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 always have been against this.
By Omar El Akkad
This book review will be a series of quotes from the book
To be outside at night requires a formal reason or else one risked harassment by the soldiers who seemed to make a military checkpoint out of every intersection. It is a hallmark of failing societies. I've learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist
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.
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 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.
On Western liberalism -
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. When the terrible thing is happening - while 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 natives being killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight
On language -
It may well be the case that there exists two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against the victims of empire and victims of empire.
On death of soul -
No, there is no terrible 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 great distance from bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the the dead if you must, but atleast fight against the death of your soul.
A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.
On Democrats in US
The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference
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As a matter ofcourse, , Western officials are generally untroubled when they say things like this, that a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of entire people
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The work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else's suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to understand, with terrible clarity that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one's own neighbors is Nothing at all.
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When the time come 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 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 was not the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.
This book is a scream. It puts in words the feelings that one has. It is the the voice of helplessness, a cry, a prayer. As the book says, it is an account of the ending.
It is a must-read!
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