The death of Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran’s Ayatollahs, announced first by Netanyahu and then confirmed by Trump, symbolically represents the end of an era, even if no one can say with certainty what color the new era will have: nor if it is truly new, and how, this era will be. Long announced, so long awaited that it was foreseen by everyone, starting with the Iranians, yesterday morning’s Israeli attack on Tehran arrived on time, almost telephonically, and yet truly lethal, in its own definitive way. The declared objective was the “Iranian nuclear”, that is, to prevent the development of the nuclear program by the Iranian Shiite theocracy, but the primary one, certainly also founding the nuclear project, was instead the violent removal of the religious-political leadership of Khamenei, the guarantor of long continuity who had inherited the helm of the Islamic revolution from Ruhollah Khomeyni, of whom he had been a dolphin and advisor. Both, albeit in different ways, left Tehran and the earth shortly before turning 87.

How Trump’s world works

What happened yesterday in Tehran explains once again, if there was still a need, how the “new world”, that of “Trump” works: he and his friends, his most trusted allies, can overthrow adverse regimes. He can do it directly and alone, as happened in Venezuela, or can do it with its most solid and faithful friend in the world, Israel Bibi Netanyahu, striking in one move the great enemy and a historic problem for both: that is, the Iran of the Ayatollahs. It will be said – and it is absolutely true – that the Iranian regime has been a great enemy of the rights and civil liberties of the Iranian people, of women first and foremost, and of every human being who loves freedom. It’s very true, and a world without a regime like that is a better world, at least until what happens next turns out to be the same, or even worse. No one can believe, however, that the raid that hit Tehran and eliminated Khamenei was generated by the desire to free Iranians from the game of this ferocious dictatorship that has now lasted almost fifty years. The uncertain political future of the two almost eighty-year-olds mentioned above, Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, perhaps has more to do with the sudden decision to cut off the head of the bull, and the horns of the Great Satan of Tehran.

The future of the Iranians

There are obviously many issues. The first, main one, concerns the future of the people in Iran. A great people, over 90 million people, multi-ethnic and multicultural, cosmopolitan like no Islamic nation and yet governed for 50 years by a reactionary, violent and fundamentalist political Islam like few others. Tehran which is teeming with cultured bourgeoisie and spreads it across the world, and the infinite deep Persian province which was probably fine in that “reactionary revolution”. What will happen from now on, how the militias who just a few weeks ago were accused of the massacre of tens of thousands of people will move, no one knows.
The second, closely linked to this, concerns any hypothesis, even vague, very vague, of transition. Beyond the usual empty words of the US president – “I have great ideas about who can govern Iran”, “they will ask me for an opinion” – it is not really clear how a future can begin, if not by passing – immediately – through a very violent internal settling of accounts, a civil war, and who knows where it will end up. After all, in theory, international law would be useful for precisely these situations.

Neither condolence nor rejoicing

And this is, obviously, the last and main question. A system that looked at and guided states from above, that balanced weights and forces within a broader system of rules, if it ever existed, is definitively disappeared. Let’s say it better, let’s say it all: if it ever tried to exist, if it ever functioned as a barrier to the hunger for arrogance of those who were more powerful, it has also abandoned that minimal function of a somewhat hypocritical breakwater, of a small but important barrier that allows one to be scandalized without being ridiculed. Today, nothing remains of that remote and increasingly debased idea. Also because – it should be remembered – the decision-making capacities of the international justice bodies, which had previously been missing for a few decades, have essentially disappeared, leaving every injustice and satrapy in its place, protected by the system of vetoes and relationships with the truly powerful: until the relationships, or the powerful, change.

Thus, two old politicians already many times considered finished and failed, one indicted for crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court and accused of Genocide before the International Court of Justice, the other pursued in vain by the courts of his country for a wide spectrum of crimes, all hateful, decided to eliminate from the face of the earth a well-known criminal who carried out his crime as head of state based on the most sinister, inhuman, chauvinist, violent and retrograde religious fundamentalism. Men of good will cannot in any way express condolences for the latter and, however, they cannot even rejoice together with the former. It is the paradox of this post-democratic time, in which even one enormous piece of good news brings two pieces of bad news, and at the end of the day there is still time only to cry. Hoping that tomorrow, truly, due to some strange turn of history, a new sun will shine over Tehran: the one that Iranians and, above all, finally, Iranian women truly deserve.