The victory speech and the commerce of illusions

A citizen from the South commented on the return of the displaced as follows:

"If you return… return in a silence worthy of what has happened, not in a clamor that wounds what little life remains."

"Do not raise victory signs over a land whose tears have not yet dried, and do not wave flags where dust still obscures the faces of those not yet pulled from the rubble."

"Return… but shed the arrogance of slogans from your shoulders, for this is not a stage for celebration — it is a field of open graves…"

If one follows the statements of Naim Kassem, who now appears more than once a week, one would think he had won a victory, defeated Israel, and liberated Lebanon. He therefore feels entitled to accuse the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister of treason and collaboration, and to demand the fall of a government from which he nonetheless refuses to withdraw his own representatives.

Meanwhile, Israel has reached the outskirts of Nabatieh, is bombarding villages in the Zahrani area, and is attempting to seize one of the most strategically important hills, Ali al-Taher. The death toll exceeds 4,000, the wounded number 11,000, homes have been destroyed, and entire villages wiped off the map. Yet all of this is supposed to amount to "divine victories."

When Lebanese officials speak with the Americans, they are labeled traitors. Yet these same circles boast when Donald Trump claims to have met with Hezbollah. When Lebanon reaches a ceasefire agreement, they denounce it in the name of the state and refuse to recognize it — yet they accept an Iranian ceasefire.

What do you call such a mindset, such a logic — or rather, this absence of both?

It is a manifestation of the disconnect between reality on the ground and mobilizing discourse. When Naim Kassem declares that "victory has been achieved," he is not speaking by the ordinary standards people typically apply: human losses, destruction, territorial control. He operates according to a different logic, which can be summed up as follows:

First, the redefinition of victory. It no longer means militarily defeating the enemy or protecting the land and its people, but rather "holding on" — preventing the total collapse of the party and preserving the capacity to fight and retaliate, even intermittently and ineffectively.

With such a definition, almost any outcome can be recast as a "victory," even at the cost of staggering losses.

There is also the shift from reality to narrative. When the facts become too hard to bear — destruction, death, retreat on the ground — they are offset by a powerful media narrative: symbolic gains are amplified, losses are concealed or justified, and any dissenting internal voice is demonized and accused of treason.

Anyone who challenges this narrative is branded a "traitor," because the battle is no longer solely military — it becomes a battle over the narrative itself.

Then comes the logic of the "monopoly on patriotism." State officials — the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister — are accused of treason. We enter a logic in which legitimacy no longer belongs to the state, but to "the resistance." Any negotiation with foreign parties, particularly the United States, becomes treason, while the same contact is deemed acceptable if it goes through their own channels or serves their narrative, as they have demonstrated on multiple occasions.

How can this logic be explained?

This can be explained through several well-known concepts in political and social science: double standards; closed ideological thinking, which rejects facts when they contradict doctrine; mobilization propaganda, aimed at maintaining popular support; and, above all, denial of reality whenever crises deepen.

More precisely, it is a "mobilizing logic that escapes all accountability," since it allows neither for measuring outcomes nor for questioning decisions. Everything within it is sacred and divine.

The real danger of this imposed politics lies not only in its contradictions, but in its catastrophic consequences: the paralysis of the state and its institutions; the very destruction of the notion of truth, since everything becomes open to interpretation; and the splitting of society into two camps — the "believers" and the "traitors." This is precisely what makes rational discussion nearly impossible.

The problem, therefore, is not simply one of propaganda or contradiction — it lies in the very tools of thought themselves.

These tools have become idols to be worshipped. Paul Valéry warned of the moment when human beings stop using their tools of thought and instead become servants to them.

We are confronted with ancient concepts — victory/defeat, resistance/betrayal — recycled endlessly; with ready-made interpretive formulas they never deviate from; with rigid linguistic molds.

All of this transforms from tools into sacred references. Yet they fail to see how outdated these references are.

The question then goes beyond simply asking: is this reasoning correct? It becomes: does it belong to the accepted vocabulary within the group?

Furthermore, "backward-looking" thinking is not ignorance — it is a structure. It is a way of thinking oriented toward the past, yet adapted to the present. It does not exist outside the present; it lives within it, but wielding tools from another era.

How does this thinking operate? It projects the past onto the present. Every event is understood as the repetition of a prior battle, as an extension of an old narrative — resistance, liberation, conspiracy. It completely ignores the fact that conditions have changed, that the balance of power has shifted, that the nature of war has changed, and that society itself has changed. And yet the tool has remained exactly the same.

This is because they protect identity through immobility. Any change is perceived as an existential threat, rather than a necessity.

Durkheim's concepts can help us understand this logic despite its contradictions. He speaks of "social facts" that impose themselves on the individual. In this case, opinion is not an individual opinion — it is collective discourse, an "imposed collective truth." The individual becomes incapable of seeing the contradiction, or is unable to break from it even when they do see it, because breaking from it means leaving the group.

An explanation of this behavior can also be found in the way Claude Lévi-Strauss conceived of how the human mind operates through structures, often built on binary oppositions: victory/defeat, betrayal/resistance, us/them.

As a result, reality ceases to matter. What counts is fitting it into this binary opposition.

This is what we witness every single day: a defeat on the ground is reframed as a victory; negotiations conducted by the state are labeled as treason; yet negotiations conducted by "the resistance" become strategy and vision. Not because they cannot see, but because their mental structure does not allow them to see it any other way.

This is more dangerous than a simple absence of logic or mere irrationality. It is a reason that operates within a closed system. It cannot be corrected by facts, arguments, or even losses. Any new information is "digested" within the old framework.

It is an entire perceptual system that lives off dead tools… yet resurrects them anew each day.