Our true legacy to other human beings is not what remains of us for them, but the change we leave from ourselves within their being.

The legacy of the Nikas, Sepidehs, Niloufars, Bahaarehs, and thousands of courageous young people of the Iranian lands will be courage and steadfastness for freedom, and it is through this legacy that future generations will remember them.

We are witnessing, during our own lifetimes, the formation of a history that will enter our collective memory and travel into the future. Only fifty years from now, other people will be walking upon this soil, and most of us will stand level with those who lived a thousand years ago.

When oppressor and oppressed, tyrant and justice-seeker alike lie beneath the earth, some of the dead among us will be the most living people in history. What a naïve fantasy it is to imagine that breaking gravestones will erase the memory of the Nikas from the people. Even if writing their names is forbidden, within a few generations Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh will be reborn to retell the story of this land and its heroes.

What ultimately triumphs over history is not hard power but narrative. Whoever commits injustice against their own people, even if they surpass Genghis and Timur in cruelty, will still not possess the narrative of history. There is no path to victory in a nation’s historical memory except respect for its people, truthfulness, and justice.

People write their own narrative, and in today’s world narratives no longer disappear easily into history’s house of forgetting. They remain alive and will be retold among people until victory. They will become text and poem and story and image and culture, and will continue forward until they overcome history.

Let us never stop telling the story. Let us never stop creating. Words are not merely words; they are a real power for changing the world.

Wherever we are, and with whatever ability we possess, let us surround despotism:
with art, poetry, music, literature, steadfastness, passion, genius, and invention;
and with the power and courage to tell our own story and speak the truth of what has happened and what is happening.

Speaking the truth is the beginning of changing ourselves and the world.

Aydin Areta