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A stop-you-in-your-tracks moment in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”

One of many!

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self. interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous | phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come | for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery | ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be | inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And | anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will | already be dead. : 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.
Text over an image showing people looking at flames in a devastated area: one day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. - omar el akkad
#Book#Author#Soul
Mar 31, 2025, 12:14 AM·Public·Web
21boosts·18favorites
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@dbattistella I don’t know the author … but wow … that page has a very deep moral foundation … thanks for sharing! I’ve shared with other personal networks.

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@stepheneb Omar El Akkad is a talented and deeply ethical journalist and author. I highly recommend all his books, but this new one is a stunning piece of writing.

“One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism 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 still 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. I tell stories for a living and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers. Makes of their narrative a neat, reflexive arc in which it was always understood by the colonized and, this part implied, the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong.” ― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Public

@dbattistella Same with Iraq.

Quiet public

@dbattistella I just finished reading it yesterday. Truly outstanding work.

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