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.

The soldiers on the corner did not know this. 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.

Words exist only in hindsight; time passes over and around them like water along a canyon floor. In the year or so between when I write these words and when they are published, perhaps so many innocent people will have been killed, so many mass graves discovered, that it will not be so controversial to state plainly what is plainly known.

People go to see the president in the White House for what they know is only a meaningless photo op and yet, in the hopes of getting him to see, to do something, anything, they show him pictures of the mangled bodies of children. It doesn’t work. There is no transaction to be had; these dead kids offer nothing in return.

How long a society can function under such a journalistic model before deteriorating into something unsalvageable is an open question. 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. Listing one position and then the other and letting the reader make up their own mind fails entirely in the face of plain bad faith. The result is absurdity: articles in which the reporter has had to pretzel their way to a level playing field between the claim that fewer guns would reduce gun violence and the claim that more guns will reduce gun violence.

Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming, cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.

And it occurs to me then, maybe for the first time in my life, that when Rambo leveled that small Washington town, or when Hunter S. Thompson made the cop chase him for miles along the desert highway just for the hell of it, it was never just an expression of ballsiness or rebellion or righteous anything. What the men who’d lived or dreamed up these stories understood was that the plausibility of such transgression depended on who the system being rebelled against was made to serve. 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.

Instead, as the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes onto the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing. A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count. Soon, Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis. As their eradication continues, they must transform into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened. Everyone involved—the dead, their killers, the arbiters of the exchange rate—knows this for what it is.

And yet 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. There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.

After chiding activists who warned years ago of the Republican Party’s descent into outright fascism, mainstream Democrats have now fully embraced the accusation. It’s become difficult to find a single Democratic campaign appeal that doesn’t lean hard on the warning that the Trump wing of the GOP—which is now the only viable wing of the GOP—represents an existential threat to democracy, the United States itself. Fight it, then. Propose something to meet the nature of the moment. It can’t be the case both that the Supreme Court is an unaccountable neoconservative body intent on rendering the whole country unrecognizable and that there’s simply no way to do anything significant about it. It can’t be that climate change is the single most important issue facing the world, with our entire species at risk, and drilling licenses need to continue. It can’t be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight, and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.

Earlier the same day, demonstrators shut down the bridges into Manhattan. As with all such acts of disobedience, the usual cavalry of talking heads emerges to note that these protests only inconvenience people, and that inconveniencing people is not an effective way to change their minds. Never is this logic applied to the past, to the demonstrations that shut down bridges to call for an end to segregation, for example. Because if applied to a moment already deemed righteous in hindsight, such an argument would be shown immediately for its spinelessness. But for now, it’s fine. 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.

It is evident now, in this latest round of mass killing, that the machinery of state violence benefits just as greatly from the dehumanizing power of what is assumed as much as it does from what is said. The Bush- and Obama-era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies to come of the post-9/11 years, and for good reason. It doubly defiles the dead, first killing then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute. It also renders them untouchable in polite society. Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication are labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

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.

There’s a convenience to having modular opinions; it’s why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel.

But so long as there exists a Western self-conception that demands the appearance of purity at all times, it should be known that what shocks the most isn’t the cruelty or indifference. Many people’s governments are cruel, many people’s governments are indifferent. It’s this relentless parachuting of virtue. It’s these speeches and statements of eloquently stated concern for human rights and freedom and the demand that those who abuse human rights or withhold freedom be held to account. And it’s the way every ideal turns vaporous the moment it threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches and statements, the moment it threatens even the most frivolous parcel of self-interest. What good are words, severed from anything real?

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?

A few months into the genocide, protesters are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events. Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties—all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.

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.

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. And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

One of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence. 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 this extreme reluctance to acknowledge, let alone study, the kaleidoscopic pathology of terror isn’t just driven by the oft-stated fear that to try to understand something is inseparable from pledging allegiance to it. 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.

Immigrants are supposed to be grateful. The narrative arc of immigration, in which one flees their own failing society to come to a better place, a country that was under no obligation to accept them but did, demands perpetual gratitude. And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: 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.

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.

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.

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.

The obvious charge of hypocrisy looms over this work, always. Refrain from engaging with one organization because of its ties to a genocide but not the uncountable number of other organizations who do as well? Call for divestment from fossil fuel companies and yet still use electricity? Agitate for a better world in any way and yet continue to exist within it? The purpose of this kind of accusation is never moral concern. To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

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.