It was a gray afternoon in Tehran when a new mural appeared near Darvazeh Dolat, a crowded crossroads where the metro empties streams of commuters into streets heavy with exhaust and drizzle. The image showed a young soldier in uniform, backlit by green light, his eyes lifted toward a promise that no one could name. Beneath him, a slogan read: “We give our lives so the homeland endures.” A few people glanced up. Most walked past. Phones glowed in their hands, umbrellas bumped shoulders. After years of loss and propaganda, Iranians have learned not to look too long at official images. The state keeps producing new scenes in its film of martyrdom, though the audience has already left the theater.

This is not disbelief born of cynicism but fatigue. For more than four decades the Islamic Republic has been in post-production mode, cutting and redubbing its founding story of sacred defense. The Iran-Iraq War gave the regime its emotional grammar: a small nation under siege, redeemed by sacrifice. That war built the state’s identity as much as any constitution. But the generation that once believed in it has aged, and their children have inherited only its slogans.

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The institutions behind this memory economy remain powerful. The Bonyad-e Shahid, or Martyrs Foundation, still determines who qualifies as a martyr and whose family receives benefits. Hozeh-ye Honari commissions the films and exhibitions; Soroush Media distributes them. Schoolbooks still teach the same story line of heroism and loss, so that children learn to mourn before they learn to question. The system functions with bureaucratic precision, as if grief itself were an administrative duty.

Over time, the regime’s myth-making techniques have grown more polished and more hollow. The war of the 1980s is constantly grafted onto new conflicts. The “Sacred Defense” theme now stretches from the battlefields of Khorramshahr to Syria, Iraq, and Gaza. When Iranian troops die abroad, they are recast as Defenders of the Shrine, modāfeʿān-e haram, so each loss fits neatly into the same moral template. The human details disappear. Doubt, fear, or fatigue are edited out. The photographs of teenage volunteers once printed in neighborhood newspapers have been replaced by glossy posters with........

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