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 treats power as a consumable commodity with which to buy time and prevail is an invading and occupying force: a destructive force for which neither human lives nor the destiny of the land possesses any value.

If Prince Reza Pahlavi is even able today to stand in opposition to the ruling power and speak to the people of Iran, it is because his father did not choose confrontation with his 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 land to act otherwise if, rightly or wrongly, the public will is for an end to their political power.

Even his final remarks indicated an awareness of this. In both *Answer to History* and *The Shah’s Story*, written after he left Iran, he emphasised that he did not want his name to become bound to the killing of the people for the preservation of power and believed that time and history would judge his decisions. Perhaps the strongest expression of this belief appears in *The Shah’s Story*, where he wrote:

“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 merely an ethical choice; it is the alphabet of a politics that understands history as the arena in which power is judged. Such judgement can make possible a return after several generations and a reassessment within collective memory.

A government that kills its own people without reflection should know that history will leave no place for the return of that government or of what it represents. History will show it and everything it represents only one door: the exit. The collective memory of the people will remember what happened for generations, especially in an age in which oral history has been transformed into documented visual history.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the last powerful pope to rule the territories of present-day Italy, known as the Papal States, used the help of foreign powers such as France and Austria to carry out bloody repression against students and citizens who demanded the unification of their country within a republican structure. It is said that the degree of repression and killing was terrifying even by the standards of nineteenth-century society. Despite all this, that patriotic movement prevailed. After Pope Pius IX fled and the Church became confined within the Vatican, a statue was erected to Garibaldi, the national hero of the Italian people, standing with sword in hand on a hill in Rome facing the Vatican.

The statue stands like a declaration addressed to every pope who might be elected in the future: you will never return from behind the enclosing walls of the Vatican into the world of politics. And this occurred in a land whose people were deeply Christian and Catholic. The historical memory of the Italian people never forgot what happened.

Even 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 later generations judged Pius IX, who destroyed the Church’s political power, even more harshly than the people did: a pope who, in order to preserve his own power and perhaps believing it his duty to preserve the power of the Church, 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 make possible their return in another generation and another time. Those who treat the people and territory they govern as occupying forces treat occupied land will never see such a return, even among people who share their faith from the depths of their being.