One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Another brutal but necessary book about a genocide happening in front of our faces. At first glance, the title might suggest a future reckoning, but Omar El Akkad is insistent on demonstrating what is happening to the world now. It will be reckoned with in the future, but that does not lessen the impact today, on Gaza and on those who are allowing it to happen.

"It is difficult to live in [the U.S.] in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be." (117)

Faced with genocide in Gaza (and a personal immigrant journey reporting on Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and more confrontations of us vs them), a sharp and painful breakup with the comfortable beliefs of liberal western democracy's morality that allow any of us to look away.

Written with absolute moral clarity, the argument here is searing, precise, and visceral. While I don't know how to make people care either, the immediacy of the author's writing goes a long way towards bringing this genocide, these atrocities and abuses of human life at the hands of empire, home. He makes the unimaginable imaginable, but does not dilute the horror in the process. These are true atrocities, and the claim made in the book's title is obviously correct. I will be thinking about some of the passages here - which aren't just passages, of course, they're real things that happened to real people - for the rest of my life. I should. We all should. I wish I could force everyone to read this.