The binary trap: How narratives of ‘Us vs Them’ manufacture consent for war

A persistent, lung-searing rain of fire is currently cauterising the nerves of the Iranian landscape, exposing the jagged vulnerability of a nation under the reach of a rampaging superpower and the unrestrained fury of its regional spearhead. Above, the indifference of the sky; below, people caught in the crossfire of history.

Far from this flayed earth, in antiseptic foreign situation rooms, the conflict is reduced to a clinical simplicity that pits “civilised stability” against a “rogue state.” The nuances of a nation of 92 million people are flattened into targetable dots on a digital map.

If Donald Trump’s Pentagon sees only targets, the “Axis of Resistance” diorama is often viewed only as heroic defiance. One might ask why, amidst the visceral horror of falling masonry and the killing of civilians, we should pause to critique the architecture of such a binary. The answer is that this bloodbath was made possible by that very architecture.

The politics of othering

Scholars addressing securitisation point out that once a population is moved out of the realm of politics and seen as an “existential threat,” any measure, no matter how violent, is deemed permissible. By characterising Iran through the lens of a permanent emergency, the West moves it beyond the reach of negotiation and into a realm where raw power projection is the solitary remaining logic.

The “us vs them” framework, the division of the world into light and dark, is the fertile ground in which public consent for devastation is nurtured. Edward Said’s foundational writings illustrate how rendering the ‘East’ as a featureless monolith creates the ideological clearance to........

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