Written by Fatmah Alotaibi 

In December 2024, one of the longest-standing authoritarian regimes in the modern world collapsed. The  Assad dynasty had ruled Syria for over fifty years. It fell in a matter of days. State television, which for decades had broadcast loyalty rituals, presidential speeches, and celebrations of military “victories over terrorism,” abruptly changed its tone. The same outlet that had framed peaceful protesters as foreign agents and state violence as patriotic duty was suddenly raising the Free Syria flag. 

The shift happened almost overnight. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if so many people had not truly believed, why had it held for so long? 

What Syria revealed was not that its people had believed the propaganda. Many had not. What it revealed is that you do not need people to believe. You just need them to comply. 

This is the central insight that political theorist Hannah Arendt captured in her concept of the “banality of  evil.” Evil, she argued, is not always the product of monsters. It is often carried out by ordinary people who follow orders, perform their roles, and stop asking questions. The danger is not the true believers. It is the quiet majority who normalise what is happening around them simply by going along with it. 

Authoritarian regimes understand this better than anyone. 

The playbook is consistent across contexts. First, language is weaponised. Protesters become terrorists. Dissent becomes betrayal. Violence becomes defence. Once the vocabulary shifts, the moral framework shifts with it. It becomes possible to justify almost anything if it is framed as protecting the nation,  defending the homeland, or fighting an existential threat. 

Second, emotions are mobilised. Fear, pride, and outrage are not incidental to authoritarian propaganda;  they are its engine. State funerals become loyalty performances. Elections become displays of unity.  Religious ceremonies become endorsements of state violence. These rituals are not designed to persuade.  They are designed to make a particular emotional and moral reality feel inevitable, to shrink the space in which doubt is even possible. 

Third, and most insidiously, repetition does the work that force alone cannot. When the same narrative is broadcast continuously that protesters are criminals, that the state is protecting you, that there is no legitimate alternative, it does not need to be believed. It just needs to be present. It fills the air until it becomes the background against which all other information is assessed. 

Look at the world right now, and the pattern is not hard to find. When Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in February 2026, months after the 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran that began in June 2025, Iranian state media did not present a system in crisis. It presented a system proving its strength. The Tehran Times  ran the headline “Trump is gone, Khamenei remains.” Hardline outlets Kayhan and Tasnim framed the succession of Mojtaba Khamenei not as a rushed, pressure-filled process, in which the IRGC reportedly pressured Assembly of Experts members to vote quickly, but as a demonstration of the Islamic Republic’s resilience.

Front pages were dominated by pledges of allegiance from military commanders, clerics, and political figures. Wartime posters merged the faces of Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, and Mojtaba, projecting an unbroken line of divine authority. The new supreme leader’s first statement was read aloud by a state television anchor over a still photograph, with no video or audio of the new leader himself released. In it,  Khamenei called the conflict an act of aggression by external enemies and demanded “effective and  regret-inducing defence.” Analysts noted that focusing on armed resistance allowed the new leadership to avoid discussing the economic hardships and domestic unrest, including violent protests in December and January that had divided Iranian society long before the strikes began. 

Meanwhile, Iran was firing hundreds of missiles and drones at Gulf states, striking civilian infrastructure,  residential areas, and energy facilities. Qatar’s foreign ministry called it a crossing of all red lines. Yet none of this appeared in Iranian state media as aggression. It was resistance. It was a duty. The mechanism is the same one that sustained Assad for fifty years: attach moral language to power, keep the population looking outward at enemies, and those carrying out the violence never have to question it. They are simply doing their duty. 

What is striking is how little this depends on outright lying. The most effective propaganda does not fabricate reality wholesale. It selects, frames, and repeats. It decides what is shown and what is not. It determines which deaths are mourned and which are invisible. Over time, what is omitted becomes unthinkable, and what is repeated becomes common sense. 

That is both reassuring and alarming. Reassuring because manufactured consent is more fragile than it looks, as Syria showed, it can collapse quickly once the coercive structure behind it falls. Alarming because it means we can live inside systems of repression for a very long time without fully registering what is happening, precisely because those systems are designed to make repression feel normal. 

The question worth asking, not just about Syria or Tehran or the waters of the Gulf, but about any political environment, is a simple one: what are we accepting as normal that we have not actually chosen to accept? 

Propaganda works best when nobody calls it propaganda, when violence is a duty, when silence is loyalty and when obedience has become so routine that it no longer feels like a choice. 

That is the moment to start paying attention. 

Sources 

Arendt, H., 1964. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber. 

BBC News. ‘All red lines have been crossed’: Gulf states weigh response to Iranian strikes. Available at:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjrqqd8lw2wo 

Al Jazeera. Iran’s Mojtaba Khamenei vows to fight in first statement as supreme leader. Available at:  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/12/irans-mojtaba-khamenei-issues-first-statement-as-supreme leader-amid-war Iran International. After first message, Iranian media cast Khamenei Jr as wartime leader. Available at:  https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603125397