The funerals of politicians and leaders grow out of their immediate occasion to become political spectacle — a platform for staking out public positions, issuing pledges, and shoring up particular states of affairs. Some funerals, deny any attachment to continuity and genuinely build the foundations for a new order that breaks with part of the past. Into this category falls, for example, the funeral of Jan Palach, the young Czech who set himself alight in 1969 in protest at the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968- a funeral that outlined the path to independence which triumphed two decades later. The funeral of the Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri in 2005, for its part, triggered a movement that led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.
Most grand political funerals, however, transform into occasions for affirming continuity and fidelity to the prevailing order. The protagonists and setting of this genre, in most cases we encounter, share more or less of the following features:
The man being buried may be the founder of a state, a revolution, or a mass party. This holds for the funerals of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Sun Yat-sen in 1925, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1938, Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, Mao Zedong in 1976, and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 (as we know, the crush at Khomeini’s funeral tore the shroud and sent the body tumbling to the ground, and more than 10 people died in the event).
Often, the deceased is a father-leader who infantilizes his children and plays on their emotions: a leader who ruled for a long time, and whose name monopolized public life and became the central axis of this life, whereby the future, in his absence, looms like a cloud of uncertainty that threatens potential violence and chaos.
When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, he was closing three decades of personal rule in the Soviet Union. When Gamal Abdel Nasser passed, it had been 18 years since his military coup and 16 since he took sole power. Before them, Atatürk’s death came after 15 years in the presidency. The same holds, of course, for Ali Khamenei, who was president of the republic in Iran from 1981 and then named supreme leader in 1989. In such cases, moreover, the tools and traditions of expression are likely weak and scarce, if not absent altogether. With institutions frail or elections abolished, funerals become one of the few legitimate occasions for mass political mobilization, demonstrations, referendums, and the founding of political and party projects. These occasions thereby seem like a kind of constitutional moment standing as an alternative to constitutionalism and its mechanisms.
The leader’s death may, in turn, crown a tragedy, such as assassination or defeat. Lenin had spent the last two years of his life suffering from wounds he had suffered as a result of successive attempts on his life. Nasser was weighed down by the enormous defeat he had suffered three years before his death. Khomeini, for his part, had announced a year before his passing that his approval of Resolution 598 was a “drinking of the chalice of poison,” which was considered as an admission of defeat in the war with Iraq. And Khamenei, who was assassinated, had his funeral riddled with images and specters: the destruction visited on Iran by two successive wars, the killing of commanders and scientists, its shrinking regional role, and perhaps the struggles among the ruling wings.
It seems that the question of continuity these funerals affirm remains highly problematic. What is sought, here, is to stress that the departed leaders bequeath the future and to turn the individual into an institution and an icon by way of a carefully staged spectacle in which collective emotions are churned by symbols, speeches, processions, flags, uniforms, and stirring anthems… The political order is thereby symbolically reconfigured, and the funeral turns from a commodity produced by the regime into a factory that produces the regime, while the deceased is painted as immortal, undying. The authorities, in such contexts, are the ones engineering the mourning ritual in the way Emile Durkheim explains when he argues that funeral rites rebuild solidarity and mend the social fabric that death seemed to have torn. The grief of sons bereft of the father and their tears, here, become one more element of unity and continuity, exhorting the living to complete the work of the dead.
Many scholars have stressed that modern nationalism is not built by armies and constitutions alone: collective public mourning, military cemeteries, and commemorative rituals share in the same task, whereby modern states take on the “nationalization of death.”
The bottom line of these acts is denial of the death. Stalin, in a literal application of the notion, insisted on embalming Lenin’s body over the objection of his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. It is not wholly unrelated that Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen as Supreme Leader to succeed his slain father despite lacking the “scholarly” credentials the post requires (bearing in mind that the father himself had not possessed them either). Here, the new leader is bound biologically to the legacy and estate of the departed, to affirm that the assassination has done nothing to shake the existing system and its institutions- indeed, not the slightest change in the pillars of power. As such, it became necessary to summon the chants that intimate continuity: “Death to America and Israel,” the demand for vengeance on the father’s killers, and the rest of the stockpile of chants and phrases of such occasions. “We will complete the journey.We remain.We continue.” All of them dispel the fear of change death might bring.
Even so, experience shows that change defeats continuity more often than continuity defeats change. Leninism, in the eyes of many, did not survive under Stalin- though many others saw it as the field in which Stalinism sprouted. Sun Yat-sen’s all-embracing nationalism split between nationalists and communists. Maoism was soon undone by Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, when the Communist Party installed “economic development” in place of “class struggle” as “the Party’s central priority,” and the program of “reform and opening up” was set in motion in the making of policy. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat pursued sweeping economic and political liberalization, as in foreign alliances and the questions of war and peace. It has become a fixture of conversations around Iran to note the growing weight of the IRGC and the waning importance of the “House of the Leader,” to say nothing of the many large question marks still hanging over Mojtaba himself.
So does the din of great funerals, and the affirmation of continuity that comes with it, leave the general principle as Sigmund Freud formulated it unaltered? Death is a moment of farewell, while mourning- a natural response to loss- detaches the bereaved, emotionally and gradually, from the deceased, enabling him to carry on with his life. As for those who cannot see in mourning rites a rite of passage, and in funerals an oblique public proclamation of it, they end in melancholia, their grief transmuted into illness.
