelty: fear, humiliation, hopelessness, exhaustion, environmental collapse, and the slow destruction of a livable future.

Most importantly, it refuses to recognize the Iranian people’s right to resist. It treats resistance as naïveté, as manipulation, as danger. It strips agency from those who protest and returns it either to foreign powers or to the state itself. The regime becomes a rational actor. Protesters become irrational bodies.

This is not an accident. It is the architecture of the discourse.

The False Binary and the Erasure of the People

At the end of the process, what remains is a false binary that benefits authoritarianism: Islamic Republic versus Pahlavi. The binary appears to offer choice, but it collapses political imagination. It erases alternatives. It erases grassroots organizing. It erases feminist, labor, student, ethnic, and ecological movements. It erases those who reject both monarchy nostalgia and theocratic rule. In other words, it erases the “third voice”, the voice of the people as political authors of their own future.

And this is why the two hegemonies, though they claim to oppose each other, often produce similar damage. One reduces Iran to a project of salvation by external allies; the other reduces Iran to a project of “security” threatened by foreign conspiracies. Both treat the people as objects rather than subjects. Both reproduce a politics where legitimacy is granted from above, never built from below.

Why the Third Voice Must Be Defended

The Iranian people do not need saviors. They do not need to be framed as spies. They need to be recognized as a society with dignity, agency, memory, and political intelligence. The third voice is not a moderate compromise between two extremes. It is the refusal of the binary itself. It is the insistence that Iran’s future cannot be manufactured through propaganda, whether dressed as nationalism, humanitarian concern, or geopolitical realism.

If Iran’s history is not to be written in the name of others, then this voice must be protected wherever we live and in whatever language we can speak. A voice that does not justify killing. A voice that does not worship power. A voice that insists, simply and relentlessly, on the right to protest, to resist, and to imagine a future beyond fear.