Protesters cast their shadows on an Iranian national flag during a rally to mark Al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) in Toronto.Image: keystone
How is the war in Iran communicated to us? How do war experts talk about what is happening in the Middle East? I scrolled through TikTok, TV talk shows, and other media and paused a few times. An experience report.
Mar 15, 2026, 3:56 p.mMar 15, 2026, 3:56 p.m
I sometimes cringe when military jargon slips out in the “heat of the moment,” even though wars are underway in Ukraine and Iran. I say innocently that I am currently busy on various “fronts”. Sometimes I “attack” someone or like to talk about an “avant-garde”. I mean a modern literary movement, but the term originally referred to the champions in a battle.
“If thinking corrupts language, language also corrupts thinking.”
George Orwell
Of course, in times of war I don’t want to “shoot powder” in the language of war. Because I know from George Orwell: “If thinking corrupts language, language also corrupts thinking.” The language of war is especially forbidden for a text like this, in which I would like to show how those who understand war talk about the events in Iran.
Textli on TikTok want to arouse my pity
I start researching on TikTok. Younger people in particular get information about the war there. I see a lot of quickly edited films (also from SRF), supplemented by short texts that an AI voice probably reads out.
A video is about defenseless Lebanese families who were attacked by Israel. They would have lost their home and their children would no longer be able to go to school. I feel sorry for them, while Israel inevitably appears as the aggressor. There is no space in the Filmli for a political or historical classification. I rarely learn that Israel’s bombings targeted suspected Hezbollah militia buildings in Lebanon because these terrorist fighters had previously fired bombs at targets in Israel.
Hiding, distorting and obscuring key information has always been part of the way war is talked about. During the Balkan Wars, the same photos of killed children were used by Serbs and Croats for propaganda purposes, wrote the famous US intellectual Susan Sontag in her book “Looking at the Suffering of Others”. She added: “All you had to do was change the caption and the deaths of these children could be used in one way or another.”
Sofa experts like to talk abstractly
This is how countless fake news is created today. I’m annoyed by deceptive war images on social media that show me bomb hits, corpses and refugees in an endless loop and can easily be used for propaganda purposes thanks to artificial intelligence. But what about the texts about the war? They shrink into mere captions or devalue themselves through their ideological proximity to one camp or the other. I don’t even want to start talking about the pure hate speech that is rampant on social media and keeps the attention economy going.
Drone image of the graves of the girls in Minab, Iran, who were allegedly bombed to death by the USA.Image: keystone
The qualitatively more cultivated media commentary on war, on the other hand, takes into account the sensitivity of its reading audience. They don’t want to subject me to too many terrible things so as not to depress me. The sofa commentators and talk show experts like to talk about the war in a soft-spoken or abstract way. They often ignore the concrete suffering of the civilian population, perhaps out of piety or because they do not want to create false closeness. This makes it all the easier for them to indulge in remote geopolitical or military-strategic topics.
Markus Somm raves about the “just” war
Trump fan Markus Somm raves in his “Nebelspalter” and in other Swiss media about a “good,” “just,” “necessary” war. When I listen to him, he lulls me into believing that this one war is needed to save the world or at least make the West safer. The only question now is whether the air war is sufficient or whether ground troops are necessary.
I am glad that there are also experts and journalists who are addressing the question of whether the USA committed a war crime on the first day of the bombings. Did they blow up a girls’ school in Iran on February 28th, killing 150 students? We don’t know exactly yet, the number of victims should be used with extreme caution. Trump claimed that Iran dropped the bomb on the school in Minab itself without having to provide any evidence.
Afterwards, I no longer knew which of these were propaganda lies and what had actually happened. But in recent days there has been increasing evidence that the girls’ school may have been targeted and wiped out due to outdated US intelligence information. “Collateral damage,” as experts say.
Not only do they know everything better, they also speak critically: Markus Lanz and Richard David Precht.Image: www.imago-images.de
Trump’s MAGA clique continues to treat the attack on Iran, which violates international law, as a kind of holy war. The US President expresses himself almost biblically when he gives the reason for war: “Peace in the Middle East and, truly, on earth!” As in the Iraq War, the US government is painting the specter of weapons of mass destruction on the wall. The mullahs’ gang could allegedly have used nuclear weapons in just a few days.
Just an “intervention,” not a war?
I’d rather follow more serious commentators from “20 Minutes” to “Cicero”, but I’m also taken aback by their analyses, when they talk trivially about an “intervention”, as if it were a parliamentary move, not a war. Some even avoid the word “bombing,” preferring instead the whimsical word “air strikes,” even though it is more reminiscent of waving arm movements when taking down a mosquito.
Only a few prominent war declarers pause to self-critically reflect on their speech, just as two TV greats who are certainly not beyond reproach have done: ZDF journalist Markus Lanz and popular philosopher Richard David Precht discussed exactly these linguistic trivializations, obfuscations and slanders in one of their most recent podcasts. An “advertising language” (Precht) was developed to convince us of the necessity of war.
Discussions about the war in Iran and Lebanon are often sterile and dull in the media and political public. It seems as if the mass presence of violence in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza has exhausted the empathy of some professional war experts. Perhaps that is why they are only interested in the big political and strategic whole when they are emotionally cold. In comparison, I almost like the TikTok films that uninhibitedly press the tear ducts, because although they often report tendentiously, they at least don’t forget the civilian victims. (aargauerzeitung.ch)