One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award

by Omar El Akkad

Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.

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

Something has ended here. But something else begins. The dead dig wells in the living.

Something has ended here. But something else begins. The dead dig wells in the living.

My daughter arranges them just so, gives each its space, starts building them a park. She turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.

She turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.

The endless footage on CNN that at first provoked such shock—these shadowed Baghdad cityscapes detonating sporadically in balls of pale white light—soon caused no reaction at all. 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.

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

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.

We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.

Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

The mind outlines better than it shades.

National anthems and military flyovers and little flag lapel pins are all well and good, but for a life stunted by a particular kind of repression, the driving force will never be toward something better, but away from something worse. The harbor never as safe as the water is cold.

It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future.

Almost every day an influential opinion columnist or think tank expert or spokesperson for the president of the United States will feign outrage at how hurtful words such as “genocide” and “occupation” are, how disparaging, how uncouth.

Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.

As it stands, the death toll is quite literally uncountable—tens or hundreds of thousands of people, likely tens or hundreds of thousands more to be found under the rubble, or wasted away from disease and starvation imposed by an occupation force that seeks, actively and for all to see, their expulsion or else extermination.

Whatever mainstream Western liberalism is—and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them—it subscribes to this calculus.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.

What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this. Here, then, is an account of an ending.

A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence.

When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility.

one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.

“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.”

Whenever I am told to go back to where I came from, I can’t help but think: Why don’t you go where I came from? You’d love it there.)

In so many of the most powerful nations on earth, utter fascists either maintain immense power or threaten to snatch it. But as much as the mainstream liberal parties might be far less deranged and cruel than their right-wing opponents on virtually every policy issue, it is the case of Palestinian suffering—or more precisely, utter indifference to it—where the two sides seem to be most in agreement.

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be.

Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue—it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.

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.

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. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called anti-Semites and terrorist-supporters.

It suddenly becomes insufficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?

It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. 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 if inoffensive centrism is seen to be concerned with these things only in as far as it reflects on the centrist’s self-image, if the Hillary Clintons of the world can muster great outrage at the fortunes of the Barbie movie at the Oscars but nothing at population-wide military murder sprees, then every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there’s no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do.

The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.

Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one’s soul. They will instead support no

one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this.

No, I don’t want a candidate who’s the embodiment of me. I want a candidate who doesn’t bankroll genocide.

One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways.

But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it’s our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

We don’t like to talk about these things. We prefer our monsters materialized, not made.

But terrorism requires a distance between state and perpetrator wide enough to fit a different kind of fear. The kind of fear that justifies the creation of entirely new laws, new modes of detention, new apparatuses of surveillance, anything, anything at all.

This is what we are to do, always and to the exclusion of all else: condemn, apologize for, retreat into silence about any atrocity committed by anyone other than those to whom we are perpetually assumed allegiant.

There exists no other remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.

How does one finish the sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

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.