In a shocking act that has gone viral, a male monarchist desecrated the grave of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (the pen name: Gohar Morad), the iconic Iranian leftist writer, by urinating on it in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Draped in an Israeli flag, the individual symbolically weaponized Sa’edi’s final resting place—a site sacred to Iranian exiles and the global left—against the very values the writer championed: resistance to tyranny and solidarity with the oppressed.
Père Lachaise Cemetery is more than a burial ground; it is a monument to revolutionary memory. It holds the graves of the Paris Commune martyrs, whose struggle inspired leftists worldwide, and for Iranians, it houses the resting places of Gholamhossein Sa’edi and Sadegh Hedayat, two towering literary figures who embodied the spirit of defiance and exile. Sa’edi, an unwavering critic of the Shah’s monarchy and the Islamic Republic, spent his life championing the cause of justice. His grave, now a flashpoint for resistance, underscores the ideological battle raging within the Iranian diaspora.
Sa’edi: A Legacy of Resistance
Sa’edi’s life was marked by relentless opposition to oppression. Tortured under the Shah’s regime, he famously declared after his release: “They broke my body but not my soul.” His works, which critiqued social injustice and political tyranny, resonated with those yearning for freedom. Following the incomplete 1979 Revolution, Sa’edi like many revolutionaries, became disillusioned with the Islamic Republic’s betrayal of its promises. Forced into exile in Paris, he lived a life of loneliness and longing, writing in his final years in 1985:
Exile is not a mere geographical displacement. It is an endless ache, a perpetual state of yearning, where the soul hovers between the memory of what was lost and the impossibility of returning. Yet, in this in-between, resistance finds its truest form.
The desecration of his grave is an attack not only on his memory but on the values, he represented: anti-imperialism, justice, and solidarity with the oppressed.
The Weaponization of Nostalgia
This incident is emblematic of a larger trend among certain factions of the Iranian opposition, particularly monarchists. Their embrace of a revisionist nostalgia for the Pahlavi era is amplified by Western and Israeli-funded Persian-language media outlets like Manoto and Iran International, often referred to as “Mossad International.” These platforms sanitize the Shah’s brutal regime, portraying it as a lost utopia while erasing the voices of those who suffered under its repression.
The hysterical act of urinating on the grave of one of Iran’s most prominent leftist exiled writers is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader, recurring pattern. This trajectory has been repeated time and again in different forms, underscoring the hegemony of Persian-language imperialist media, which has become a lucrative avenue for segments of the Iranian diaspora now engaged in “democracy promotion” narratives. Many of these individuals, who command exorbitant salaries, previously worked for state-run media in the Islamic Republic or reformist newspapers, only to rebrand themselves as oppositional figures under the banners of Washington and Tel Aviv. They are now participants in the ongoing psychological warfare against the Iranian regime. Another example of this trajectory is the recent release of a documentary glorifying Parviz Sabeti, one of the most notorious security figures of the Shah’s regime, now living in the United States.
Sabeti held the position of deputy director of SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence apparatus, from 1973 to 1979. As the head of SAVAK’s third department—the organization’s most powerful and repressive division—he oversaw the internal security of what Jimmy Carter once called the “island of stability.” The Shah’s reign, reinstated by the U.S.-backed coup of August 1953, was marked by bloodshed, particularly the execution of Tudeh Communist Party of Iran (TPI) members and officers. The regime was deeply subservient to American interests—a fact often admitted by former Pahlavi officials in post-revolution interviews and substantiated by declassified documents from the U.S. Embassy.
The documentary, while ostensibly an effort to sanitize a segment of the Pahlavi regime’s history, inadvertently reveals the extent of imperialist involvement in shaping SAVAK. According to Sabeti, SAVAK’s creation was proposed by CENTO (Central Treaty Organization), one of the U.S.-led Cold War alliances aimed at countering Soviet-aligned blocs like the Warsaw Pact.
The reappearance of a figure as ominous as Sabeti after four decades, alongside symbolic acts like monarchists waving the Israeli flag or urinating on the graves of their political opponents, is no coincidence. These acts are deeply emblematic of a broader ideological alignment: the convergence of monarchist factions with Zionist and neoliberal agendas. The desecration of Gholamhossein Sa’edi’s grave is not just a symbolic insult; it is a political statement that aligns with the same forces Sa’edi spent his life resisting—imperialism, authoritarianism, and the erasure of revolutionary memory.
A deeper analysis of this phenomenon reveals the centrality of phallic symbolism in legitimizing hereditary monarchy. Titles such as “Prince,” “Shahbanoo,” and “His Royal Highness” derive their legitimacy from heteronormative patriarchal structures that privilege lineage and male dominance. What Marxist queer feminist scholarship calls the “phallocentric gaze” is starkly evident here, where the monarchy’s very essence is rooted in “sperm-driven democracy.” This is a system in which biological inheritance—mediated by phallic legitimacy—serves as the sole basis for authority.
This phallocentric performance is not confined to the Pahlavi monarchists, who are arguably the most patriarchal and reactionary forces among the opposition. It is also a recurring phenomenon within significant segments of the left, where patriarchal and cultural issues persist, particularly among the so-called “brocialist” factions on a global scale. While a deeper exploration of leftist patriarchy lies beyond the scope of this article, it is essential to recognize its relevance to the broader discourse. The Pahlavis, meanwhile, derive their legitimacy from phallic authority and wield it as a tool of intimidation, mirroring the tactics of their staunch ally, the Israeli regime, in its efforts to reshape the Middle East into a “New Middle East.” This phallocentric politics of domination not only reveals the monarchy’s fragile claims to power but also highlights the deeply reactionary nature of its alliance with imperialist forces.
What we are witnessing is a reassertion of patriarchal violence, one that seeks to erase revolutionary memory and undermine the emancipatory aspirations that figures like Sa’edi represented. The desecration of his grave serves as both a literal and figurative battlefield in the fight over Iran’s revolutionary legacy, a fight that must resist the erasure of anti-imperialist struggles by those who trade in the language of democracy while aligning themselves with imperial power.
Simultaneously, these pro-Western democracy promoters, funded by Western assets and Israel, shape discourses in ways that create ideological confusion among contrite leftists, further diluting anti-imperialist frameworks. This dynamic is exacerbated by the brutality of the Islamic Republic itself, which claims to support the Palestinian cause while systematically oppressing its own people, undermining any genuine solidarity and leaving room for reactionary narratives to thrive. The branding and rebranding of the crownless prince unfolds in the vacuum left by the absence of a democratic alternative to a regime that, during the final decade of the Cold War, was built on executing, imprisoning, and exiling leftist revolutionaries while recycling the tired slogan of “Death to America.” However, the prince’s personal quirks—having spent four decades lounging near CIA headquarters in Langley, waiting for foreign powers to restore him, much like they did for his father—have become fodder for ridicule on social media. In one interview, he candidly admitted, “For these 40 years, I’ve been getting an allowance from my family so I can do political work!” On another occasion, he remarked that all his friends are abroad, adding that he could only work part-time in Iran because, as he put it, “I am now a free man, and under no circumstances would I give up the freedom I have or sacrifice myself for it.”
Most recently, following the regime change in Syria, he declared himself ready for interim rule. The sheer audacity of these statements, coupled with his track record of political inactivity, highlights the absurdity of this carefully curated rebranding effort.
Reza Pahlavi’s recent visit to Israel, where he met with Benjamin Netanyahu, further highlights this ideological shift. His gestures of alignment with pro-Israel narratives ignore the revolutionary history of Iranian leftists who, since the 1960s, stood firmly in solidarity with Palestine. The Islamic Republic’s instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause, coupled with its brutal domestic repression, has created a vacuum where reactionary elements manipulate opposition to the regime to embrace imperialist alliances.
The New Face of Fascism
The viral desecration also reflects a disturbing rise in what Iranian intellectuals have termed a “new fascist discourse” within segments of the opposition. In a recent statement, a group of Iranian intellectuals and scholars, including Tehran-based Marxist-Leninist lawyer Nasser Zarafshan, condemned this trend. They warned:
“We have witnessed the intensification of a troubling trend in recent weeks on social media, fueled by certain foreign-funded outlets. Groups identifying as opposition factions employ vulgarity, character assassination, and relentless verbal attacks to promote a fascist discourse. This trend echoes tactics historically used by authoritarian regimes to suppress intellectuals and freedom fighters, aimed at paving a smooth path to power by eliminating all dissent.”
The statement further noted the parallels between these attacks and the smear campaigns once waged by state-aligned media like hard-liner daily Kayhan within Iran. It concluded with a powerful call: “The growing targeted attacks on intellectuals and thinkers only strengthen our resolve to unite in the fight against this emergent fascism and to reaffirm the foundational principles of unrestricted freedom of expression.”
How New Media and Contrite Leftists Rewrite Struggles Against Capitalism and Zionism
In the imperial core, we are witnessing a profound transformation in the role of new media platforms like Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Netflix, and Google. These tech giants have become powerful teaching machines—not for enlightenment or democratic progress but for actively promoting far-right ideologies and the values of gangster capitalism. Their algorithms amplify reactionary narratives, distort historical realities, and condition users to internalize imperialist frameworks, all while masquerading as neutral or democratic platforms.
This digital machinery has profoundly influenced the representation of Iran and other nations in the Global South, transforming their complex histories into simplistic moral binaries like “democracy versus dictatorship.” For instance, Israeli series like Tehran on Apple TV+ exemplify how media narratives selectively emphasize espionage, internal conflicts, and authoritarianism in Iran, while neglecting to contextualize these issues within the legacies of imperialist intervention and ongoing Western aggression. Similarly, films like Argo (2012) depict Iran through a sensationalized lens, reinforcing a view of the country as hostile and irrational while sidelining its anti-imperialist history. Documentaries like For Neda (2010), which focus on the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan during the 2009 protests, center narratives of victimhood and authoritarian repression while ignoring the role of U.S.-led sanctions and interventions in shaping Iran’s socio-political landscape.
Perhaps most troubling is the erasure or distortion of pivotal historical events such as the massacre of thousands of Iranian communists and leftists in the prisons of the Islamic Republic during the 1980s. When acknowledged at all in Western media, this atrocity is often reduced to a generalized “human rights violation,” stripping it of its revolutionary and anti-imperialist dimensions. This framing not only depoliticizes the victims, who were predominantly members of leftist and anti-imperialist movements, but also aligns the narrative with the broader imperialist agenda of delegitimizing Iran as a state rather than addressing the global forces that have shaped its history.
Such reductive representations distort Iran’s history and have significant implications for global leftist discourse. By propagating a binary view of “freedom” versus “tyranny,” these media platforms and productions obscure the imperialist structures that birthed and sustained regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran. For example, they frequently ignore events like the 1953 U.S.-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which dismantled a democratically elected government and replaced it with the Shah’s autocratic rule, setting the stage for the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
This narrative simplification has contributed to the erosion of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist commitments among segments of the Middle Eastern and Third World left. By critiquing regimes like Iran’s without situating them within the broader context of U.S. imperialism and neoliberal interventionism, these platforms condition users to view imperial power as a benign force. The result is a politics that echoes imperialist priorities, marginalizing alternative perspectives and reinforcing the global dominance of Western ideological frameworks.
The Islamic Republic is often framed as a standalone antagonist in the global order—a despotic regime entirely isolated from the forces of imperialism. This framing conveniently erases the fact that the Islamic Republic is, in many ways, a direct offspring of imperialist intervention in the late Cold War. After the U.S.-backed coup in 1953, which reinstated the Shah and crushed Iran’s burgeoning democratic and communist movements, the groundwork was laid for a reactionary backlash. The Shah’s SAVAK, trained and supported by the CIA and Mossad, suppressed leftist opposition so effectively that, by the late 1970s, the Islamic Revolution filled the void left by the crushed secular left. The contradictions of the Islamic Republic—its anti-imperialist rhetoric paired with its repressive theocracy—stem directly from this imperialist legacy. Adding to the complexity is the phenomenon of dual marginality, where many former members of leftist parties and organizations in the Middle East and the Global South now find themselves utterly irrelevant. Within their original political movements, they once held meaning and purpose, rooted in collective struggle. However, as these organizations weakened or dissolved, their significance dissipated. Disconnected from their parties and movements, these individuals are neither integrated into revolutionary praxis nor able to meaningfully engage with the mainstream discourse. This vacuum of relevance leaves space for reactionary forces—monarchist factions, fascist elements, and their ilk—to fill the void with noise and symbolic acts of provocation, such as the desecration of Gholamhossein Sa’edi’s grave.
The far-right noisemaking is no coincidence. It thrives on the vacuum left by the erosion of meaningful political movements and the sidelining of anti-imperialist struggles. In the absence of a strong leftist alternative, reactionary forces step in, weaponizing historical revisionism and the tools of new media to undermine the very principles of justice and liberation that movements like the Iranian revolution once represented. The question is not whether regimes like the Islamic Republic should be critiqued—of course they should—but whether that critique serves liberation or reinforces the imperialist status quo. To reclaim the narrative, we must address the dual marginality of former leftists and reconnect them with anti-imperialist praxis, reject the reductive binaries of “democracy versus dictatorship” and revisit the foundational principles of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist struggle, expose the role of new media as ideological apparatuses of imperial power, and resist the co-optation of revolutionary discourse by reactionary forces.
The fight against imperialism, capitalism, and Zionism requires not just a critique of existing regimes but a renewed commitment to building movements that can challenge the far-right noise and reclaim the revolutionary potential that figures like Sa’edi embodied. Without this, the vacuum left by dual marginality will continue to be filled by those who amplify the imperialist agenda under the guise of “democracy promotion.”
The issues of dual marginality and the illusion of agency are pivotal to understanding the dynamics at play in the post-1979 Iranian intellectual landscape, particularly within the exilic community. These themes have recently resurfaced under the pretext of a royalist male lumpen’s performative act at the grave of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi. At the large gathering in Paris—a city that, alongside Berlin and London, has historically served as a crucible for Iranian intellectual and political movements—the performative spectacle was glaring, with little discernible agency beyond the surface. This reflects a broader ideological decline, shaped by the global defeat of leftist movements, the hollow anti-American rhetoric of the Islamic regime, and the incomplete nature of the 1979 Revolution itself.
The Incomplete Revolution of 1979: A Persistent Framework
The 1979 Iranian Revolution, which promised a rupture from imperialism and class oppression, remains incomplete—a revolution that was co-opted and transformed into its counterrevolutionary mirror by the establishment of an Islamic theocracy. This incompleteness is not merely a historical observation but a living dynamic that continues to shape the exile community. It highlights how the revolutionary aspirations of 1979—rooted in anti-imperialist, Marxist, and socialist movements—were suppressed and replaced with hollow ideological rhetoric. The failure to achieve a truly anti-imperialist and emancipatory revolution has led to the current fragmentation of the Iranian diaspora, where performative gestures and lifestyle politics dominate, overshadowing the collective struggle that once defined the movement.
Jodi Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism offers a critical lens through which to understand this shift. In the post-1979 landscape, the digital platforms that dominate exile discourse commodify dissent, turning political agency into shallow acts of visibility. What was once a coherent revolutionary opposition, organized across ideological and regional lines—from the Moscow-aligned Tudeh communist Party of Iran in East Berlin to Maoists and Trotskyists and the rest in West Berlin, Paris, London, and the U.S. in Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU)—has now been reduced to fragmented, individualized expressions of discontent.
Exile, Fossilization, and Performative Agency
This decline evokes the melancholic reflections in Exile, the novel by German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, translated into Persian by the late leftist author Roshanak Daryoush. Feuchtwanger’s observations on the German exile community resonate deeply with post-1979 Iranian diaspora:
Among the exiles, there were all kinds of people: some driven out for their beliefs, others simply because of their birth certificates or happenstance. Some were voluntary émigrés; others were forced. They came from different political convictions, social standings, and walks of life. Yet, they were homogenized, labeled as mere migrants before being seen as their true selves. Many resisted this imposed categorization, but it was futile. They belonged to this group, a bond that was unbreakable… Ideals and loyalty to principles are the first casualties, abandoned long before the bread and butter upon which survival depends. If a burden must be cast away, morality is the first to be discarded. Many immigrants lose their integrity; flaws that lay dormant in times of ease now surface unchecked, while their virtues twist and transform.
The cautious grow cowardly; the brave turn to crime. The frugal become miserly, and the magnanimous devolve into braggarts. Most become self-absorbed, losing their sense of scale and distinction between the permissible and the forbidden. Their wretchedness becomes an excuse for recklessness and defiance. They grow querulous and contentious, their tongues sharpened by frustration.
Those cast from the security of stable ties into the chaos of uncertainty grow both insolent and servile, loud in their pretensions yet hollow in substance. They claim to know better than all others, their arrogance masking a deeper fragility. Like fruit plucked prematurely from the tree, they fail to ripen—drying instead, brittle and wooden in spirit.
As hope for return—or even the comfort of a settled existence—dwindles, they let themselves fall further into the abyss, surrendering to the depth of despair with no rope to pull them back.
(Pages 211–217, Volume 1, Exile, by Lion Feuchtwanger, translated from German by Roshanak Daryoush, Roshangaran Publishing, First Edition, Spring 1989)
This forced homogenization parallels the dynamics of the Iranian diaspora, where the multiplicity of political and social differences is often obscured in favor of a monolithic narrative of exile. Feuchtwanger’s depiction of exile as both diminishment and enrichment reflects the duality of the Iranian exile experience. On the one hand, exile has stripped away the collective agency that marked the pre- and immediate post-1979 era. On the other hand, it provides a lens to critique the commodification of dissent and the failure of the revolution:
They all shared common desires: passports, work permits, money, a new homeland, and above all, a return to their old one—liberated and free. Yet their reasons, the why behind their wants, their goals, and the paths they chose to reach them, diverged greatly. What one deemed sublime, another found horrifying.
Even those bound by shared fate and similar aims rubbed against one another, fraying the fragile thread of camaraderie. Each collision birthed fresh disillusionment. Hatred—venomous and unyielding—festered among them. Enmities grew so fierce that death seemed their only resolve. With unwavering conviction, they accused one another of carelessness, of betraying their shared ideals.
Yes, exile wounds—it diminishes, belittles, corrodes. But exile also fortifies, enlarges, and molds fighters. The life of the rooted, of those tied to the land, demands traits unlike those of wanderers and the untethered. Yet, in the machine age—when machines displace peasants by the day—the resilience of the uprooted becomes no less vital. For those forced to fight life’s battles daily, their attributes seem even more fitting.
Immigrants hold fewer rights than others, yet their lives are unshackled by many of the duties, prejudices, and confines that weigh others down. The sharpest among them grow swifter, tougher, more pliant. As the old German writer Sebastian Franck once said, “Flowing water does not rot.” To him, this was not a curse but a blessing.
Exile stifled many, yet those of stronger mettle found their horizons broadened, their spirits stretched. It taught them to release their grip on the nonessential, to live lightly yet deeply. Cast from New York to Moscow, from Stockholm to Cape Town, they were forced to think more expansively, more profoundly, than those who clung to their office chairs in Berlin for a lifetime.
Many exiles grew inwardly richer, transformed by the journey, rejuvenated in their essence. That old phrase, “Die and become!”—which turns the weary into the joyous—became their mantra, the heartbeat of their survival.
(Ibid)
Reclaiming Sa’edi’s Legacy
This new wave of reactionary politics—whether in the desecration of Sa’edi’s grave or in the alignment with imperialist powers—represents a profound betrayal of Iran’s revolutionary heritage. The forces that now wave Israeli flags over the graves of anti-imperialist thinkers claim to oppose the Islamic Republic, yet their actions mirror the very authoritarianism they purport to resist.
Sa’edi’s life and words remind us that exile, though isolating, can be a space of profound resistance. For queer exiles and others navigating the pain of displacement, his legacy offers a roadmap for reclaiming belonging through defiance. Sa’edi’s grave, defiled by fascistic hypermasculine monarchists, has become a rallying point for those committed to justice and solidarity.
Sa’edi’, an influential writer, poet, and leftist political activist, was a staunch opponent of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s regime. A member of the Iranian Writers’ Association, he was one of the prominent speakers at the iconic Goethe Institute poetry nights held in Tehran during the fall of 1977. In 1974, Sa’edi’was arrested by SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police, and spent a year in prison for his activism. Forced to participate in a televised confession—eerily like the coercive tactics used by the Islamic Republic today— Sa’edi’s defiance remained unbroken. As he wrote to his brother from prison: “If they silence me, they cannot silence my roar. Remember, even after my death, I will continue to scream, and my scream will still be heard.”
I can still see Sa’edi, sitting in a dimly lit Tehran café, his glass of arak shimmering faintly in the haze of cigarette smoke, whispering Khayyam’s verses to himself in Persian, his strong Azeri accent weaving an unmistakable rhythm into the ancient words. Each sip seemed to carry the weight of centuries, each whisper an act of defiance against orthodoxy. His voice, both intimate and unrelenting, would rise above the quiet murmurs of workers, retirees, nurses, and teachers, gathered to resist the Islamic Republic’s repression and its neoliberal betrayals. Sa’edi, with his unkempt hair and an ever-watchful gaze, seemed to carry their collective grief and rage in his words, transforming it into a clarion call that pierced through the suffocating silence of dictatorship.
But Sa’edi’s defiance was never limited to Tehran’s streets. His solidarity stretched outward, his accent—a blend of two worlds—ringing with a fierce pride that rejected all erasures. Through the rubble-strewn landscapes of Palestine and Lebanon, where the scars of settler colonialism bore testimony to ongoing resistance, his words became echoes of a shared fight for liberation. And in the streets of the Global South—be it Managua, Johannesburg, or Jakarta—his voice found kinship in the chants of those refusing to be crushed under the weight of empire.
To sip and whisper, to speak and roar—with his strong Azeri accent grounding him in a heritage of defiance, Sa’edi embodied the radical audacity of living as an exile, of turning displacement into a weapon against the structures of power that sought to silence him. His presence, whether among Tehran’s restless workers or in the imaginaries of global uprisings, was a reminder that solidarity is both local and transnational, both whispered in quiet corners and shouted across barricades. Sa’edi’s legacy, like the poems of Khayyam he so often recited, refuses to fade, instead living on as a testament to the boundlessness of resistance.
A supporter of the incomplete 1979 Revolution that toppled Carter’s “Island of Stability,” Sa’edi’s writings reflected the complex social and intellectual landscape of Iran during the 1960s to the 1980s. However, disillusionment with the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic led him to leave Iran in 1981, settling in Paris, where he passed away four years later at the age of 50. Sa’edi’s works, such as The Mourners of Bayal, The Cow (adapted into a film by Dariush Mehrjui), Eye for an Eye, and Strangers in the City, capture the struggles of Iranian society and the plight of intellectuals under oppressive regimes. His stories remain a testament to the enduring spirit of resistance against tyranny—a beacon for those who refuse to let the wounds of exile erase their commitment to justice.
As Sa’edi poignantly observed in exile: “Resistance is not an act of defiance against one regime or another; it is the refusal to allow memory, dignity, and justice to be erased.” His words compel us to confront the broader forces of erasure and manipulation. The fight to defend Sa’edi’s legacy is not merely about preserving the memory of a revolutionary writer—it is a battle against what Gramsci termed cultural hegemony, the domination of societal norms and historical narratives by ruling powers to maintain their authority. From the Islamic Republic’s brutal repression to the reactionary nostalgia of monarchists, to the settler colonial regime of Israel backed by imperialist forces, these systems of power perpetuate their control by rewriting history and silencing dissent. Sa’edi himself foresaw these dangers. In one of his final essays, published in the exile journal Alefba (Vol. 3, Paris, 1983), he wrote of his fears of cultural annihilation and the surrender to what he termed “cultural suicide.” Warning against the fragility of memory, he urged:
Let us not reach a point where our end is like the protagonists of Fahrenheit 451. Memory is unreliable. We have distant memory and near memory, and these two sometimes merge and sometimes diverge. One memory becomes alive, blending with another, and this is how the memory of humankind differs from the fidelity of a tape recorder.
To honor Sa’edi is to affirm that resistance, as Gramsci would argue, requires an ongoing struggle to contest and reclaim the spaces where memory, culture, and truth are shaped. It is an unrelenting refusal to let the truth, however inconvenient, be silenced. Sa’edi’s words echo as a reminder that the fight for cultural preservation is not a passive act but a radical act of resistance against forces that seek to erase history and co-opt memory for their own ends.
