Twenty years have passed since the death of a man exiled from the soil that bore him, an Iranian who longed not for riches or rank, but simply for the dignity of his nation restored. He died far from the valleys and deserts that shaped his childhood, carrying in his lungs the dust of estrangement and in his mind the fire of an unfulfilled vision. His passing was not the quiet fading of a private citizen; it was the silencing of a voice that refused to yield to tyranny, the extinguishing of a figure who bore witness to the degradations wrought by foreign appetites and the treacheries of domestic rule.

 

To recall him today is to wrest memory from the state’s machinery of forgetting, that vast apparatus of censorship, distortion, and state-sanctioned erasure. His life cuts through the propaganda that cloaks repression in the rhetoric of security, sovereignty, and modernisation. His exile exposes the violence through which authority criminalises dissent, casting patriots as traitors, critics as conspirators, and visionaries as heretics. He belongs to the long genealogy of dissidents, martyrs, and exiles who reveal, through their absence, the ethical bankruptcy of regimes built upon fear.

 

There is no comfort in his story, nor should there be. To elegise him is not to domesticate his memory into sentimental ritual, but to confront what his life and death demand of us. If he dreamt of an Iran unshackled from authoritarian control, an Iran capable of walking its own path without foreign tutelage or clerical coercion, then the measure of our fidelity lies in how ruthlessly we interrogate those structures that continue to deny that possibility. His longing for prosperity and renewal was not nostalgia, nor naïve idealism; it was the prophetic insistence that a nation can and must resist falling again.

 

Then comes the bitter irony: the very state that claims to defend independence thrives upon subjugating its own. It wraps itself in the flag while ensuring that the nation’s finest voices are silenced, imprisoned, or scattered across continents. What emerges, in this contradiction, is the truth he understood too well: power feeds upon amnesia, and the role of the exile, even in death, is to refuse it.

 

To speak of his death is to speak of betrayal. Not merely the betrayal of an individual by his government, but of a nation by the powers who claimed to be its allies. The collapse of the imperial government in 1979 did not unfold in a political vacuum; it was prepared, fertilised, and weaponised by Western and Israeli greed. The tragedy is not only that a nation was handed to clerical demagogues, but that this transfer was permitted, even encouraged, to consolidate Western interests in the Persian Gulf.

 

The West’s duplicity in the so-called Islamic revolution is rarely confronted with honesty. Official histories produced by the Western propaganda machine portray the fall of the late Imperial Majesty as an indigenous revolt against autocracy. Yet beneath this narrative lies a deliberate strategy: to allow a modernising but independent monarchy to be weakened, then supplanted by a reactionary theocracy incapable of genuine sovereignty. It was not democracy that Western states feared in Iran, but the prospect of an autonomous nation commanding its own resources, charting its own alliances, and refusing countries younger than pencil holders in Iranian museums the right to dictate terms.

 

The clerical regime was the perfect scarecrow. Its ascetic brutality, its staged theatre of anti-Western rhetoric, its exported militancy, these were never threats to the Western order, but tools within it. By setting a fanatical theocracy at the helm of Iran, Western governments secured both a justification for their military presence in the Persian Gulf and a perpetual schism in Western Asia. Divide and rule required an Iran demonised yet instrumental, frightening its Arab neighbours into dependency on Western arms and protection.

 

The consequences are written across the last two decades. Arab pseudo-monarchies, drenched in oil wealth, were pressed into massive arms purchases, not for genuine defence, but to fuel Western industries and entrench military dependency. Their resources, extracted and sold at prices cheaper than water, lubricated the economies of Europe and America while ensuring that these states remained politically tethered to their patrons. The Persian Gulf became both an arsenal and a market, a landscape where war was manufactured to sustain profit.

 

What emerges, then, is the cruel irony: the Iranian nation, long positioned as a potential engine of regional autonomy, was deliberately shackled to a regime designed to terrify its neighbours and exhaust its own citizens. Theocratic totalitarianism was not an accident of history, nor solely the product of internal fissures. It was the outcome of Western betrayal, rooted not in ignorance but in calculation. To destabilise Imperial Iran, which aspired to reclaim its civilisational role as the inheritor of ancient forebears, when the West was scarcely emerging from the Neolithic age, to cultivate the conditions for its collapse, and then to embrace reactionary clerics as useful adversaries, this was not misfortune, but strategy.

 

Betrayal was not solely external. Western chancelleries may have scripted the drama, but the staging relied upon actors within Iran itself. The collapse of Iran’s modernising trajectory was enabled by what the Shah himself called the ‘alliance of reactionary black and destructive red’, clerical fundamentalists and leftist ideologues, whose strings were pulled and purses lined by Western intelligence services. Those dispatched abroad on state scholarships, financed by the very sovereign they later reviled, returned not as innovators or reformers but as carriers of imported dogmas. Some became intoxicated with Marxist utopias divorced from Iranian realities, while others fell into thrall to clerical absolutism, uncritically parroting doctrines centuries removed from modern governance.

 

Yet the abdication was not confined to elites. A society that had been granted unprecedented rights, free education, universal healthcare, women’s suffrage long before Switzerland, and access to every profession on equal footing, surrendered these hard-won gains with astonishing ease. A generation raised within free institutions fell prey to Western disinformation campaigns, none more potent than the propaganda of BBC Persian, so notorious among Iranians that it earned the moniker ‘Ayatollah BBC’. Through calculated manipulation, foreign narratives framed regression as resistance and dismantling as liberation. At the heart of this capitulation stood the sanctification of a single man, Ruhollah Khomeini, whose entire life embodied an anachronism. He had never laboured for a wage, never paid tax, never cultivated a profession, and never engaged with knowledge beyond ritual ablutions and obsessions with bodily taboos. That such a figure could be elevated to arbiter of national destiny speaks to the depth of collective surrender.

 

Iran’s undoing was not engineered abroad alone. It was made possible by a society willing to confuse manipulation for revolution, grievance politics for emancipation, and dogma for progress. The West authored the conditions for collapse, but Iranians themselves performed the drama, dismantling the very project of renewal that had already secured them rights and freedoms unprecedented in the region.

 

Then arises the bitter question: how did a nation that had been granted free education, free healthcare, and universal suffrage before much of Europe, women enfranchised earlier than in Switzerland, women permitted to ascend every profession and rank equal to men, capitulate so swiftly to the intoxication of clerical populism and leftist demagoguery? To answer demands confronting not only external manipulation, but also the readiness with which sections of society surrendered to grievance politics and the theatre of false resistance. The betrayal was doubled: the West engineered the collapse, yet Iranians themselves permitted it by confusing propaganda with truth, mistaking manipulation for revolution, and crucifying the very project of renewal that had already given them unprecedented rights in the region.

 

What emerges, then, is not a history of victimhood alone. It is a history of complicity, of a society that traded its modernising momentum for the illusions of ideological purity, that bartered away hard-won rights for clerical decrees and leftist slogans. To insist only upon Western culpability is to evade the harsher truth: betrayal was also domestic. A monarch’s gifts, education, enfranchisement, public health, the possibility of dignity, were squandered by those unwilling to defend them against the shrill rhetoric of imported revolution. To remember his exile truthfully is to acknowledge duplicity at home as well as in Western chancelleries.

 

To remember him today is to reject the sanitised versions of this Islamo-western propagated false history. His vision of a proud, sovereign Iran stands as indictment of both domestic tyrants and foreign patrons of repression. His death in exile testifies to the refusal of Western governments to support the possibility of a prosperous and powerful Iran that might upset the balance of exploitation in the Persian Gulf region. What he witnessed, and what he warned against, was the cynical collusion between Western chancelleries and theocrats whose stranglehold over Iran serves the logic of division, fear, and extraction.

 

To elegise him is thus inseparable from denunciation. Western powers who drape themselves in the rhetoric of freedom cannot escape the blood-stained ledger of 1979, when they traded away the hope of Iranian renewal in exchange for oil priced like water and arms contracts signed in perpetuity. They betrayed Iran not once, but continuously, sustaining its misery to justify their presence and their profit.

 

Then the question arises: what does fidelity to his memory demand? It demands we say openly that the so-called Islamic Republic is not the antithesis of Western power, but its grotesque accomplice. It demands we expose the way in which fear of Iran is manufactured to discipline the Arab rulers, to keep them on their toes, and their treasuries open and their sovereignty mutilated. It demands that we refuse the amnesia that allows Western capitals to pose as guardians of order while orchestrating chaos.

 

His absence is the shadow under which their duplicity is revealed. His longing for a grandiose Iran survives as challenge, not only to the clerics who usurped the nation, but to the Western states whose betrayal cleared their path.

 

To mark this anniversary is therefore an act of defiance. It is to speak against the lies of official history’s revisionists, to affirm that he did not die a forgotten exiled King of Kings, but lives still in the unfinished struggle for justice. His absence is not void but summons, calling us to resist complacency, to strip away the pieties of political rhetoric, and to hold those who betray us accountable. In the end, his eulogy is inseparable from an indictment: of those who banish their own visionaries, and of those who stand silent while it happens.