The aim of violence is always to turn the human being into an object, and its first act is to ask you to doubt your own eyes: to become unable even to trust your profound feeling of grief; to feel that perhaps circumstances are more complicated than your human response; and finally to accept that silence is order. When you reach this point, violence has completed your objectification.

What removes nations from the stage of history is not the violence they have experienced. It is what violence makes possible.

The final destruction of a nation always arrives after violence, through the objectification of each of its human beings. What inevitably follows is the destruction of shared memory and a nation’s history, and eventually even the denial of its historical existence.

Do you know why we Iranians are still alive as a historical nation? Do you know why we are so resilient that, despite all the violence invaders have inflicted on the people of this land across millennia, the blood of an ancient culture and civilisation still flows through the veins of this country?

Iran remains alive because, through massacre after massacre, book-burning after book-burning, and destruction after destruction, those among our mothers and fathers who survived each catastrophe regarded their survival not as good fortune but as a great responsibility.

Throughout history our people have resisted, heroically, not only violence but objectification. Nations paralysed by violence handed their language, history and entire identity to the invaders and to the narrative those invaders constructed of their history.

When the wounded body of truth is so injured in our country, bearing clear witness to catastrophe is not a political act but an ethical duty, even if it changes nothing within the visible horizon of possibility and even if no one hears our voice.

Hope is not the treatment for our suffering. Our suffering in an age of darkness comes from hope itself. An age of darkness does not ask us for hope. It asks us for fidelity to truth and refusal of lies. It asks us to preserve collective memory and remembrance and to steady our inner selves with truth even when externally we have been shattered. It asks us to speak truth in a clear and precise voice.

A voice that violence cannot silence belongs to a human being who refuses to become an object.

The narration of truth is the last stronghold whose defence falls to those who remain after catastrophe, bearing the heavy responsibility of continuing this path.

Aydin Areta