For six days, the clerical regime in Tehran intends to wrap former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the mantle of martyrdom. State-orchestrated crowds, rivers of black-clad mourners, military pageantry, and carefully choreographed displays of devotion will seek to elevate Iran's Supreme Leader into an icon of Islamic resistance. History demands a very different verdict. Ali Khamenei leaves behind neither a legacy of greatness nor one of statesmanship. He leaves a blood-soaked record of repression, terror, and cruelty that stretches across almost four decades. Behind every carefully rehearsed eulogy stand thousands of shattered families, countless political prisoners, silenced journalists, persecuted women, and innocent civilians whose lives became expendable in pursuit of ideological fanaticism.

The architects of this grotesque spectacle hope the world will remember Khamenei as a defender of Iran. Future generations should remember him as the chief custodian of one of the world's most brutal theocratic dictatorships. Few episodes illustrate that brutality more starkly than the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. More than 30,000 men and women, many already serving prison sentences, faced summary proceedings in front of infamous "death commissions," before execution and burial in secret mass graves, simply for swearing allegiance to the main democratic opposition movement—the Peoples Mojahedinof Iran/Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK). Human rights experts, United Nations officials, and survivors have spent decades demanding accountability for what constituted crimes against humanity and genocide. Throughout those years, Khamenei defended the system that carried out those atrocities and presided over a regime determined to erase both the evidence and the memory of its victims.

His rule rested upon fear. Freedom of speech became a criminal offence. Independent newspapers disappeared. Trade........

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