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Operation Countenance: The 1941 Invasion of Iran and the Clash of Propaganda Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mervyn Roberts
Mervyn Roberts*
Affiliation:
Central Texas College, Killeen, TX, USA
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Abstract

The June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union unleashed a series of events that culminated in the Allied invasion of Iran two months later. In their propaganda, Britain and the Soviet Union publicly justified that invasion as a means of preventing Iran from falling into the German orbit. However, a review of radio broadcasts of the time shows the theme of a German menace was not widely believed in the region. Using BBC Summary of World Broadcasts transcripts from the period, this paper argues that the decision to base their propaganda on a lie also negatively affected relations in the postwar world. In that sense the decision to justify the invasion on the basis of German presence was a propaganda failure for the allies.

Keywords

PropagandaGreat BritainSoviet UnionSummary of World BroadcastsIranOperation Countenance, 1941BBC
Type
Regular Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3-4: Special Section: Commercial, Confessional, and Military Encounters in Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands in the Early Modern Period , July 2019 , pp. 589 - 610
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2019

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