The Power That Remains, the Power That Passes

Aydin Areta

Power is never a short-term concept or something to be consumed. Power is judged over the long term. The only force that regards power as a consumable commodity with which to buy time and prevail is an invading and occupying force: a destructive power for which neither human life nor the destiny of the land possesses value.

If Prince Reza Pahlavi today is even able to stand in the position of opposition to the ruling power and speak to the people of Iran, it is because his father did not choose to fight his own people to the last person. Many say he refrained from doing so out of fear. But the truth is that it is impossible for a political leader who possesses even the slightest love for their people and country to act otherwise when, rightly or wrongly, the public demand is for an end to their political power.

Even his final words indicated his awareness of this. In both *Answer to History* and *The Shah’s Story*, written after leaving Iran, he emphasised that he did not want his name to become associated with killing the people in order to preserve power and believed that time and history would judge his decisions. Perhaps the most forceful expression of this conviction in *The Shah’s Story* is rendered here as follows:

“They say that martial law would have cost my country less than the bloody chaos now unfolding there. I can only reply that prophecy after the event is easy, and that a king cannot preserve his throne by shedding the blood of his compatriots. A dictator can do so, because he acts in the name of an ideology he believes must triumph at any cost. But a king is not a dictator. Between him and his people there is a covenant that he cannot break.”

This choice is not only an ethical choice but also the alphabet of a politics that understands history as the arena in which power is judged—a judgement that can make possible return several generations later through the re-evaluation of collective memory. A government that kills its own people without hesitation should know that history will leave no place for its return or for the return of what it represents. For generations, the people’s collective memory will remember what happened.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the last powerful pope to rule the territories of present-day Italy—the Papal States—used the assistance of foreign powers such as France and Austria to carry out bloody repression against students and citizens demanding the unification of their country within a republican structure. It is said that the scale of repression and killing was terrifying even by the standards of nineteenth-century society. Despite this, the patriotic movement ultimately prevailed. After Pope Pius IX fled and the Church became confined to the Vatican, a statue was erected to Garibaldi, national hero of the Italian people, standing with sword in hand upon a hill in Rome facing the Vatican—as though declaring to every future pope: you will never return from behind those walls to the world of politics. The historical memory of those people would never forget what had occurred.

A country Christian to the depths of its soul never again saw in its future a place for the pope’s return to politics. Perhaps the popes of subsequent generations judged Pius IX, who destroyed the Church’s political power, even more harshly than the people themselves: a pope who, in order to preserve his own power—and perhaps believing it his duty to preserve the Church’s power—separated the centre of the Church permanently from the land of the people and reduced it to a non-political institution.

No power is permanent. But ethical and deeply rooted forms of power bargain not with their own era but with history. They understand that relinquishing power can preserve the possibility of return in another generation and another time. Those who treat the people and territory they govern as occupying forces treat an occupied land will never see such a return, even among people who share their religion from the depths of their being.