One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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.

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.

Fear obscures the necessity of its causing. No one has ever been unjustifiably afraid, not in their own mind. An old college professor of mine once said a fundamental tenet of logic theory is that, from a false premise, any implication is true. Fear functions this way, too, causes the whole of the world to flower in limitless, terrible possibility.

It has always been this way—not just in this moment, this culmination of so many previous moments, but as a precondition of existence within a system whose currency of justification is fear. And it is a currency. The exchange rate is very real.

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. Instead, the case for nonviolence becomes, in the ugliest way, pragmatic: the state wants violence, because in that playing field it maintains every advantage, from bigger guns to total immunity to the privilege of perpetual victimhood.

Maybe the real fear is that, when one begins to consider the root systems of small-scale, sometimes state-supported, but often stateless evil, there’s an obligation to apply the same rigor to the large-scale machinery of imperial evil. And in doing so, one might find that what drives and absolves the state of so much evil isn’t the fear that not doing so will allow some terrorist to destroy the fabric of free society. But rather that the evil itself is necessary to the system it protects. That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.

Violence comes later, most often at the hands of someone who reads enough of these pieces and decides to act explicitly on what is only implicitly implied. The point, the fundamental prerequisite, is to say: Against those people, those lesser people, anything can be justifiably done. The point is to flaunt permission.

Middle East peace process. Its failure, he argued in passing, wasn’t a failure of Israeli compromise or intent, but rather one of Palestinian imagination. What this particular bromide is intended to mean, when Western officials trot it out time and time again, is that one party in these proceedings got a little too big for its britches, and if these perpetually angry people only understood the generosity with which they were being treated, they would not be in this mess. Anyone who has ever been forced to contend with the empire’s footprint knows this argument by heart. We treat you so much better than we have to; why are you so angry? Why did you make us do this to you?

Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King? I’ve heard said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.

But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.

I want to live in a world where the worst thing imaginable is a protest nearing a hospital. I want the narcotic capacity to unsee mangled bodies, surgeons sniped in their operating room, a handcuffed prisoner ordered into a hospital to tell everyone to leave and then, on his return outside, executed—so that I too might calibrate my condemnations accordingly. It would be good to live in that world.

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.

In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.

And then I watch an interview with a Palestinian child who is asked what she misses most and answers: Bread.

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.

Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.”

No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.

Perhaps that is what this all comes to, in the end, some pathetic adherence to the idea that certain peoples simply need to be crushed. But whoever subscribes to this idea should at least have the spine to embrace it. To look upon the body of the little girl hanging from the wall, limbs severed by the force of the blast, and say: I’m fine with this, I am this. At least there’d be some measure of honesty in it.

The imaginative obligation of progress is infinite. A person the system was never built to serve bears the responsibility of dreaming up a better one, and who can say how much better? So many progressive movements splinter this way. Power bends even a little, and for some that’s good enough. Others want more. Still others want the entire system demolished. A person the system was built to serve bears no such responsibility, has no reason to imagine anything better.

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.

In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames.

American War,