The Death of Khamenei and the End of an Era

Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP / Getty

“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.” For nearly four decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over exactly that. He did not build the Islamic Republic of Iran. He inherited it from its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led a revolution that deposed a U.S.-aligned monarchy and replaced it with an Islamist theocracy whose three ideological pillars were “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and the mandatory covering of  women—the hijab, he said, was “the flag of the revolution.”

Khomeini died in 1989, and his successor’s life’s work was to keep that revolution alive long after the society it governed had moved on. In this, Khamenei was remarkably, ruthlessly successful. But the worldview he imposed was never truly his own. He was the spokesman for a ghost.