Almost five years ago I watched and reviewed Threads, a “pseudo-documentary” film about World War III starting in Iran. In hindsight, it’s amazingly close to how the Iran situation is actually unfolding, but the serious flaws I pointed out in 2021 still apply.
First, let’s see what they got right. The US attempted a coup, which succeeded in the movie and failed in real life. In the movie, the Russians invade and occupy Iran, while in real life the US and Israel bomb Iran and attempt to incite ethnic uprisings. The portrayal of British domestic oppression are very on the nose. The patriots are giddy with excitement for war while protestors are simply thrown in prison. That’s roughly what’s happening in real life. But it is actually an understatement of real life. In real life the legacy news outlets report crushing, absolute destruction of the Iranian military and “imminent” victory with the same three or four grainy clips of exploding vehicles playing on loop. The behavior of western media regarding Iran is actually near-identical to what they claimed Russian media is like.
Perhaps the most amazing characteristic of the Iran war is how unapologetically fascist the patriots and center-left liberals are, and don’t even hide it. According to them, if you’re against the war you should be censored, if not outright executed on the spot for treason. And like with allegations of atrocities against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, the pro-war patriots hedge their positions, literally something like “The US wouldn’t deliberately bomb Iranian school girls but if they did that would be a good thing and they deserve it.”
Real life warhawks today are actually more pathetic than what they were in 1984, who back then were typical stodgy conservatives. But the “conservatives” of 2026 are pоrn-brained gooners, and their “values” are represented by Iranian expat girls shaking their аssеs on Tik-Tok to celebrate schools and hospitals exploding in their homeland. If a 1950s Soviet propagandist portrayed 21st century western people as pathetic horny losers who get all their beliefs from AI-generated half-naked Israeli women on a split screen viral video with Sonic the hedgehog running an obstacle course on the other side, he would be sent to the sanatorium for mental evaluation.
Actually come to think of it, this future isn’t too absurd from a sci-fi perspective. The 1974 Soviet movie Teens in the Universe shows a group of Soviet kids meeting an alien race who invented an AI that took over and put them inside pleasure rooms, where they stopped reproducing and died from apathy. That’s not too far off from what’s happening now. Today’s patriots are far more grotesque than the fictional warhawks in Threads, who are just typical nationalists doing typical wartime censorship, and are not pathologically hоrnу and bloodthirsty.
Now for the things I claimed the movie got wrong. In my 2021 article I said this:
At first glance, the world events in Threads seem plausible and are further reinforced by fictional exposition interlaced with real-world news footage. But they’re actually absurd, and this is one of the factors that make Threads insidious propaganda and not an honest warning against Mutually Assured Destruction. BBC wanted their viewers to believe: in a nuclear war, the Soviets would be the aggressors. I could argue for or against that narrative, but it doesn’t actually matter because an anti-war message loses all value when the “other” side is portrayed as the aggressor. We can’t control other people’s actions, only our own. So if our declared “adversaries” are going to start a war no matter what we do, what is even the point of an anti-war message? Threads actually teaches the opposite lesson it purports to. If war is inevitable, then of course the West should strike first, and harder. That’s the real geopolitical lesson of the movie.
Decades of propaganda saying over and over again “both sides bad but the other side is worse” seems to have been successful. Real-life protests against the USA’s actions against Iran are nearly non-existent, and very polite. Almost none of Europe’s Weimar lefties are willing to say that Iranians are the good guys in this war.
Unfortunately, Threads was more correct about Europe’s actions than I was:
If the events in Threads were to happen in real life, why would people in the UK consent to their own extinction? If America and Russia want to destroy each other, why not just let them? Why couldn’t the UK and the rest of Europe simply declare neutrality and refuse to take a side? The USA would complain but have no realistic way to force Europeans to help, and surely, the Russians would appreciate having fewer targets to allocate missiles to. I would think the British Broadcasting Corporation would want to instill national pride and patriotism, not portray their own country and people as pathetic pawns of a foreign empire. But that’s the fate the UK and EU have chosen for themselves. I have no explanation for this.
Europe’s leaders are unanimously siding with the US and Israel and condemning Iran as the aggressors, even though they’re literally defending themselves. Five years later, I still have no explanation for why they so gleefully betray their own nations and supposed values for a foreign empire.
My final point in the article was the most concerning one:
This theme leads into an equally concerning problem with Threads, and it is a problem shared by virtually every film in this genre. We never see the best of humanity, but rather, the worst. The British people are depicted as weak, stupid, and cowardly. They’re easily dominated by their government before, during, and after the apocalypse. They have no sense of community whatsoever, or even basic survival skills. In one scene, some of the characters eat raw meat, because apparently they’re too stupid to know that you’re supposed to cook it first. Throughout the film, British soldiers bully and casually murder people for virtually no reason at all. It’s bizarre to me, and also concerning. Fiction does influence reality, and we develop our attitudes in large part due to how we see people, role models, behave in films and literature. When the next disaster hits, regardless of whether it’s natural or manmade, I shudder to think what will happen. Will people in the West band together and use basic common sense to help each other survive, or will our societies immediately collapse into self-destruction? Hopefully that question will never need to be answered, but probability is not in our favor.
So we can see that western propaganda is a double-edged sword. “Enemy” nations, like Russians or Iranians, are depicted as subhuman vermin who should be gleefully exterminated down to the last man, woman and child. Repeatedly and endlessly portraying the British people as pathetic cowards who are easily dominated by a few soldiers with guns is not a less insidious message. It’s clearly meant to demoralize them and atomize their communities. If British people believed their community had value, then they might want to defend it. They wouldn’t accept becoming minorities in their own cities, dominated by foreign-born mayors and parliament members who openly profess to hating the English identity and wanting to destroy it. And also, from a foreign policy perspective, people who treasure their community and nation would be more afraid of war, because war can seriously harm your nation even if you win. The British, and basically every other western nation, have been brainwashed to despise themselves, so are indifferent to warmongering politicians.
While European people are driven to extinction by mass immigration, the “new” Europeans are a near-endless supply of disposable soldiers who can be sent to the slaughter in exchange for citizenship in the “garden of Europe.” I am not convinced a random Syrian guy who came to Europe to smoke dope and collect welfare wants to die in the trenches for the glory of western civilization, but the elites seem to think that he will.
Five years later, I am dismayed by the cavalier disregard for nuclear war that Threads and other movies instilled in western populations. We have not one but two nuclear powers attacking Iran, and if they lose, there’s a very high chance that they will use nukes. And after the first nuke is fired, even against a non-nuclear power, that pushes the world to the edge of MAD.
Watch Threads on Amazon Prime
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made through product links and web banners. Click here to navigate to the Amazon storefront.
Ian Kummer
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
Very well articulated.Interesting to me since it pertains to media I personally don't consume.