The most common pro-war talking point about Iran is that they massacred tens of thousands of protesters in January of this year — but what’s funny is that they never cite the same number. Because it’s a completely fictional story, they can just make up any number they want.
In online discourse with empire apologists these past few months I’ve been told that the number of dead protesters is thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, and a hundred thousand.
They really do seem to just throw out whatever number feels believable in a given moment. I recently saw an exasperated Glenn Greenwald ask an interlocutor on Twitter, “How do you decide when to claim that Iran killed 30,000 protesters, or 45,000, or 70,000? Does it depend on the day of the week or lyrical flow or something else?”
Iranian regime change muppet Reza Pahlavi claimed in January that 50,000 protesters had been massacred by the Iranian government that month.
Notorious Korean propagandist Yeonmi Park put the number at 40,000.
In February, President Trump said it was 32,000. By April he had inflated that number to 45,000, and then later climbed it up to 60,000.
Last month I saw The Australian’s Cameron Stewart swelling the number to 80,000.
In February there was a viral tweet by a propaganda account called The Persian Jewess asserting that “90,000 protesters have been killed to date,” while right wing influencer Nicholas Lissack said it was actually 100,000.
The other day someone commented on a post of mine telling me “Iran killed over 40k protesters standing up for freedom,” and when I dismissed that claim another empire apologist came in and adjusted the number to 30,000.
The reason they can’t settle on a number is because it’s all made up.
Nobody denies that thousands of people were killed in the January unrest; the Iranian government itself has stated that 3,117 people were killed in the violent clashes, including large numbers of security forces. Given that the US Treasury Secretary has repeatedly admitted that the US deliberately fomented the unrest in Iran, and given that Trump has admitted to sending weapons into the country with the goal of arming the protesters, and given that Trump’s previous secretary of state has suggested that Mossad was intimately involved in the so-called “peaceful protests”, it was inevitable that people were going to be killed.
But the war propagandists couldn’t be content with a few thousand deaths. They needed something more spectacular. Something sensational. So they started circulating thinly-sourced reports by shady individuals claiming the body count was much higher than acknowledged, and then further inflating the numbers in those reports.
And when they did this it made it clear that they’ve been lying about the whole thing, because anyone can see the numbers going all over the place depending on who happens to be speaking and what kind of mood they happen to be in. They made a classic blunder in fiction writing, as explained in a viral post that was doing the rounds on Tumblr a few months ago:
“speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don’t say numbers. don’t give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it’s secondhand.
“the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don’t let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.
“you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it’s no fun anymore.”
If you’re going to write fiction, it’s important not to disrupt the illusion and snap the reader out of the imaginary world you are creating for them. The narrative about tens of thousands of dead Iranian protesters is fiction, and everyone’s waking up to the lies.
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Caitlin Johnstone 