Sided with Justice

I read this book by Pankaj Mishra. I read this book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Malcolm, James Baldwin, Fanon… I’ve read this book. We’ve all seen this movie before.

Omar himself narrated the audiobook for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. His weary voice sets the perfect tone, especially as a numbing offset to the shocking scenes he opens each chapter with. It is the numbness, the apathy, that afford the high-minded ideals merely spoken and never acted upon.

Which is exactly why we need books like this. We need voices that were born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, immigrated to Canada and finally the United States. Omar sees through the contradictory American self-image, the one that “plays the role of the rebel“ despite “every shred of contemporary evidence” which “leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire.” Omar’s prose ties off each observation in a gift-wrapped quote for you to give to friends and loved ones:

I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.

His deadpan voice delivers the most savage of lines:

In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?

I had the audiobook from the library but ended up buying a digital copy since there were so many lines I wanted to highlight. But I still kept listening to Omar’s audio performance, it is that good.

Some have referred to this book as an autobiography. It is in the sense that Omar writes about how career and family are intertwined in this sad state of modern reality. But I can’t think anyone would periodicize their own life with chapter titles such as: Resistance, Lesser Evils, or Fear. Maybe they would. But this book is more about seeing into the mind of the liberal, the wish-washy reality of the comfortable centrist, holding up a mirror to the West reflecting all its hypocrisies (which he did as allegory in American War, and as he describes in One Day, many still missed the simple point.)

Centrist ”vote harder” and guilt trip messaging (“Do you want the deranged right wing to win?”) are thumped repeatedly in the book, just to demonstrate how hollow they are:

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 uses his words to expose the calculus of liberalism, the misdirecting hand of a close-up magician that somehow keeps getting away with the trick:

“Yes We Can” is a conditional. “Yes We Will” is not.

This is not a book that ends without a solution. Omar implores us to resist in big ways and small. It is worth reading this book and all the other like it. More can be written, so the movement can grow.

…. every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come.

We cannot let them make us expect less.

In 2024 Ta-Nehisi Coates published The Message after a trip to Palestine. In that he tackles the common refrain that the Palestine issue “is complicated”, pointing out how that excludes certain voices, and that from a moral perspective it is actually not very complicated at all: killing innocents is wrong.

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad also offers clarity:

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?

Over and over we have had to read these books. To paraphrase Fanon, our society is sick. But we must keep asking the hard question and refusing pat answers.

I am late to this book. I am sure since being published last year it has been dismissed, harangued, and abhorred. But it also won accolades and awards. For that I am heartened, and am glad to have read it. I recommend you do too. 🍉