One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. 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. I tell stories for a living, and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers, makes of their narrative a neat reflexive arc in which it was always understood, by the colonized and (this part implied) the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.

Instead, something else changes most radically in the psychology of someone who leaves home: a relative distance between the person one is and the person they must become.

Palestinians in Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas.

A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count.

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

Of all the aftereffects of the War on Terror years, the most frequently underestimated is the heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence.

This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.

(As a matter of tactics, it is instructive to know that 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. As a matter of moral health, the same knowledge is horrifying.)

But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?

But the moral prohibition on siding with any administration that endorses genocide will force a different flavor of the exact same logic that centrist liberalism has depended on for so long: hold your nose and align with the least worst thing. Only the least worst thing will no longer be the mild, ethics-agnostic emptiness of modern Western liberalism, nor will it be the multitude of barbaric authoritarians and their secret prisons. It will be communal solidarity, or else nothing, a walking away from all of this.

So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.

Most anyone remotely informed has by now either seen the mountain of evidence that lays bare the scale of the carnage or has actively chosen to look away from it. Either way, they know what this is.

One of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence. The argument that violence in any form debases us and marks the instant failure of all involved is much more difficult to make when the state regularly engages in or approves of wholesale violence against civilians and combatants alike.

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.

For months I’ve watched presidents and prime ministers balk at calling for a ceasefire that most of their electorate supports, for fear that trying to end a genocide might in some way prove politically disadvantageous. For months I’ve watched this utter moral emptiness, which in such plain, undisguised form often feels so much more insidious than active support of this horror.

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.

Active resistance—showing up to protests and speaking out and working to make change even at the smallest levels, the school boards and town councils—matters. Negative resistance—refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold—matters. And yet there are days when both negative and active resistance feel pointless. A political system that won’t restrict firearms even after a shooter massacres classrooms full of children, a system that shrugs when a regime murders and dismembers a journalist because that regime controls an inordinate amount of oil, a system that won’t flinch at the images of starving babies when it has the power to save their lives—what manner of resistance can’t such a system learn to abide? What use is any of it, what use?

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

The machine swallows life and spits out convenience. If liberalism has finally decided it is safe enough to consider the Black people whose labor built the machine as human, and the Indigenous people whose obliteration made room for the machine as human, and maybe the distant foreigners who sew our clothes and solder our motherboards might be human, and the inconvenient occupied whose land and water might hold resources we implicitly know but cannot explicitly say would be so much better used in service of the civilized world might be human, and if even the natural world and its inhabitants deserve the rights of humans—well, what’s left to feed the machine?

What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. 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. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students’ demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicit with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees. The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward—never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing—it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.

increasing tolerance for worse.

Unconfronted, this kind of negation will not remain confined to widgets or labor or even the economic world. When the bigger wildfires come—as they already have—the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity. When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing. In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand.

There is a numb, overriding grief that colors life in the audience to a slaughter. And like all measures of grief, it is born not of some exotic incendiary impulse, but of the most plain, unadorned knowing. I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, to whom I will never speak again so long as I can help it. It’s the people who said nothing, who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk to it, a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It’s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience.

I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag is supposed to have said about the great lesson of the Second World War: that 10 percent of people are fundamentally good, 10 are fundamentally evil, and the other 80 swayable in either direction. I don’t know if I agree. There are young people all over the West risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers, to protest the killing. There are Jews being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace. There are Indigenous communities who have suffered the Western world’s most unspeakable atrocities and still find the will to stand up for an occupied land on the other side of the planet, who recognize a thing for what it is. I think instead of Virginia Woolf’s conversation with that lawyer over the images of the war’s dead: I cannot argue with you, cannot convince you of anything, because when you and I look at these pictures we see, fundamentally, different things.

It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating.

When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone. There will always be feigned shock at how bad things really were, how we couldn’t have possibly known. 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.

There will be more moments of terror, both state-sanctioned and coldly, brutally individual. Only some of these acts will be formally labeled terror, though, because in the hierarchy of the Western world—of the world entire—revenge is a carefully delineated thing, around which whole histories and peoples must be ordered to make certain violence regrettable but understandable and other violence savage and infinitely punishable. But none of this changes the reality that revenge has always been a universal resource. When the state enacts it, it will be deemed proportional and measured. When the individual does, it will mark a brand-new starting point of history and everyone who looks or sounds or in any way resembles the author of that violence will be commanded in perpetuity to condemn it, knowing full well no amount of condemnation will ever be enough. One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made of life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on ...