One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Neatly wrapped-up paragraphs of what in the industry is called “M-copy,” explaining the background of a conflict by listing an act of aggression by one party and then an offsetting one by the other, absent historical context, so as not to be seen as taking sides. A deranged Republican talking point presented with at best mild rebuke because there are only two major political parties in America and one of them just happens to be populated with the sort of people who muse about whether wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.

But this is centrism. This is the high-minded middle ground. The only serious, nuanced position, in such circles, is to plant oneself firmly halfway between what is assumed to be the standard left and standard right. Should one party propose stripping immigrants of all rights and the other propose stripping them of only some rights, the intellectually rigorous thing to do is to consider that what’s best is stripping immigrants of most rights. To compromise.

I’m sure it’s not the case that every editor of every major publication in the West doesn’t give a damn about all those inconvenient Brown people who keep getting killed and maimed by the thousands. But to never see these people in daily life, to never converse with them outside the bounds of interrogation, to never have reason to consider them human in any social sense—these things bleed into the story, or the absence of story. The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the West is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.

What laces the entire racist, nonsensical premise is fear. Everyone knows, instinctively, the recoil the sight of a wasp induces. 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.

When students at the most prestigious universities in North America build encampments in solidarity with Palestine, it’s difficult to believe the institutional response isn’t colored by a sense of betrayal. These young people have been afforded entry into the heart of the system, with all the privileges that entails. That they should jettison such a privilege in favor of a people on the other side of the planet who are able to offer nothing in return—to an ideology fixated on self-interest, it must seem like an embrace of nihilism. In reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.

That so far as the West stands in historical reality, nothing has evolved, nothing has become more enlightened, nothing has been learned. It has always been this way.

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.

One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually. 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.