These people deserve better. Our children have the right and deserve to live in a better world. These people do not deserve poverty in one of the richest lands in the world; they do not deserve governance by ignorance and cultural impoverishment in one of civilisation’s oldest cradles; they do not deserve to lead the world in executions, nor the ethical decline and corruption that drip like darkness from above into society; they do not deserve water shortages, electricity shortages and the painful destruction of their environment; nor do they deserve separation from one another and life in ethnic enclaves divided by walls of ethnicity.

What these people deserve is a united, powerful, civilised and prosperous Iran. Anyone who tells you that this is not your right and that what is happening to these people is what they deserve is lying. Narratives matter. Narratives shape people, direct history, and rewrite the future.

The narrative in which I believe is the narrative of Iran rising like a phoenix from its own ashes: a narrative of unity, progress, civilisation and culture. All the suffering, injustice and cultural degradation that have befallen us and continue to befall us are a bitter sneer at everything we could be and are not today. The time has come for the history of Iran, after centuries, to rise from the ashes of its silence. Only one distance separates us from this dream: respect for ourselves and refusal to accept what we do not deserve.

The time has come for the future to separate itself from the past, and I believe that we and our children are ready for it.
The power of being together and of unity is always beautiful. What the enemies of the people and of Iran have always targeted are the hearts of these people beating in the same colour, and everything that connects them—from national identity to their shared suffering. They fear this shared colour because they know there is no way to break the interlocked fingers of this united and steadfast fist.

In a world where identities have become multilayered and diverse, the stronghold of our shared narrative is the first field of endurance and struggle. This shared narrative has only one name: Iran.

They attempt to sever our inner bonds, unaware that these threads are woven from hope and history—a fabric that has endured for centuries and remains intact. And what we have experienced in recent years is not merely a revolution, nor only a continuing movement. What is being realised is larger than these names: a historical awakening, the moment in which a nation remembers itself, draws its own name out from beneath the dust, and declares to the world that it will entrust its destiny to no hand but its own.

Aydin Areta