On the Cancer of Calling Others Cancer
A certain rot has taken hold of political discourse—one that begins the moment we cease to see our adversaries as human beings and begin to see them as diseases. The metaphor of cancer, that most dreaded of diagnoses, has become a favoured instrument in the rhetorical arsenal of those who wish to circumvent the difficult work of politics. The Iranian regime is cancer. The opposition is cancer. Israel is cancer. Palestine is cancer. The pattern repeats with grim predictability, and with each deployment, something essential to our humanity quietly atrophies.
The Grammar of Dehumanisation
John Keane, in his rigorous examination of the relationship between violence and democratic life, observed that fascist regimes were “obsessed with unifying the body politic through the controlling, cleansing and healing effects of violence, which was often understood through ‘medical’ or ‘surgical’ metaphors.” The language of surgery and sanitation, of excision and eradication, served then—as it serves now—to transform political adversaries into pathological agents that must be removed for the health of the collective. Keane noted with precision that “mature democracies find such euphemisms embarrassing. They regard them as corrupting and contestable.” The question before us is whether we still possess the capacity for such embarrassment.
When the current regime in Iran is likened to a cancer requiring aggressive intervention at its centre—the only way, purportedly, to address a malignancy that will otherwise metastasise—we witness not political analysis but a suspension of it. The metaphor performs a sleight of hand. It transforms a complex political formation, with its millions of complicit and resistant and indifferent subjects, into a tumorous growth that exists outside the body it has ostensibly invaded. But here is what the metaphor conceals: in this particular “treatment,” everyone knows that killing the patient in the process of removing the carcinogenic tumour is not an unfortunate side effect but a tolerated—even welcomed—outcome. The cure, we are told, may be worse than the disease, but desperation has made such calculations acceptable. This is not medicine. It is murder dressed in a white coat.
Keane warned that when politicians speak of “surgical strikes, sanitary cordons, mopping-up operations and fighting the ‘cancer’ or ‘plague’ of terrorism,” they deploy language that “corrupts and contests” the foundations of democratic deliberation. The surgical metaphor promises precision that violence never delivers. The oncological metaphor promises necessity that politics rarely requires. Together, they provide moral permission for what would otherwise be recognised as the indiscriminate destruction of human beings who happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Foreclosure of Politics
The cancer metaphor does something more insidious still. It transforms the enemy into something that cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or accommodated. One does not negotiate with carcinoma. One does not seek compromise with metastasis. The metaphor forecloses precisely those possibilities of engagement that distinguish political action from mere violence. As Keane observed, “even when it comes dressed in velvet, violence is a relational act in which the victim of violence is regarded, involuntarily, not as a subject whose ‘otherness’ is recognised and respected, but rather as a mere object potentially worthy of bodily harm, or even annihilation.” The medical metaphor is precisely such velvet: it drapes the annihilation of the other in the sterile language of clinical necessity, transforming political subjects into pathological objects whose elimination requires no justification beyond the diagnosis itself.
Consider the rhetorical construction that accompanies the cancer metaphor in contemporary discourse about Iran. The regime is cancer; therefore, it must be excised. The process of excision will be painful, but all cancer treatment involves suffering. Those who counsel caution or diplomacy are accused of advocating for the spread of disease. The metaphor creates its own logic, impervious to evidence or consequence. That similar prescriptions applied to Iraq produced not democracy but state collapse and sectarian slaughter, that Libya’s surgical liberation produced slave markets, that Syria’s intervention produced half a million dead—these precedents dissolve in the certainty that this cancer is different, that this surgery will succeed where all others have failed.
There is a deeper pathology at work here. When do people resort to metaphors? They resort to metaphors when they are no longer capable of solving the problem. The metaphor becomes a substitute for analysis, a way of wrapping intractable complexity in an aura of comprehensibility. It suspends the question. It transcends the real issue while permitting all the follies of humanity to continue behind this smoke screen. The metaphor does not illuminate; it obscures. It does not enable thought; it substitutes for thought. And in political discourse, where thought is already scarce and precious, this substitution is catastrophic.
What the cancer metaphor ultimately accomplishes is the postponement of the moment when we must face our conscience and think rationally about what we are actually proposing. To bomb a city is to kill children. To destroy infrastructure is to deprive the sick of medicine and the hungry of food. To collapse a state is to unleash chaos whose victims will number in the hundreds of thousands. These are not abstractions. They are consequences that the metaphor exists precisely to obscure. When we speak of “treating” a regime, we avoid the word “kill.” When we speak of “excising” a government, we avoid the word “destroy.” The medical vocabulary provides a moral anaesthetic, numbing us to the reality of what we advocate.
The corruption operates in both directions. It is worth noting that the Iranian propaganda machine has itself deployed the cancer metaphor against Israel—and with equal bankruptcy of imagination and equal contempt for the human beings it would sacrifice on the altar of its rhetoric. Both deployments share the same fundamental error: the conviction that those who live under a political arrangement we find abhorrent have thereby forfeited their claims to continued existence. Both assume that political problems admit of surgical solutions. Both are wrong.
The ‘Occupation’ Metaphor and the Logic of Double Standards
The cancer metaphor, however, is not the only instrument of rhetorical corruption at work in contemporary discourse about Iran. There is another metaphor, quieter but no less potent, that has attached itself to the Iranian regime in recent years: the metaphor of occupation. Iran, we are told, is under ‘occupation’—its people subjugated by a force that has seized their land and holds it against their will. The language is striking in its strangeness. Iran has not been invaded. No foreign army sits in its barracks. No external power has drawn its borders anew. The regime, whatever its myriad crimes against its own citizens, is not an occupying force in any sense recognised by international law. It is a domestic political formation—authoritarian, theocratic, brutal in its repressions—but it is not an occupation. To call it one is to engage in a purely rhetorical act, one that borrows the moral clarity of anti-colonial resistance and drapes it over a situation to which it does not apply.
The irony is lacerating. Israel, which maintains what the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, and the overwhelming consensus of international legal scholarship recognise as a military occupation of Palestinian territories, is rarely subjected to the same rhetorical framework by those who deploy the ‘occupation’ metaphor against Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is engulfed in the political rhetoric of terrorist designation, its every action framed as illegitimate; yet the actual, physical, legally recognised occupation of another people’s land by a sovereign state has, over seven decades and countless UN resolutions, never been granted the same moral urgency. Fighting the Iranian regime is presented as self-evidently legitimate—a people rising against their occupier. Fighting an actual occupation, by contrast, remains perpetually contested, perpetually deferred, perpetually hedged with qualifications that the word ‘occupation’ applied to Iran never seems to require.
The ‘occupier’ label, when applied to the Iranian regime, functions as a psychological instrument rather than a descriptive one. It exists to convince its audience that resistance to this regime belongs to the same moral category as resistance to colonial domination—that it is not merely desirable but righteous, not merely political but existential. The metaphor does not describe a reality; it manufactures a permission. And in manufacturing that permission, it quietly erases the case where the metaphor actually applies, where the occupation is not figurative but literal, where the dispossession is not rhetorical but physical. The deep chasm between reality and political depiction here is not an accident. It is the metaphor’s entire purpose: to rearrange moral categories so that what is figurative feels urgent and what is literal feels abstract.
Mirrors, Not Opposites
What emerges from this tangle of competing metaphors—cancer, occupation, terrorism—is an uncomfortable recognition that the Iranian regime and the Israeli state function, in the rhetoric of their respective opponents, as mirrors of one another. Both are called cancers. Both are called occupiers. Both are called existential threats requiring extraordinary measures. Both Iranian and Israeli propaganda machines have likened the other to a malignancy that must be eradicated for civilisation to survive. And neither depiction—neither the Iranian regime’s portrayal of Israel as a cancerous tumour on the body of the Islamic world, nor the Israeli and diaspora portrayal of Iran as a metastasising threat to regional and global order—has led humanity to a better place. They are mirrors, not opposites, and yet they are treated with radically different degrees of seriousness by Western media, by international institutions, and—most troublingly—by the Iranian diaspora itself, which has too often adopted one set of metaphors while remaining blind to the other. The task of intellectual honesty is not to choose between these distorting mirrors but to smash them both.
Toward Honest Language
The alternative to the medical metaphor is not passivity but politics—the difficult, frustrating, often unsatisfying work of engagement, pressure, negotiation, and incremental change. It requires acknowledging that the millions who live under systems we oppose are neither tumours nor accomplices, but human beings whose suffering cannot be the acceptable cost of our ideological satisfaction. It requires, in Keane’s phrase, the “democratisation” of violence—the insistence that means and institutions of violence be publicly accountable, that their deployment be subject to scrutiny and their consequences openly acknowledged.
There is something embarrassing about the cancer metaphor that those who deploy it rarely acknowledge. It reveals a poverty of political imagination, an inability to conceive of solutions that do not involve the destruction of the enemy. It betrays the very desperation it claims to diagnose in others. When we call our opponents cancer, we announce that we have given up on the possibilities of political transformation and settled for the fantasies of annihilation. We have stopped thinking and started merely wanting—wanting the problem to disappear, wanting the enemy to vanish, wanting the complexity of the world to resolve itself into the simplicity of a pathology report.
The most honest response to this temptation is a recognition that both sides of these rhetorical wars—those who call regimes cancer and those who call their opponents the same—have arrived at the same intellectual and moral dead end. Neither has led humanity to a better place. Neither has produced the transformation it promised. Both have contributed to the degradation of political discourse into a competition in dehumanisation, where the prize is the moral permission to treat others as less than human.
We would do better to retire the metaphor entirely—to speak of political formations as political formations, of governments as governments, of human beings as human beings. This is not a retreat from moral clarity but an advance toward it. It is easier to condemn a cancer than to condemn a government; it is easier to advocate excision than to advocate the difficult work of political change. The metaphor flatters our moral self-image while excusing us from moral responsibility. But the children in the rubble do not care whether we called their killers surgeons or soldiers. They are dead either way.
The pathology we should be diagnosing is not in our adversaries but in ourselves: in our willingness to reach for metaphors that transform political problems into medical ones, that excuse violence as treatment, that permit us to sleep at night while advocating positions that would, if enacted, fill morgues and orphanages across the earth. This is the true cancer of political discourse—and unlike the metaphorical diseases we so freely diagnose in others, it is one we might actually cure, if only we could muster the intellectual honesty to recognise its symptoms in ourselves.
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