One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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

Young, bored, tasked with what authoritarian regimes have ordered young, bored soldiers to do since time immemorial—stand there projecting the violent underpinning of political power—they also didn’t care.

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?

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

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.

One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of political opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election campaign, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something greater. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power. History is a debris field of such moments.

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.

Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust or anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. 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.

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.

The most glaring example in the Western world is Fox News, an entity that more than any other has normalized the practice of severing any relationship between the truth and what one wishes the truth to be. It’s a common refrain that the news industry has failed to come up with a functioning business model in the Internet age, but that’s not entirely true. 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. It might not be journalism, might be the opposite of journalism, but the checks clear.

Yet journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is. A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence.

When Russian authorities detained and eventually convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in an obvious sham of a judicial process, almost every Western media outlet called it what it was. But as the Israeli military wiped out both Palestinian journalists and their entire families in a deliberate campaign to silence the flow of information out of Gaza, virtually all the same colleagues, all the same outlets, took a very different approach.

But the entire notion of reporter as referee/announcer/scorekeeper, even if it has any merit, requires the game on the field to be played in accordance with some set of rules. It has no capacity to deal with players who kneecap their opponents in the locker room, who have no interest in the rules or even the game itself.

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.

For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day. That most every major Western journalism prize that emerges from the coverage of this onslaught will overlook or at best offer glancing recognition of the work of men and women like Dahdouh for fear of being labeled biased is as clear an indictment of the industry’s cracked moral compass as exists anywhere.

Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble—it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences.

And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I begin to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.

And then I watch former vice president Mike Pence write messages of support on the side of bombs. He smiles as he does this, as he commits his name and whatever exists of his conscience to the machinery of wholesale murder. The people around him smile. They take pictures. Again, there is about the grotesquerie a current of catharsis, a lightness akin to the freeing of a pants button after a heavy meal, making peace with insatiable appetite.

Seven months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when the same newspaper publishes and then quickly deletes a post titled “When Genocide Is Permissible,” the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably sees as a hallmark of its own enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing—a premise that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete vocabulary of violence.

What power assumes, ultimately, is that all those who weren’t directly affected by this, who only had to bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar, will move on, will forget.

But even the most sheltered will at least be given reason to reconsider what any system capable of justifying such things can do. When a man signs his name to a bomb and smiles, who that bomb is used to kill isn’t even an afterthought. It can’t be.

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

Don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the reality that a Trump administration would be so much worse. That this campaign tactic reemerges every election cycle is a testament to its effectiveness. It is not quite accurate to say the Republican Party is more destructive on virtually every domestic and foreign policy issue, because such a statement would imply that the party has any interest in policy as it exists in normal, civil society.

(It’s a fascinating directive, Go back to where you came from. One can’t help but wonder how changed the world would be had the ancestors of the same people who use that phrase now heeded the same advice then. Overwhelmingly, it’s employed against anyone who tries to make use of the freedoms on which the West so prides itself: the freedom to speak and to criticize, to hold power accountable. In this way, it shares a deep bond with the approach to free expression that can be found in most dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the places so many immigrants fled: You are free to say so long as what you say is acceptable. 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.

Either hundreds of millions of people have always been predisposed to the lure of the fascist, in which case the entire democratic endeavor is doomed anyway, or something of corporate liberalism has brought us here. Whatever the quality of its rhetoric, any politics that buckles at the prospect of even mildly inconveniencing the rich, or resisting an ally’s genocidal intentions, will always face an uphill battle against a politics that actively embraces malice. “Yes We Can” is a conditional. “Yes We Will” is not.

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 cla...

Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated.

Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable. It’s not only that the absence of information allows those complicit in but unaffected by wrongdoing to look away. The silence itself becomes an empty canvas, onto which any fantasy can be painted.

The narrative—as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other—demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, 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.

If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

What good are words, severed from anything real?

When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved.

The Renaissance artists had their many-castled benefactors, why can’t we have ours? Because sometimes the powerful commit or condone or bankroll acts of unspeakable evil, and any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It’s a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.

“I want to be like those poets who care about the moon,” the Palestinian American poet Noor Hindi writes. The poem is titled “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.”

The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood—only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque—what we do to one another so grotesque—that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

The main event sees a CNN moderator lob questions at nine Republican hopefuls, all of whom take turns doing the sort of thing Republicans have been doing for most of the twenty-first century, painting the United States as simultaneously the greatest country on earth and a nightmare place. An enormously powerful, God-chosen nation in which families are too scared to leave their houses at night.

Priebus, like most Republican Party insiders, hates Donald Trump. It is an ongoing mockery of the entire Republican establishment that this man is so thoroughly humiliating what Priebus and his ilk have tried to paint as the deepest, most qualified lineup of candidates in American history.

Priebus wants us all to know, to believe, that this early momentum won’t last. Order will be restored. The glaring chasm between the dignified thing Republicanism pretends to be and the exclusively hate-catering thing it really is will soon stop being so glaring. Within a few months, most every one of these party insiders will roll over, pledge fealty to a man they privately despise.

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, too much an indictment of something bigger than one man’s campaign. Even years later, as the same man, now convicted or indicted for a litany of crimes, still easily controls the base of the Republican Party, there is great care on the part of many mainstream liberals to focus on the destructive potential of Trump as a singular entity, a freak storm somehow returned to shore, rather than a symptom of an entirely different climate.

Among the more troubling trends of twenty-first-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim. Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center.

Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?

A writer friend of mine describes it as cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s a hackneyed phrase for a writer to rely on, but I can’t stop thinking about it, the privilege implicit in its assumptions: ownership of body, agency over mutilation.

Ignore, for a moment, the people engaged most directly in the violence. Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you’ll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you’ll see a childish little smirk. It’s the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now.

But there were always going to be consequences. The fascists whose ranks exert such outsize influence on Republican politics have come to understand that the veneer of liberalism is a deeply vulnerable thing. Its perfunctory concern with rhetorical evenhandedness gives even the most obviously bad-faith allegation influence. The result is an endless stream of distractions, fantastical claims, and charges on which, in the name of fairness, countless ink is spilled, debates had. Again, what matters is not the damage done when such nonsense is given oxygen, but the idea of being a person who gives all ideas a fair shake. Beyond the stream of distractions, there is a much more existential vulnerability. Whatever derangement currently occupies conservative American politics is, at least, something of very real consequence: the minority groups they want to legislate out of every facet of society, the books they want to ban, the mechanisms of democracy they want to subvert—none of it is hypothetical. 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.

Much like the insidious foreign plot, the notion that people simply aren’t prepared for democracy is a fundamental rhetorical tool of failing regimes. Whatever this is might feel oppressive, the argument goes, but you have no idea how much worse abandoning this way of doing things will be.