Description
Created in accordance with the Supreme Leader’s wish of an attractive and memorable theme, the song ‘Salam Farmandeh’ (سلام فرمانده - ‘Hello Commander’) was quickly spread through the Islamic Republic’s media channels, public events, and performances in schools. While aiming at increasing the popularity of the Islamic Republic on a broad scale, the song is explicitly targeting the country’s youth. With the education of the next generation being one of the fundamental anxieties of the Islamic Republic, the paper argues that ‘Salam Farmandeh’ is a means of symbolic politics that aims at building and strengthening a common national identity in line with the Islamic Republic’s ideological values among the country’s youth while at the same time aiming at creating an attractive image of the Islamic Republic among the broader population.
Approached from a constructivist perspective, the paper studies the song’s audio and visual discourse and demonstrates how the song is used to create emotional appeal to reach the hearts of the Iranian youth and how it acts as an instrument of identity building and mobilization. The paper relies on theories and concepts of rhetoric and visual rhetoric, focusing particularly on the concept of pathos or emotional engagement.
