One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence.

It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence.

American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free.

That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.

But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.

A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.

For someone fortunate enough to be born wearing the boot, the capacity for mercy may well extend only to how hard one chooses to step on the neck.

Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive.