ar has rarely been left to speak in its own terrible name. It is prepared for us in advance: announced, narrated, captioned, justified, made bearable, made shareable. Before the ruins are counted, the image has already been taught the way to circulate.

The relation between war and media is one of the great political facts of the 20th Century. Modern war did not merely require armies, factories, weapons, borders, alliances and enemies. It also required publics. It required a story large enough to make sacrifice intelligible, death useful, fear organised and obedience emotionally available. The battlefield was never only a battlefield. It was a theatre of perception as well.

War before the feed

World War I gave propaganda its modern bureaucratic confidence. The poster became a weapon of recruitment and shame, turning a complicated imperial catastrophe into a demand on the passerby. The World War II expanded this machinery. Radio made the nation audible to itself; the newsreel gave war movement, music, montage; cinema transformed military struggle into a moral universe. Marshall McLuhan remains useful here because war was increasingly experienced through the form that delivered it. Media did not merely carry war. It trained the sensorium through which war could be felt.

By Vietnam War, the arrangement began to fray. The war entered the living room with unwanted proximity. Villages burned on television. Bodies appeared with less heroic distance. But Vietnam, often remembered as the war television exposed, was not simply revealed by media; it was mediated by it. Stuart Hall’s account of encoding and decoding still matters here: publics do not merely receive images; they interpret them through nation, ideology, race, class, memory and mood. The image disturbed the official story, but it did not abolish the struggle over meaning.

The Cold War understood that struggle with uncommon sophistication. It was not only a conflict of weapons and blocs, but also of atmosphere: spy thrillers, nuclear drills, patriotic cinema, Bond villains, dissident literature, satellite images and televised speeches. It turned ideology into décor, entertainment, anxiety, education. It also gave us the celebrity politics of war: actors, musicians, athletes, defectors and dissidents endorsing wars, opposing them, or softening the official voice through televised sincerity.

Then came the War on Terror, and with it another grammar. The language was clinical: precision, targets, surgical strikes, collateral damage. The imagery was technological: night-vision green, maps, briefings, embedded cameras, aerial views, screens within screens. The body was often absent from the official frame. The invasion of Iraq was a media event as much as a military one, staged through Shock and Awe, rolling television graphics, expert panels, Pentagon phrases and the strange authority of the map without the corpse.

Jean Baudrillard’s arguments about simulation were often overused, sometimes carelessly, but a part of his provocation endures: modern war increasingly appears to distant publics through signs of war before it appears as human devastation. The screen does not hide everything. It shows selectively, rhythmically and persuasively. It does not make war unreal; it makes war consumable.

Earlier propaganda often said: believe this. The meme says: pass this on before belief has had time to become a question.

Judith Butler’s Frames of War is useful here because it asks how media and political frames determine which lives appear as lives and which deaths become publicly grievable. War images do not simply show violence; they organise the conditions under which some suffering can be recognised and other suffering can be absorbed as necessity. Some dead are named, photographed, biographied and returned to the world as interrupted futures. Others are converted into numbers, threats, targets, regrettable consequences or the familiar fog of military necessity.

This is the long history the feed has inherited. But the feed has done something new to it. It has stripped war of ceremony. The evening bulletin asked for attention. The newspaper asked for reading. The documentary asked for time. The feed interrupts. War appears between a recipe, a joke, a wedding photograph, a celebrity clip, a football goal, a dance trend, an advertisement for shoes. A missile strike is encountered in the same posture as a cat video. A child under rubble must compete for the thumb.

The meme as battlefield

This is the condition in which the AI-generated Lego-style Iran war memes have appeared. Their significance is not that they are crude. Their crudity is part of their intelligence. They belong to the native language of platform life: quick, comic, referential, emotionally pre-loaded.

The Associated Press reported that pro-Iran groups have used AI-generated, English-language memes to troll Donald Trump and shape the war narrative for Western audiences. Sam McNeil noted that the pieces were steeped in American pop culture and aimed at a highly online public already fluent in parody, ridicule and anti-establishment humour. Kyle Chayka, writing in The New Yorker, described the Lego-themed videos produced by Akhbar Enfejari (Explosive News) as among the most visible artifacts of the conflict, moving across YouTube, Instagram, X and Telegram while being amplified by Iranian-government accounts and Russian state media. ABC News and The Wall Street Journal placed similar material inside a broader AI-era information war. The Guardian, in an essay by Mark Alfano and Micha Klincewicz, located these videos inside the emerging vocabulary of “slopaganda”: cheap, fast AI propaganda designed less to persuade through evidence than to flood the public sphere with emotionally useful material.

The word has a comic awkwardness, but it names something real. The content may be “slop” in its speed, abundance and synthetic texture. Its political work is not necessarily sloppy. It knows where the nerves are. It knows that the viewer is tired. It knows that moral seriousness has difficulty surviving the pace of the feed. It knows that mockery can travel farther than analysis.

The Lego form is not incidental. It matters that catastrophe is being rendered through the aesthetic of childhood. Lego carries a moral innocence: play, construction, imagination, harmless modularity. It belongs to the nursery, the toy box, the fantasy of building. To stage war through Lego is therefore to perform a strange laundering of violence: the missile becomes a plastic object; the leader becomes a figurine; the battlefield becomes a playset. Destruction is made cute without ceasing to be vengeful.

The meme does not necessarily ask the viewer to believe a lie. It asks the viewer to inhabit a mood. Mockery replaces argument. Humour does what ideology once did more solemnly. It sorts the world quickly: villain, fool, victim, avenger, hypocrite, underdog. In a few seconds, the viewer receives a complete moral arrangement, not as doctrine but as entertainment.

Earlier propaganda often said: believe this. The meme says: pass this on before belief has had time to become a question. Its unseriousness is its method of entry. It lowers the guard. It smuggles the political through laughter, rhythm, parody, familiarity. A state does not need the viewer to become a full ideological subject. It may be enough for the viewer to laugh, repost, sneer, recognise the villain, feel briefly clever and move on.

The old distinction between propaganda and entertainment no longer holds cleanly. Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle was never simply a society of images, but of social relations mediated by images. Platform culture goes further. The spectacle is no longer something we merely watch. We help distribute it.

The meme does not necessarily ask the viewer to believe a lie. It asks the viewer to inhabit a mood.

Iran’s use of such memes reverses an old arrogance. For decades, Western powers imagined themselves as masters of media modernity: Hollywood, CNN, Silicon Valley, the language of freedom, the architecture of global attention. Now adversaries use the same platforms, references and AI tools to turn that grammar back upon them. The point is not that Iran has invented propaganda. The point is that it has learnt the comic timing of the feed.

This is the asymmetry of the new information war. Narrative power no longer depends only on studios, state broadcasters or formal ministries. A small team with AI tools, cultural fluency and a feel for resentment can enter the bloodstream of global discourse. The West built much of the platform architecture through which this material now travels. It built the incentives: speed, outrage, engagement, shareability, reaction. Now it complains when others learn the game.

What the feed asks us to feel

What, then, does the reader receive when such a meme appears on the phone?

Not information, exactly; not fiction either; something more unstable: a mood-object; a small carrier of political sensation. It asks for almost nothing and gets quite a lot. It does not demand study. It does not ask the viewer to know the history of Iran, American intervention, Israeli policy, sanctions, nuclear agreements, regional rivalries or the dead of any side. It provides the pleasure of position without the labour of understanding.

This is perhaps the most dangerous feature of platform war. It offers moral orientation without historical depth. It allows people to feel located in a conflict without being answerable to its complexity. One can be anti-war as meme, nationalist as meme, anti-imperialist as meme, militarist as meme, humanitarian as meme. Every position can be compressed into a visual reflex.

The danger is not only misinformation. That word is now too small for what confronts us. The danger is deformation. War is deformed when it is made frictionless. Public judgment is deformed when the first encounter with conflict is engineered as amusement. Memory is deformed when atrocities become templates. Attention is deformed when every catastrophe must arrive dressed for engagement.

The user who receives a war meme in the feed is not receiving a small joke. A meme contains a theory of the conflict, however crude. It contains an enemy, a joke structure, an invitation to belong to those who “get it.” It carries an emotional instruction: laugh here, despise him, cheer this reversal, enjoy this humiliation, distrust that media, recognise this hypocrisy. The feed is not merely a place where politics appears. It is a machine for arranging political feeling.

This does not mean every viewer is duped. Many viewers know exactly what they are seeing. They may know it is exaggerated and manipulative - even state-adjacent. But knowledge is not the same as immunity. The modern viewer often consumes propaganda ironically. Yet irony does not cancel the effect of repetition. A joke seen ten times may do more work than an editorial read once. The meme succeeds when it becomes familiar before it becomes accountable.

Susan Sontag once warned against the complacency of looking at the pain of others. But we are now beyond looking in the old sense. We glance, swipe, save, forward, react. Spectacle may now be too heavy a word for something so light, so quick and so disposable. The meme does not monumentalise violence; it miniaturises it.

That is why Lego is such a perfect and chilling form. It makes war buildable and turns history into parts. It allows the world to be broken and reassembled with comic ease. The plastic brick becomes an emblem of our media condition: modular, colourful, endlessly rearrangeable, innocent in appearance, ruthless in use.

A war rendered as Lego is still war. But it reaches us altered. Its moral temperature has changed. It no longer arrives with the grave voice of the broadcaster or the ideological confidence of the poster. It comes laughing. It comes as parody, remix, toy, clip. It enters the mind through the side door.

Every war now has at least two fronts: the territorial and the narrative. The first is fought with weapons, money, alliances and bodies. The second is fought through images, memes, clips, captions, influencers, bots, AI videos, strategic jokes and emotional atmospheres. The second front does not merely comment on the first. It prepares consent, refusal, confusion, fatigue, glee and indifference.

The old propaganda poster wanted the citizen to stand still. The war meme knows the citizen no longer stands still. The citizen scrolls. So propaganda has learnt to scroll with him.

The task is not to become humourless. Nor is it to pretend that all memes are lies or that all laughter is manipulation. Political humour has always belonged to the weak as well as the powerful. Satire has punctured empires, dictators, occupiers and hypocrites. But meme warfare under platform capitalism changes the conditions under which satire travels. It becomes difficult to know where dissent ends and influence begins; where mockery becomes manipulation; where anti-imperial pleasure becomes another form of aesthetic consumption.

The reader should therefore ask a different question when war appears in the feed. Not only: is this true? That remains necessary. But also: what is this asking me to feel before I think? What does it make easy to hate? What does it make impossible to mourn? Who benefits if I pass this on? What history has been compressed into this joke? What dead have been turned into atmosphere?

These are not academic questions. They are ordinary civic questions now. The feed has become one of the places where war is made available to consciousness. It is also one of the places where war is made less difficult to bear.

The new propaganda does not always arrive as command. It arrives as relief: a joke in the middle of horror; a little brick world in which geopolitics can be smashed, mocked, rebuilt and forgotten; a toy war for an exhausted public; a tiny theatre of revenge - endlessly replayable.

Before the dead arrive, the language arrives to frame their reception. Now, before even the language settles, the meme has already moved on.

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His latest book is Form as History: When History No Longer Requires Us (Daraja Press, 2026).