One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

In the hierarchy of migration, “expat” is largely reserved for white Westerners who leave their homes for another country, usually because the money’s better there. When other people do this, they might be deemed “aliens” or “illegals” or at best “economic migrants.” As with most criteria of segregation, everyone knows, instinctively, how they will be labeled. It’s a matter of self-preservation, to know.)

One of them stopped my father. Your papers, he said. My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor. Your papers, he repeated.

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.

for a life stunted by a particular kind of repression, the driving force will never be toward something better, but away from something worse.

I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom. The freedom to become something better than what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear. And more than any of these things, the freedom to be left alone.

the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child),

The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

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.

They say what you’re supposed to do, in this line of work, is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I heard that saying a lot, as a young journalist. Believed in it, too. It’s a quote originally from a piece of fiction, spoken by a character who can’t stand the press.

In the modern, well-dressed definition, adhered to in one form or another at almost every major newspaper, the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality. 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. To maintain both these realities at the same time—of the neutral agitator—requires a cognitive dissonance that can be seen in every corner of the industry. In much of the world, the most prestigious journalism prizes honor public service, which is to say stories that prompt institutional change, send a corrupt mayor to jail, or force the ending of an unjust policy. But journalists themselves cannot call for justice.

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. The profession of journalism necessitates a capacity to understand things, and all who watched the killings understood what was happening.

political coverage, where the chief concern of so many stories is not the substance of the policy proposal but the way it moves the polls. It’s a bizarre, destructive form of pragmatism—the jettisoning of moral faculties in favor of a near-Machiavellian view of the world.

early in the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump musing about forcing American Muslims to carry special identification cards—a proposal that is by any honest measure reminiscent of the preamble to some of history’s worst atrocities. Hillary Clinton condemned the idea and returned to her talking point about how American Muslims were important allies in the War on Terror, the government’s “eyes and ears” on the front lines of radicalization and extremism. That’s not why such a proposal deserves condemnation. It deserves condemnation because it is morally repugnant. But morals complicate the matter. They introduce an obligation to oppose. They also force everyone involved to confront the fact that a significant swath of the American electorate does indeed consider the affected group to be so threatening, so inherently barbaric, that making them carry special identification cards becomes perfectly acceptable. And that, in turn, forces a reckoning with what the United States has become, or has always been.

instead, the coverage shifts to a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on the poll numbers. Everything becomes a horse race. How long a society can function under such a journalistic model before deteriorating into something unsalvageable is an open question.

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.

As I write this, Palestinian reporters are in effect the world’s sole source of information about the reality of the obliteration of Gaza, the plain truth of the horror in the face of a mass propagandist effort that at one point included the president of the United States claiming to have seen pictures of dead babies he never saw, claiming a United States ally did not bomb a hospital among the myriad hospitals it now regularly bombs.

The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

there is a deranged honesty about the cult to which the likes of Pence—and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who signed her own message, “Finish them!,” to similar bombs—belong. American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free.

For now, a motorist made late for work or a colonizer’s portrait disfigured provokes more of a political response than any number of dead foreign kids can.

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.

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 is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.

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.

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.

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.

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. There’s no avenue but him to power, and no principle worth holding on to in power’s stead.

This chasm between the thing one pretends to be and the thing one really is—it’s not an exclusively Republican phenomenon.

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. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade’s time, will be more moderate and reasonable? When will any Democratic candidate not be able to say: Elect me or they will dismantle everything, will wreak unimaginable havoc, unbelievable cruelty.

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?

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.

the notion that people simply aren’t prepared for democracy is a fundamental rhetorical tool of failing regimes.

There’s immense persuasive power to the notion that the only alternative to mainstream Democratic politics is fascistic Republicanism. Who are Muslim Americans going to turn to? The Arab authoritarians from whom so many of them escaped? China, where Muslims are regularly thrown into concentration camps? Russia, where political opponents are assassinated as a matter of course?

consider the gaggle of world-famous sports stars who’ve happily sided with murderous regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia, helping whitewash the government’s image in exchange for not much more than money.

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.

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.

I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.

there exists a massive gap between the empty statements of the powerful in support of justice and the application of actual justice.

Power absent ethics rests on an unshakable ability and desire to punish active resistance—to beat and arrest and try to ruin the lives of people who block freeways and set up encampments and confront lawmakers. But such power has no idea what to do against negative resistance, against someone who refuses to buy or attend or align, who simply says: I will not be part of this. Against the one who walks away.

In mid-February 2024, the United States once again vetoes a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Most everyone sees it coming, and for all the rhetorical backlash afterward, nobody seriously believes the administration endorsing this genocide is going to suddenly participate in even a ventriloquism of concern. The image that once again graces most articles about the veto is of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, raising her hand. This is not the first time she has done this, sinking a ceasefire resolution on the grounds that it might jeopardize U.S. efforts to bring lasting peace to the region. 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.

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.

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? But there is a use, always.

How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it?

a business magazine I used to freelance for named its CEO of the year: an airline executive whose hallmark achievement was figuring out a way to offload his workers’ pension and health benefits, thereby doing something truly spectacular to the company’s financial fortunes.

Everywhere there is a great rage simmering, boiling over, and everything feels like an argument. But there are no arguments to be had anymore. I traverse the days, send the air back and forth in the shape of words with this person or that. Some agree, some don’t but are careful not to make things uncomfortable. Some seem to have no opinion at all, nothing they can’t ditch or rearrange at a moment’s notice.

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.