One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Quotes

“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

“The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. 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, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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. How does one finish the sentence: 'It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …'
Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—You made me do this. Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one “tence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals. How to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.
Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: They would have killed more of ours.
What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life. And yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Whose non existence is necessary to the self conception of this place?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“In the Middle East I’d seen North Americans and Europeans arrive and immediately cocoon themselves into gated compounds and gated friendships. So normalized was this walling off that a Westerner could spend decades in a place like Qatar and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation’s ways of living. (It would come as a genuine surprise to me, years later, when I came to the West and found that this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate.)”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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 to 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 the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The most glaring example in the Western world is 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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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?”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“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.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This