When the spin is the win
Satellite imagery showed six gaping wounds at Fordo, a blackened sprawl at Isfahan, and an 18-foot hole at Natanz. Trump repeatedly asserted that Iran's nuclear programme was 'completely obliterated', a claim the Israel Atomic Energy Commission backed. Yet, making defiant noises from his bunker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed a 'severe slap' to America and a 'victory' over the 'Zionist regime'. There were photographs of Iranians dancing on the streets in celebration, having chosen to believe in their victory. As a great author said, patriotism is the opium of the people.
Closer home, one thought of Operation Sindoor. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said it was an unqualified success. Pakistan's General Asim Munir, in return, claimed his army had shot down Indian planes. We chose officially not to believe him. Yet, the latest on this front is an admission of downed planes by an Indian defence attaché, a naval officer, at a seminar in Jakarta on June 10. But we still don't know how many planes India might have lost, or how many died or were wounded during the operation.
We don't even seem to know for certain if the families of the Pahalgam victims have been compensated for their plight. In short, we are swallowed by the official bubble.
In the absence of clear evidence, then, you are free to live in the truth bubble of your choice. Or so one thought until Trump bombed Iran, marking the return of the unipolar world, where the American version of the truth increasingly seems to be the only one, gaining ascendance over other national narratives.
The indeterminacy of reality is a haze enveloping the world. Never mind if we are living in one of the most surveilled times in history: almost nothing goes unrecorded. Even what we search for on the internet comes back to haunt us as advertisements. We walk naked in the crowd, as it were.
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