Foreign terrorist attack and the collapse of public rationality
Article and photos by: Elham Abasloo*
Translated by Raha Sabet Sarvestany
IRWomen**
Perhaps our greatest failure has not unfolded on the battlefield, but in the collapse of our collective “we”,
the very we that had taken shape through years of striving for civility and coexistence, and that might have formed the foundation of a more hopeful future.
We now inhabit a world in which human suffering and death have been commodified. Narratives are selectively constructed by the media: some deaths are made visible, while others are deliberately erased. Some victims become headlines; others are not even granted the dignity of being mourned. In this cycle, the lives of the oppressed are consumed fuel for politics, for media spectacle, and even for the machinery of human rights institutions.
Yet a deeper tragedy lies in the fact that this external logic has seeped into our own society. A crisis of narrative has emerged among Iranians themselves. Certain parts of reality are amplified, while others are pushed into silence. We, too, have learned to sort deaths into categories: if a victim does not align with our preferred narrative, we first dehumanize them, so that their erasure becomes easier, or their death becomes justifiable.
In doing so, we reproduce the very logic of violence we once condemned.
If human life truly has value, it cannot be reduced to factional calculations, to blind vengeance, or to the pursuit of power.
Today, a profound divide has formed among us, a divide between those who believe war and violence can deliver salvation, and those who fear their consequences and the possibility of an even greater catastrophe. This is no longer a simple disagreement; it is as if a sea of blood has risen to separate us.
Human death itself has become an instrument for reproducing the inhuman logic of power.
At this critical historical moment, we are bound, by our shared responsibility, to engage in ethical self-reflection.
When a society reaches the point where human death is met with celebration or calls for revenge, we must ask ourselves: what has become of our collective conscience? We are not only victims of authoritarianism; we have, perhaps unknowingly, begun to reproduce its violence.
And perhaps this is the greatest danger of all: the loss of that human “we” that might have stood together against brutality.
In the end, what remains is not the triumph of any single narrative,
but grief, grief for a humanity that has once again become a casualty of politics.
*Freelance Photographer
**Iranian Women’s Center
