The Cap of Mr Khamenei

The images of the meeting between the “Leaders of the Regime” and Mr Khamenei on Fitr celebration day in Tehran had all the characteristics of a dictatorship, and they put on display the bitter fate of despots; It is the story of the Cap of Clementis in Czech writer Milan Kundera’s book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which by reviewing an image, depicts what takes place in dictatorships and what happens to despots; that is the story of Khamenei’s predecessors. Pity that he too has gone the way of his co-thinkers and co-actors, and did not realize that history is to learn from.

The story of the The Cap of Clementis is about how individuals are eliminated in a dictatorship. In the photographs of the Iranian regime when it was first established, the leader stood in the foreground and all his aides were around him. The aides look to be in harmony at heart and word.

But as time passes, the aides drop out of the picture. Every year a person drops off from the regime; and he is removed from the memorabilia. At the end, only one person remains and that is Clementis, the “leader.”

But Clementis’ turn arrives as well. He too is cut off from the photograph. The only problem is that Clementis has put his hat on the dictator’s head, making the removal of the cap impossible. To eliminate the cap, the head of the leader too must go as well. So  the cap stays and the memorable photograph only displays the dictator and the cap: a lonely dictatorship with a cap as a sign of better days that have passed.

The story of photo editing in the Islamic Republic too go back to the first years of the 1979 revolution. Every time I watched a video clip showing Mr Khomeini’s arrival at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, I noticed one of his colleagues was missing from the clip. This continued until the last video clip showed only the founder of the Islamic Republic and the French pilot of the plane that had brought him. This image made it appear as if Mr Khomeini had arrived in Iran all by himself and that his only companion was a foreigner who could not be eliminated.

Today, those very individuals who reduced the video clips of Mr Khomeini’s arrival to his image and that of his pilot, are busy working to make sure that all individuals, events and historic narratives are eliminated from public view so that nothing is left except Ali and his cap. Let’s take a look at the photograph:

This photograph demonstrates the complete loneliness of a dictator. He is flanked by the heads of the three branches of government, each of whom has a different look. The faces seem annoyed and the looks are full of anger. The head of the legislature Ali Larijani can’t bear the sight of the head of the executive; Sadegh Larijani does not display the confidence of a head of the judiciary. The head of the executive branch Ahmadinejad bears the perfect image of an anxious dictator. This is a regime whose inner circle has been rapidly shrinking.

The gap between this photograph and the images of the first “enthusiastic meeting” between the heads of the branches of government in the early years of the revolution are startling. This is the passage from principled allies to a group of mini-politicians. This photograph shows the reality of a shrinking regime to the point that today nobody is left to come to the stage; a stage on which peripheral individuals mimic the role of key players, and do it badly.

This is an image that lacks the luster of the photographs of the first period of the revolution. In this photograph, even Khomeini, the founder of the regime, is turned into a small photograph, displayed in the corner of the frame, simply to meet a requirement.

This lifeless photograph radiates misery and is a shocking reminder of the difference between what we dreamed of and what we eventually got. Still, we wish that Mr Khamenei who has wasted all opportunities can step aside and look at this photograph so he may realize what his poet meant when he said: Yes, even Ali is now alone and without people behind him.