The Death of Khamenei and the End of an Era (That was fast. What did they know?) The Atlantic

[usonian]

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His life’s work was to preserve a revolution that is heading for the ash heap.
By Karim Sadjadpour

“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.” For nearly four decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over exactly that. He did not build the Islamic Republic of Iran. He inherited it from its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led a revolution that deposed a U.S.-aligned monarchy and replaced it with an Islamist theocracy whose three ideological pillars were “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and the mandatory covering of women—the hijab, he said, was “the flag of the revolution.”

Khomeini died in 1989, and his successor’s life’s work was to keep that revolution alive long after the society it governed had moved on. In this, Khamenei was remarkably, ruthlessly successful. But the worldview he imposed was never truly his own. He was the spokesman for a ghost.

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Khamenei treated the relationship between the state and its citizens not as a social contract but as a predatory lease—nonnegotiable, imposed by the landlord, long since expired. The regime micromanaged the personal lives of more than 90 million people, dictating whom they were allowed to love, what they drank, what women wore on their heads. It preached austerity while the Guards operated as a tax-exempt conglomerate. It built a digital wall around the country, blocking global platforms while regime officials posted propaganda on X. It charged protesters with “waging war against God” and maintained the world’s highest execution rate per capita. When even that was not enough to quell dissent—last month, as protests again swept the country—Khamenei ordered what may prove to be one of the deadliest episodes of state violence in modern history.

Khamenei confronted the paradox that every revolutionary caretaker must face: The revolution he preserved was designed for a world that no longer exists. George Kennan once wrote of the Soviet Union, “No mystical, Messianic movement can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.” Khamenei staved off that adjustment for nearly four decades through force of will, brutality, and the conviction that bending would mean breaking.

This sounds all too familiar ...