One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.

To allow oneself to think otherwise risked having to contend with the reality that this whole place lived on top of people who looked just like this man.

the West, these places—or rather ideas of places—became in my imagination the negative space of all I despised about the Middle East:

The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

(The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.)

A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power.

Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.

Jettisoning the requirement to report news in favor of inciting the rage and fear and hatred of your audience before serving them up ads for guns and bunkers is a perfectly functional business model.

More than a few of my former colleagues, in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attacks on Israel, proudly boasted of their support for both Ukraine and Israel.

And that, in turn, forces a reckoning with what the United States has become, or has always been.

In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator.

There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign:

It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.

“Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.”

It doubly defiles the dead, first killing then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute.

In the motion we were handed that day in Gitmo, the thing blacked out was a copy of a New York Times article the defense lawyer had attached so the judge didn’t have to go search it out himself. Someone had decided a story in the most well-known newspaper on the planet was too dangerous for us to read.

Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable.

He was fifteen when he was captured and sent to Gitmo. He will spend the next decade of his life there, awaiting trial.

Myriad conventions and norms that would apply in most any other U.S. courtroom do not exist here. Names of key witnesses are withheld, evidence is withheld, hearsay is allowed.

It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice.

Time and again, various production company executives tell me how perfectly the novel has managed to capture this moment in American life, and I can’t help but think that the exact opposite is true. Something of American life has captured the novel.

It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.

Western power must cater to a sizable swath of people who can be made to care or not care about any issue, any measure of human suffering, so long as it affects the constant availability and prompt delivery of their consumables and conveniences.

(if nothing else at all, the protest sheds light on something I and most everyone in the ballroom that night probably didn’t know: that the Giller Prize’s corporate sponsor, one of Canada’s biggest banks, held a $500 million stake in an Israeli weapons maker).

I marvel at the casual, obvious, but unstated corollary: that there is an Indigenous population being colonized, but that we should let this unpleasantness run its course so we can arrive at true justice in the form of land acknowledgments at every Tel Aviv poetry reading.

He understands what his opponents don’t—that the people who will decide this election have gone well past red meat. They want the body served up alive.

There was a time, mostly forgotten now, when almost every centrist institution in this country bent over backward to describe Donald Trump’s appeal as a function of some kind of “economic anxiety.” The alternative—that millions of Americans want desperately for people who don’t look and live and believe the way they do to suffer without end—was too unpleasant to consider,

They’re still doing it

Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

And yet, I know other people’s fear—as irrational as mine, more irrational than mine—buys everything. It moves armies, obliterates thousands.

But fear is no end in itself: its function here is to allow for the abdication of restraint—nobody has ever been blamed for wanting to swat a wasp. It might have stung.

We prefer our monsters materialized, not made.

On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy.

On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before.

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled.

The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.

As a matter of course, Western officials are generally untroubled when they say things like this, that a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people.

When the world’s wealthiest nations decide, on the flimsiest pretext, to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow, hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure. But when voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the reelection of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded rubes at best, if not potential enablers of a fascist takeover of Western democracy.

cannot be afforded an all-encompassing right not to participate.

Not when the entire system depends, in a very existential sense, on continued participation, on e...

In the midst of the world’s first livestreamed genocide, when plain before the eyes of anyone who cares to look are shown the most visceral details, one of the few things that inspires any real panic on the part of most Western power centers is the prospect of reduced shipping activity through the Red Sea.

It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more.

But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more?

I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.

The machine swallows life and spits out convenience.

Terms like “economic terrorism” are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn’t sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced.

One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history.

There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well-meaning folks. Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.

but until then, until that very last moment, it’s important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.