Lego Blocks of Truth: Iran Builds Reality While the West Builds Lies

From Iraq’s WMDs to LEGO war videos, Iran’s new animations don’t rewrite history – they fight to take it back.

Ninety-four years ago, Denmark’s Ole Kirk Christiansen founded a small company that almost every child globally - or near enough - has spent hours, days and weeks playing with.

LEGO has not only outlasted most humans - it’s an institution that has given children and adults the ability to build, imagine and create entire worlds from nothing more than a handful of pieces.

Finding a child who hasn’t experienced hours of wonder LEGO has brought, and the creative world its building blocks have allowed children to explore over nearly a century, is almost impossible.

When Christiansen first founded his toy company in 1932, he began making small wooden toys. Seventeen years later, in 1949, the first iteration of the now-famous plastic interlocking bricks was produced, with the modern brick design patented nine years later in 1958.

LEGO, like time, has evolved. It’s transformed into something beyond simple play - where creativity has expanded into storytelling, film and global cultural influence.

Hollywood’s 2014 production “The Lego Movie” saw comedic superstar Will Ferrell play President Business / Lord Business, the film’s main villain. The movie follows Emmet, an ordinary and rule-following LEGO construction worker who is mistakenly identified as the “Special” - destined to stop the tyrannical Lord Business from gluing the LEGO universe into rigid perfection.

Pulled into a chaotic adventure with a group of Master Builders, Emmet learns that creativity, individuality and breaking the rules are what truly give the world meaning. In a final twist, Ferrell appears in live action as “The Man Upstairs,” tying the LEGO world to the real world.

LEGO has now become more than just building blocks for creative play or for Hollywood to concoct fictitious stories about a construction worker tasked with stopping a tyrannical business lord – LEGO’s now become a tool to recite history and tell and retell history without the Hollywood spin and the West’s lies of dressing violence up as “security” and “freedom.”

The first casualty of war is always the truth, and Iran, if anyone hasn’t noticed, has used the creativity of storytelling and LEGO to convey to the world and challengeTrump’s boasts and threats about how the US has “obliterated” Iran or left it with “nothing left.” Through LEGO, Iran and its supporters are answering back - brick by brick, lie by lie.

Since the 28 February US–Israeli launched attack that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei and 175 innocent school girls in a double tap war crime to launch an illegal the Middle East is now embroiled in, Iranian state-linked producers and meme-makers have masterfully with brilliance flooded social media with a wave of LEGO-style animations.

One widely reported video from the state-run Revayat‑e Fath institute shows toy versions of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu standing alongside the devil, pressing a red button to launch attacks on Iran, followed by a sequence of Iranian missile strikes on US and Israeli targets across the region.

Another hip‑hop style LEGO animation, shared by broadcasters in Australia, mocks US Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth and throws his own “warrior” image back in his face, turning the Pentagon’s macho branding into a punchline.

Hegseth, America’s self‑proclaimed warrior, superhero and tough guy, is the target of that latest Iranian LEGO movie, and it sums up the Secretary of War’s evil traits and inhumanity along with his decisions. The aesthetic is playful; the message is a blunt hard-hitting indictment.

The decision to put these men in plastic, to miniaturise them, isn’t accidental. It visually cuts them down to size in a way no conventional press conference ever could.

It isn’t Iran “rewriting” history, but it’s Iran is correcting a history that Washington and its allies have twisted beyond recognition for decades.

Washington’s record is a self-damning indictment it can’t escape. The world was dragged into the Iraq war on the back of weapons-of-mass-destruction claims that turned out to be false, built on cherry‑picked intelligence and insinuations that officials already knew were lies. Years later, investigations and former weapons inspectors detailed how Washington pushed a narrative of WMDs long after evidence contradicted it.

On Iran itself, US allegations about nuclear weapons ambitions have repeatedly been challenged and undercut by international inspectors and independent analysts, even as sanctions, sabotage and threats continued.

It’s not hard to see why many outside the West view US and Israeli “security narratives” not just with suspicion and contempt. When those same capitals now claim clean hands, surgical strikes and moral clarity in a war that has killed thousands, critics hear the echo of those earlier lies - and see the same political class asking the world to trust them again.

Into that moral and factual vacuum march the LEGO videos.
Iran through LEGO movies is peeling away the layers of decades of distortion, demonisation and propaganda used to brainwash the West. Iran is, setting the record straight. The toy figures, the bright colours, the meme‑ready edits - they are sugar coating for an explicitly political charge sheet: that the story told in US and Israeli press conferences isn’t the whole story, and not even close.

One viral LEGO-style clip, widely covered by global media, shows a panicked Trump and Netanyahu hiding under a table as Iranian missiles strike airports, embassies and bases across the region, after an earlier scene where they casually sign off on a strike that hits a girls’ school in Minab.

The symbolism is blunt. Iran is portrayed not as the cartoon villain of Western imagination, but as a wounded country forced to respond to repeated aggression - and as the side that ultimately outsmarts and outlasts its opponents.

This isn’t Iran fantasising but retelling that restores the parts the US prefers to erase: the coups, the sanctions, the cyberattacks, the assassinations and proxy wars in which Iran has been treated as a punching bag and then condemned as “destabilising” for daring to swing back. If you omit all that context, of course Iran looks like the irrational aggressor. Put it back in, and the picture changes.

The West’s rush to label these LEGO clips “propaganda,” and of course they’re propaganda in the literal sense: political communication aimed at persuasion. What almost never gets said in the same breath is that Washington, Tel Aviv and their media ecosystems have been running far more powerful propaganda machines for generations - under the more respectable branding of “public diplomacy,” “strategic communications” and “defence briefings.”

When the White House posts a video montage mixing real strikes on Iran with footage from the video game Call of Duty, set to patriotic music and shared as entertainment, that too is propaganda. When spokespersons insist that civilian deaths are “regrettable” but unavoidable, while offering little transparency and less accountability, that is narrative laundering. And when years later we discover key claims were exaggerated, unproven or flatly untrue - as with Iraq’s WMD - the consequences are measured in bodies, not bricks.

That’s why the LEGO front in the current war matters. It’s not about toys, who’s allowed to tell the story of the war - and who gets dismissed as childish, irrational or illegitimate when they try.

Iran’s LEGO videos since 28 February do three things at once. They replay the true sequence of events: a deadly US–Israeli strike, a country under attack, retaliation portrayed as defence rather than unprovoked aggression. They mock US and Israeli leaders, puncturing the aura of invincibility and exceptionalism that official communications constantly reinforce. And correct, in the eyes of their creators and their audience, a history in which Iranian suffering and resilience are erased while Western leaders lecture the world about “rules” they break with impunity.

None of this means Iran’s own messaging is neutral or disinterested. It isn’t, and no state’s messaging is. These animations are crafted, funded or amplified by actors aligned with the Iranian state, with clear strategic goals in mind. They glamorise military power, aestheticise violence and, simplify complex realities into good‑versus‑evil storyboards. But to pretend only Iran does this, while the US and Israel merely “inform,” is an insult to basic intelligence.

The US and Israel have long enjoyed near‑total dominance over global information flows, the sudden appearance of a rival narrative - one that uses the West’s own cultural icons and internet humour against it to set the record straight - is a shock to the system. The outrage some Western outlets denounce “Iranian propaganda” while glossing over their own governments’ record of deception underlines the hypocrisy Iran’s LEGO campaign is calling out.

The battle isn’t just over territory, casualties or ceasefires. It’s over memory, who gets to define what happened on 28 February and after, and whose version will be taught, shared and believed in 10 or 20-years’ time.

Iran isn’t rewriting future history so much as trying to stop it being written, once again, solely by its enemies. The LEGO animations are less a novelty than a warning shot: a sign the era of uncontested Western narrative supremacy is over, and the US and Israel can no longer assume the world will accept their storyline as the default.

Iran’s isn’t only winning the war it’s winning the PR war too.

The bricks may be plastic. The message is not.