One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
This is less of a book review and more of a pondering about the topics laid out in this book and how my own lived experiences mesh with those topics. I might add more of an actual "review" some time later, but for now, this felt appropriate.
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.
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 3
Typing copy of highlighted text from a physical book, typos are my own.
It was a similar line of thinking that set me down the path towards studying political theory and seeking out more points of view than that which has been laid out in front of me, easy to access, and even easier to digest. In all honesty, this started long ago, but especially ramping up when I was stuck at home during the lockdowns and even more while watching a genocide beamed to my phone in real time. There were so many atrocities happening in front of us and it was met with contradictory or lukewarm responses from those in positions of power.
"Either hundreds of millions of people have always 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."
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 3
This book captured that feeling of bewilderment and betrayal I had at this system that seemingly can only make things worse against our collective wishes. Through the past decade, I've been deconstructing things I've thought were truths, harsh realities, or how necessary the necessary evils are. I've had to ask myself how many lives is my personal comfort worth. Living aboard the Death Star, no matter how mundane my job and how idealistic and progressive my views, I would still be helping to power the planet-destroying machine. This, for a long time has paralyzed me with doom, unable to find an avenue towards making things better. Forced to crowd-fund a genocide against my will and that, if I stopped paying into it entirely, it has every ability to just print more money to do it anyway. So what's the solution? How do I maintain my soul inside the Death Star? I'm not entirely sure there is one, but I think trying to fix things through organization and community can hopefully hold on to that spark of humanity we desperately need to not act purely in our own self-interests when the hand of fascism inevitably turns inward.
The book talks quite a bit about their other book American War, which I have yet to read, but in doing so, it talks about being a journalist, a writer, one who lives in the arts sphere in a world where funding can be pulled depending on the whims of billionaires. While I'm obviously not a writer, and my professional work isn't nearly high-profile enough to even garner the attention of any billionaires, I do exist in the arts sphere professionally and the risk of actually becoming a "starving artist" is a fear that is immediately outweighed by the first moment I decide to stamp my name on self-censored art. Starving is another story entirely, but the fear of becoming a starving artist cannot ever change the nature of my art, else my art and humanity as a whole is compromised.
"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."
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 6
If this book is anything, it's a kind of poetic that I really appreciate. It's amazing that, as someone who has always disliked a witty political "zinger", that if you put enough flourish on it, it loops back around and suddenly becomes very desirable, especially if that arrow is flying in the correct direction.
"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?"
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 7
"Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air."
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 10
While this book has its issues, which I might get into in later edits, I do think this should be essential reading. It offers a moral clarity that has been hard to find prior to reading. These are only a few quotes I have chosen of the multitudes of highlighted sections from a book I read in record time (and as someone with ADHD, that's saying something). But if you are at all interested, I'd highly recommend this book.
"If liberalism has finally decided it is safe enough to consider the Black people whose labor built the machine as human, and the Indigenous people whose obliteration made room for the machine as human, and maybe the distant foreigners who sew our clothes and solder our motherboards might be human, and the inconvenient occupied whose land and water might hold resources we implicitly know but cannot explicitly say would be so much better used in service of the civilized world might be human, and even the natural world and its inhabitants deserve the rights of humans-well, what's left to feed the machine? What's left to manufacture convenience?"
- Omar El Akkad, Chapter 9