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Iran’s self-aggrandising ‘fake’ fighter plane and a history of doctored photos

This picture of an allegedly unflyable plane shows Iran playing a dangerous game of trying to awe people with military might



Guardian, 13 Feb 2013 – There is an unreal history of the modern world in which inconvenient facts become idyllic fantasies, a history made on desktops and screens – an archive of nonsense. This is the counter-factual realm of the doctored photograph. A picture of Iran’s new stealth fighter apparently flying over a snow-covered mountain has been widely identified as a fake in this same tradition. The plane, say aviation commentators, looks like it cannot fly at all, but in this picture it soars gloriously aloft – thanks to Photoshop.
 



Benito Mussolini: the groom holding the horse’s reins was airbrushed out from this image
Long before Photoshop, in an age when it required delicate physical intervention with a scalpel to photomontage a new reality, dictators routinely vanished people. Stalin’s demonised “other”, Leon Trotsky, was removed from an inconveniently prominent position in a photo of Lenin: the same photographic death befell many lesser commissars. Even Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the Third Reich, was once removed from a photograph of Hitler. This exclusion of a valued ally is more baffling than a picture of Mussolini posing on horseback from which a man holding the horse was removed – leaving just the noble equestrian Duce.
Such manipulations did not end in the 1940s. In 1976 the so-called “gang of four” were notoriously removed from a photograph of Chinese Communist party leaders after these high-ranking officials were suddenly arrested following the death of Mao Zedong. Oddly, a recent news story involving doctored photographs in China concerned a gang who were convicted of blackmailing officials with Photoshopped pictures of illicit sex: was this conspiracy real or a product of the same imaginations that have used photographic fictions to impose a party vision on history? Was it a fabricated fabrication?
Iran too is a hall of mirrors where photographic fact and fiction are hard to tell apart. In 2008 newspapers around the world carried a front-page picture of four Iranian missiles blasting into the sky on columns of fire: this image of a successful missile test sent out a clear message about the Islamic state’s growing military capability. But within hours, the same papers, including the New York Times, were retracting the picture and declaring it a fake. In what seemed to be the raw version of the same image, one of the four missiles had failed to launch – so it was neatly replaced with a Photoshopped blast-off. An image of semi-competence became a picture of power. Only, who altered it? The reason the picture was unveiled as a fake was that Sepah News, the news agency of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, later released an honest version of the same picture. What was going on? Might the added missile actually have served the interests of governments outside Iran who want this state to be seen as scary?
In the case of the allegedly unflyable plane, a far more extravagant level of fantasy seems to be fuelling Iran’s military dreams. The new jet has been widely mocked by aviation experts outside Iran as a plastic model rather than a real jet. Observers say a jet engine would rapidly melt it while the cockpit is too small for a pilot to even get inside. It is a toy plane, conclude the laughter-convulsed aeronautic authorities, “designed to convince people in more rural areas that the country is technologically advanced”. It was first unveiled as President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt prepared to visit Iran, so perhaps it was also intended to impress this foreign leader. Morsi has occasionally come across as less than brilliant in interviews, rambling about Planet of the Apes, so maybe they thought he was easy to intimidate with a fake jet.
The theory that Iran is trying to awe its own people, rather than foreign powers, with the stealth jet gains credence when you consider where the Photoshopped image of the fighter in flight first appeared. It surfaced on Khouz News, a website dedicated to news about the Khusestan province in southwestern Iran.
It therefore looks as if Iran’s Photoshopping exploit is designed to deceive its own people, rather than the US or Israel. This is a dangerous game. Saddam Hussein similarly talked up his arsenal to scare external and internal foes, and look where it got him.

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