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There is no freedom for a people forced to accept imposed friends and enemies, and no hope for a people who dare not speak openly of peace.
According to Carl Schmitt, the concept of the enemy lies at the heart of politics. It stands apart from morality, aesthetics, and economics. To identify an enemy is thus a strictly political act, carrying no moral weight and showing no regard for historical accuracy. Within this realm, free from any claim to objectivity, an enemy can be conceived purely to advance political goals.
In a multicultural society like Lebanon, the enemy is deliberately designated to enforce a single ideology, enabling cultural hegemony and the marginalization of diversity. Carl Schmitt notes that the distinction between friend and enemy relies on no moral compass—no sense of good or evil—no aesthetic judgment of beauty or ugliness, and not even on economic concerns such as profitability. Instead, it can serve an ideological purpose: either to cement a society internally or to dominate others.
Killing Two Birds with One Stone
The enemy is the “other,” and it is through this opposition that one defines oneself. A group’s identity—the “we”—is forged in relation to its enemy. Totalitarianism exploits this dynamic skillfully, turning it to cunning and insidious purposes. In this way, messianic Islamism (Hezbollah), like the supposedly secular Arabism that preceded it, seeks to unify its society by asserting its identity against the other, who comes to embody evil in its purest form.
“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are,” one might observe, echoing the spirit of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As he wrote in Citadelle, “man is measured by the obstacle” and also, “man only discovers himself by confronting what opposes him.” In this light, constructing the image of the Zionist enemy becomes an existential imperative, used to enforce social cohesion.
Totalitarianism, however, makes a dual use of the ideology of the enemy. By imposing it on the societies it seeks to subjugate, it erases their memory, their cognitive references, and thus their cultural identity. It accomplishes two goals at once. Since the 1960s, Arabists have aimed to create or impose a singular national identity, built largely around the unifying core that is the concept of the Zionist enemy.
Cultural Substitution
Hezbollah, as the direct heir of Arabist movements, has shown through its leniency toward its Israeli neighbor that this demonization of the enemy is directed solely at other cultural groups within Lebanon. By readily conceding Lebanon’s territorial waters and gas fields, it exposed the true nature of its intentions: the ideology of the enemy-as-scarecrow is merely a legalistic weapon aimed at terrorizing other ethnic groups and annihilating diversity.
Carl Schmitt sees in the friend–enemy duality (Freund/Feind) a complementarity that guides political choice. For him, this pairing represents the fundamental distinction of politics. Once the enemy is defined, the designation of the friend inevitably follows—an ally not only militarily but, above all, culturally. In the impossibility of demographic replacement, the totalitarian ideologies of secular Arabism and messianic Islamism turn to cultural substitution, seeking the adoption of the culture and identity of the designated and imposed ally.
The Linguistic Shift
The adoption of this cultural identity seeks to penetrate deeply by reshaping cognitive patterns. It works by persuading through the removal of all points of reference. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, suggests that language structures the way we perceive and think about the world. As Benjamin Lee Whorf noted, when a culture adopts the words, categories, and metaphors of another language, it also takes on the cognitive framework that language carries. Linguistic shift thus enables the acceptance of foreign ideas and values that stand in direct opposition to our own.
This shift, initiated by the Arabist ideology in the 20th century, moved into the realm of vocabulary with messianic Islamists in the 21st century. The majority of media then submit to the lexicon imposed or propagated by Hezbollah’s propaganda platforms, which determine the choice of terms, expressions, and syntactic structures, as well as the categories and metaphors that carry foreign conceptual frameworks. This targeted language reshapes mental categories and influences the cognitive framework.
The Enemy of Humanity
This form of value upheaval is illustrated by George Orwell in 1984, when the regime imposes a sudden redefinition of the hereditary enemy upon the population. This new “truth” must be accepted immediately and without resistance, as is the case in reality under Baathist, Nasserist, Arabist, and Islamist regimes. The enemy’s designation by those in power is seen by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci as a means of legitimizing societal control. It is through this ruse, turned into a phobia, that the military tribunal terrorizes the Lebanese population.
Hannah Arendt rightly notes that totalitarian regimes declare the designated enemy, above all else, a threat to all of humanity. By transforming a national or Pan-Arab cause into a so-called cause of humanity, it is treated as sacred, universal, indisputable, and non-negotiable. Any challenge to this dogma is met with immediate intimidation, forcing those who resist to submit to the dictates of the prevailing orthodoxy.
There can be no true liberation of Lebanon without a liberation of the mind. Beyond interrogations, arrests, the confiscation of passports and mobile phones, and trials in military courts, the real chains that oppress us are those we impose on ourselves—whether through coercive self-censorship or the fear of thinking outside established conventions and norms. There is no freedom for a people forced to accept imposed friends and enemies, and no hope for a people who dare not speak openly of peace.
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