I wrote this eight months ago, and today I believe in it more clearly than ever—not with hope, but with faith. We will travel the difficult road to freedom, with all its historical suffering:

“There have been many dark moments in my life when my faith in people and in humanity has been severely tested, but I have never been able, and am still unable, to surrender myself to despair and bitterness. For me, that road is defeat and death...”

Although I believe these words with my whole being, they are not mine. They belong to a great man who wrote of the “long road to freedom.”

We are a people who know the difficulty of the road to freedom. Every event has transformed our historical mind and our methods of struggle for freedom, and today, more than at any other time in our history, we are close to making our historical unconscious conscious. I know that hope no longer finds many buyers, but I am not speaking of hope. I am speaking of a firm faith.

Mandela believed that “there is nothing like returning to a place that has not changed and discovering that you yourself have fundamentally changed,” and that “where we rise depends entirely on where we are sitting on the ground.” When I look at Iran’s younger generation, I feel with my whole being that at last we will rise from this very place where we are sitting. We will rise for life.

From the legendary invasion of Zahhak and the thousand-year occupation of Airyanem Vaejah, to the destructive Assyrian invasion said here to have brought about the destruction of the Iranian civilisation of Elam; from the occupation of Iran by Alexander and then by Arabs, to the devastating Mongol invasion and what came after it—we have repeatedly endured destructive conditions, each storm of which might have destroyed a civilisation forever, just as the cultural civilisations of Egypt and the Eastern Roman world disappeared. Yet we stood against the Assyrians, Macedonians, Romans, Mongols, and Arabs until we witnessed their ending and decline.

It is said that for a hundred years after the Mongol invasion not even a single verse of poetry was composed across the Iranian lands, as though the dust of death had been scattered over all of Iran. Yet that period, too, passed. In the end, this people transformed their Mongol rulers to such an extent that only a few generations later those rulers were writing poetry in Persian and disappearing into the great river of Iranian culture.

Never forget that, in the end, it is we, the people, who slowly change those who hold power and draw them along with the current of life, even if they resist with all their strength what must change. Very soon, they will feel this inevitable transformation within the heart of their own families and in the new generation.”

Aydin Areta
Esfand 1400