It is only recently that I have discovered Omar El Akkad and his indescribably excellent and, for me, utterly profound book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This — which I am now nearly finished reading. I cannot put it down, no matter how heart wrenching. Truly a profound life changing work. And so vital.
I am moved now to share this interview from last year and to spread the word again and again about this book and its author because it is hard to wake up from our delusions in a society where from birth we are immersed in deadening propaganda, indoctrination, ignorance, and illusions. It is my strong belief that we need to support each other and spread the word about what will empower, what will help us remember what we have forgotten, what will break our hearts and minds open, what will move us to act and truly care about the welfare of all life on Earth, what will support us in authentically and increasingly walking our talk related to nonviolence and alleviating suffering in ourselves and our world, and what will facilitate our capacity to extricate ourselves one step at a time day after day from the poisonous systems that want us to stay asleep.
It is no wonder that being "woke" is such a threat to the powerful. Because as we increasingly awaken from our separateness and tragically high tolerance for colluding in violence and turning away, we will need to join with everyone else who is awakening from our long individual and collective slumber and act on behalf of ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and all of our planetary sisters and brothers everywhere. Bless those like Omar El Akkad and Chris Hedges for being such strong conduits for our awakening. And I passionately agree with Omar when he says that "you have to decide what the hell it means to you to be human." We all need to decide. May we decide wisely and with great love. 🙏💜 Molly
Egyptian-Canadian novelist and author Omar El Akkad reckons with the genocide in Gaza through personal stories of the past and analysis of the present in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue were used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad details these stories in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.
These are excerpts from this interview and transcript that I am called to highlight:
Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language. A language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence as though living was an aberration. And this language might protect the empire's most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism, the alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home, without school, without hospital, and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism.
One of the things they sort of informed in terms of my worldview is that the physical layer of violence in wartime or in what might be described as peacetime, even though it isn't, can't stand in a vacuum. It can't stand on its own. It needs other layers holding it up. And one of those layers is linguistic violence, euphemistic violence, the violence of calling a thing something other than what it is, collateral damage instead of, oops we bombed a wedding party. And that you see, I mean, in varying degrees of intensity, particularly over the last 25 years or so, but in the last year and change, it's had this almost numbing quality to it where it's not just the general from the invading army telling you this. It's the anchor on the nightly news describing a little girl as a young lady who collided with a bullet. What the hell does any of that mean, right? But it's necessary because fundamentally what you're trying to do is not represent the situation as it is. What you're trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience. All of this essentially works the moment somebody in the privileged side of the world is able to say, yeah, that's also complicated and turn away from it. That's all they're being asked to do. And this is the language that facilitates that.
The distance that you can impose with this kind of language is so modular. You end up in a situation where you can apply this language to anybody whose presence, whose existence is inconvenient to the project. And I mean, we're going to see this, right? We're going to see this with the language being used by the government of the United States with regards to migrants, over the next four years is going to use the same kind of anesthetic language. And it's almost the employment of language for the exact opposite of what language is supposed to do. There's supposed to be some concern with precision here, with using the word that most closely describes the thing. And this is the exact opposite of that. And it cannot be said to be done accidentally. This is an incredibly deliberate kind of linguistic malpractice. And overwhelmingly, it works. Overwhelmingly. You call someone an enemy combatant, and who the hell wants to stand up for an enemy combatant? Who wants to be that person? You call someone a terrorist after the fact, they're dead, they can't defend themselves. Maybe they were a terrorist. Maybe they were this incredibly evil person. I don't want my reputation to be destroyed, standing up for a kind of person like that. So overwhelmingly all evidence is that this kind of thing works. And so I can fully understand why institutions of all kinds, not just the military, not just the government, would rely on this. It's the fastest way to avoid dealing with something that would otherwise make very privileged people very uncomfortable.
I think makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options. You are either wearing the boot or you're having your neck stepped on. And so to speak up on behalf of anybody who's having their neck stepped on is immediately assumed to mean, you want to step on my neck. Those are the only sort of worldviews that are acceptable under that ordering of the world. And it's disastrous, because the obligations put on somebody who's trying to imagine a better world are unlimited. If you and I both want something better than this, I guarantee you within five minutes of talking about it, we will have some kind of disagreement as to what better looks like, because the imaginative obligations placed on us are infinite. Somebody who is served by the system doesn't have to imagine anything else and so can safely live within the confines of this fantasy where, yes, either these people will be killed or those people will be killed. Either this genocide happens this way or an even worse genocide is going to happen. And it is such imaginative poverty. And it's applicable to virtually every facet of life under an empire. It has to be this way because somebody has to do the killing and it may as well be us.
It 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 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.
And that is such an important part of the entire project. We can all be sorry afterwards. The taking happens now and the apology comes later. It's a hallmark of every colonial society. The thing that makes it so dangerous to acknowledge right now is that we're not after the fact. We're in the middle of the fact. And so the people who disagree with the content of this book or with the assertion of that title are going to disagree vehemently until one day they don't have to. And then they're going to acknowledge it and there will be no repercussions and we can sit around and listen to a very flowery land acknowledgement when it's too late to do anything about it.
Where the hell are these fruits and vegetables in my grocery store coming from, and whose life is being made miserable to provide this? Well, just don't think about it. There is people whose non-existence is central to your privilege of daily existence. All you have to do is not think about them. All you have to do is look away.
Whose non-existence is central to this project? And I've asked that about every society I've been a part of, every society I've ever looked at since that point. Because not only does it happen everywhere to certain degrees, it is so easy to normalize.
More than a few of my former colleagues in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attacks on Israel proudly boasted of their support for both Ukraine and Israel. When Russian authorities detained and eventually convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has since been released, 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. The profession of journalism necessitates a capacity to understand things, and all who watch the killings understood what was happening.
You have to believe in something. You have to believe that you are in this to cause positive change. And yet there is a part of the spectrum where the switch can be flipped. And suddenly you have to be sort of capital O, objective and neutral, whatever those terms mean. And you have to shut off the part of you that would result in the best, most important kind of journalism.
And I think one of the things about the situation in Gaza where you're watching this ongoing genocide, is that rarely in my life have I seen the switch flipped so quickly and so flagrantly. You had the immediate juxtaposition of what journalists are allowed to say about Ukraine. You had the immediacy of these being journalists that are being killed. These aren't members of another profession even. These are your colleagues. And suddenly you see the switch flipped. And, I mean, the result is not only sort of detrimental to the souls of the people who are involved in this, or guess, non-involved. It also creates some real garbage journalism. I mean, you can see the tortured constructions in some of these headlines, you know, bullet collides with lives lost, the flower massacre headlines, as though the bags of flour had committed the massacre. I mean, the whole thing just results in almost cartoonishly bad journalism. And people are okay with it because the alternative is personal consequences, the alternative is institutional consequences. Somebody might pull an ad, somebody might pull access. Whereas if you do subscribe to this and you do use this tortured passive construction, yeah, maybe somebody will yell at you on Twitter. You know, journalists are very well-versed, I think, in weighing consequences. We sort of have to be. And in this case, the relative consequences are clear. You could lose your job. You could lose your livelihood on one hand. On the other hand, you could get yelled at by somebody on a social media platform or something like that. It's not—I can see how the case is made internally, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it.
Which, to be perfectly honest with you, this is how I behaved for most of my life. You know, there have been several elections where I looked at the ballot and saw an R next to somebody's name and voted for whoever the hell had the best chance against that R. I think one of the things that has become, that became really clear over the last year and change is that for some people there is a hard line after which I can no longer do that, after which this idea of relative evil is consumed by absolute evil. And for me and for I think a lot of people, a genocide is that point. Over the last year, I have become conditioned that whenever I see a picture of a smiling child on my social media feed, that is probably there because that child has just been murdered, dismembered, or is starving to death.
I cannot go from that mode, just as a human being, just as somebody with a soul, and I'm sure your listeners will disagree with me on a million political points, but setting all of that aside, just as a human being, I cannot go from that to voting for an administration that would allow or bankroll or cheerlead for this and say to myself that, well, at least I'm voting for the lesser of two evils. I know the Trump administration is evil. I know Republican politics has become a kind of deranged fascist cult. I get all of this.
But at some point, you have to decide what the hell it means to you to be human. And for me, I cannot continue to think of myself as human and then casually vote for somebody who would allow something like this to happen. And I've lost friends over this and I can see where they're coming from, right? I had a friend who talked about this idea of, we need to vote for Harris and then push her on Gaza and then push her on climate change and then do all of this stuff. And I thought, you know, if that works for you, fantastic. Do your thing, I guess. But also, I'm not 100% sure that you're going to be pushing for any of this stuff. I think that you're either horrified by what has happened or you're not. And if you're not, that's okay. That's your life. But we are on opposite ends of a chasm. And it precludes me from voting for this person.
I think one of the sort of hallmarks of Republican politics over the last 20 years is that you could safely go back a decade or so and take any piece of ideology or policy proposal that was previously on the fringe, and now it will be in the center, now it will be in the mainstream. And that kind of derangement has been ongoing for a very long time. And I think instead of sort of standing in opposition to that, there has been an impulse within mainstream progressive liberal democratic circles to sort of present oneself as a kind of endless centrist—I'm high minded, I'm above it all, I find the center position and that's the correct one to take. And I think at some point everybody in the right wing realized that you could take advantage of this and just push things further to the right, further towards fascism. And these very same people will gladly move further to the right alongside you because they want to remain in the center. It's just that the center keeps changing. I've heard variations of this argument in every part of the world.
I think this idea of tethering yourself to being slightly less evil than the most evil thing essentially becomes indistinguishable from that over time.
I describe myself as a pacifist, as a fairly committed proponent of nonviolence. But I have the privilege of saying those words in a relative vacuum, a vacuum created by the fact that I live on the launching end of the bombs. I live within the heart of the empire.
But I'm watching, daily, incredible acts of solidarity. I'm watching Jewish folks shut down one of the biggest train stations in the world, calling for solidarity in opposition to the oppression of people of another religion on the other side of the planet. I'm watching people exercise acts of love at great personal risk. You don't chain yourself to the gate of a weapons manufacturer and expect to get away scot-free. I've watched people go into a killing field and practice surgery to ease the suffering of children. I mean, there are immense acts of love happening right now.
But what I am no longer interested in is love as a form of institutional camouflage. I'm no longer interested in that. I'm no longer interested in stories that talk about how everything was great at the end after all the bad stuff happened. I am interested in that active form of love that is trying to stop the bad thing from happening right now. And I'm seeing so many examples of it and it is the one thing keeping me going.
Yeah, I often go back to, I was on this panel once, it was for a climate essay anthology, and the final question of the panel was something like, where do you derive hope? Where do you get your hope from? And that sort of thing. And people gave the sort of answers you'd expect, except the last guy. The last guy, his house had just burned down in the California wildfires. And he said something like, there is no hope. We've gone too far. We've done too much damage. But we must act as though there is. And I think about that a lot.
We are obligated to give a damn about one another. We are obligated to want something better than this. I think we're obligated to love one another even in this incredibly cruel moment and this culmination of so many cruel moments. That keeps me going every day, even when I do the bare minimum or do nothing at all. And I truly believe that right now there is a huge chasm between what people want and what our institutions of governance are doing. But we have one another. And that, I think, is a form of strength that no institution can ever mimic. There are days I wake up and realize that I don't have an ounce of the resources of the machinery aligned against me. But we have one another, and I hold on to that. And if that's my only source of hope, then so be it. That's enough.
