Political information and the use of images in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Political information via the use of painted images represents, the Khomeinist Iran, a formidable instrument of propaganda, and it is a sign of great originality in the Gulf region. The murals are milestones, icons for the memory in which and through which the ruling class secures two of the most fundamental events which, during the 1970s and the 1980s have laid the foundations for the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Both the theocratic revolution and the war against Iraq were the result of shrewd political power games that were endogenous with regard to the 1979 revolution, caused by the Shah, who in turn was a victim of the image of himself and of his country which he wanted to give to the world (‘the fifth military and economic power in the world’); and were exogenous because the war with Saddam Hussein, perpetrator and simultaneously victim of the bi-polar conflict on the one hand, and his seductive transformation into an icon and paladin of Western secular interests in the area on the other, was imposed on the Iranian people.