British royalty arrange their own funerals long before they die. Practicality takes precedence over sentiment.
For Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, plans were prepared well in advance of her death in 2002. They were coded ‘Operation Tay Bridge’. In 1997, however, the Palace was caught off-guard by the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales. They dusted ‘Tay Bridge’ and used it for Diana instead.
Prince Philip’s funeral plans - ‘Operation Forth Bridge’ - were put into motion when he died in 2021. His widow Queen Elizabeth II passed away a year later. The world watched as her funeral adhered meticulously to the much-rehearsed ‘Operation London Bridge’.
All three senior royals died of old age. Their deaths came as no surprise, unlike the murder of their kinsmen Lord Louis Mountbatten, killed by the IRA in 1979. Mountbatten - a stickler for ceremony – made an elaborate programme (code named ‘Operation Freeman’) which included one representative from every Indian regiment when he was the Viceroy there. PM Mrs. Indira Gandhi scotched his grandiose ideas by reminding him that he was no longer Viceroy of India.
Many recall the hastily arranged but dignified funeral of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and the heartbreaking image of his three year old son ‘John-John’, saluting his father’s casket.
Western funerals leave little room for emotions. Eastern funerals are different. Hysteria erupted at the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. An estimated 10 million mourners (approximately one-sixth of Iran's population) took part.
His successor as Supreme Leader, Imam Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S.-Israeli forces in an aerial attack on his home in Tehran on 28 February. With him died his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his 14 month old granddaughter.
Their bodies remained unburied until 4 July, when their coffins (one no larger than a crib), draped in Iran’s national colours, were given a mass farewell. Millions gathered at every stage of the cortege’s procession in Tehran, Qom, and (in Iraq) Najaf and Karbala before interment on 9th in Mashhad.
Imam Khamenei’s funeral coincided deliberately with celebrations across the Atlantic to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence – a telling rejoinder by an undefeated Iran to Trump’s hubris.
Nations are not given state funerals: parades, fireworks and boastful speeches mark their decline. President Trump may see himself as a modern Caesar. Many of his detractors have already begun sharpening their daggers. His Brutus waits in the wings.
Ten years ago, in 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, The Atlantic magazine carried an article by J. D. Vance, who at the time worked in a private sector venture capital firm. He had not entered politics. Vance felt compelled, though, to voice strong opposition to Trump’s candidacy.
Vance described Trump’s political credo as ‘cultural heroin’, a needle in ‘America’s collective vein, ’ offering voters ‘an easy escape from the pain’. Vance grumbled: ‘Trump never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t [.] To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.’ Vance prayed that one day Trump’s supporters would realise he was not the answer to their problems.
This month, on 4th July, The Atlantic magazine chose to reprint Vance’s original article. Why did The Atlantic wait years to remind Vance of his visceral indictment of Trump, and that too on the occasion of the US’s semiquincentennial? Its editorial explained lamely: ‘So that our readers can judge for themselves how well [Vance’s] assessment has stood the test of time’. Or perhaps how far VP Vance wishes to distance himself from his president?
Vance’s reasons for allowing that re-publication are probably the same as Brutus’s: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.‘
Vance is hoping for a response from U.S. voters in the elections due in November 2028, similar to the cry of Roman citizens in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar? Among those who gathered to hear Brutus’s justification for murdering Caesar, one citizen cries out: ‘Let him be Caesar’. Another tops that with: ‘Caesar's better parts/ Shall be crown'd in Brutus’.
Imam Khamenei’s 14 month old granddaughter, the 164 defenceless Iranian children evaporated in their elementary school in Minab on 28 February, and the 20,000 plus Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza are martyrs to causes they will never reach adulthood to understand.
Khamenei’s funeral bore the official motto: ‘Must rise’. It is an ironic echo of the American poet Maya Angelou’s elegiac lines: ‘You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies,/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I'll rise.’
‘Martyrdom does not end something’, the late Indira Gandhi, who died at the hands of assassins, once said, ‘it is only a beginning’.
Such brutal ends spawn dangerous beginnings.
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[DAWN, 9 July 2026] |
