Ali Khamenei’s final act of revenge against the people lay in the timing and manner of his death. For decades, the anonymous[1] and known forces under his command systematically crushed every progressive possibility within society; every trade union, every political collective, every social movement capable of organizing or defending the public. They shut down publications, fired and imprisoned labor activists, gagged and shackled them. They assassinated, strangled, and tore open chests. They poured vast security budgets into suppressing the “left,” clearing the path for an Islamic neoliberal capitalism built over the crushed bones of the working class.
They smashed women’s organizations. They destroyed the spontaneous and autonomous institutions formed among oppressed nations with the most security-heavy response possible. And in the face of the repeated eruptions of rage from the dispossessed and marginalized from December 2017 uprising onward, they did not retreat a single step from their most oppressive “economic reforms.” On the contrary, one administration after another deepened and accelerated these policies, until hunger and malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, education, and housing ceased to be exceptions and became a widespread social epidemic. There were massacres in the streets by bullets, and at the same time a quieter massacre of those who had already seen every trench they possessed, indeed, anything resembling a trench, demolished by the executioners operating under the command of the Supreme Leader.
And now he, who supervised, ordered, and advanced the full implementation of all these policies of total repression on the one hand, and the simultaneous intensification of every form of oppression on the other, has suddenly vanished and been buried under heaps of earth. He disappeared at the very moment when the possibilities of collective resistance had been completely destroyed. At the moment when despair and helplessness ruled. At the moment when the most likely alternatives to him, or to the regime he represented, would be no less corrupt than he was; if not worse. He vanished in an era when the precondition for the survival of his system-internal successors would be accommodation with the dominant global order. And not just any global order, but the global order of the age of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. He vanished at a time when the hegemonic force within his opposition is a fascist current that has already declared it will exact brutal revenge on everyone, especially on the oppressed classes.
It is understandable that many feel joy at Khamenei’s disappearance. It is even possible to sympathize with that joy; at least so long as it is not artificial or performative.
But the anxiety and dread about the days ahead, about the prospect of alternatives each worse than the last, is a far more terrifying piece of news, one that those who laugh, without a racing heart or sleepless nightmares, have not yet truly heard.
We will have more to say about this future.
[1] “Anonymous Soldiers of Imam Zaman” is a term used by officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran to refer to active members and agents of the Ministry of Intelligence.
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