Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

This is a brilliant 52-minute interview with the author of a book whose title is already being misinterpreted by misguided liberals as being about Trump. More’s the pity. The author is young and brilliant. May he have a long and illustrious life and career.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At about 09:42,

“All of this sort of stuff, I think, makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options: you are either wearing the boot or you’re having your neck stepped on. And, so, to speak up on behalf of anybody who’s having their neck stepped on is immediately assumed to mean, ‘oh you want to step on my neck.’ Those are the only sort of world views that are acceptable under that ordering of the world.

“Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against ThisAnd it’s disastrous […] because the obligations put on somebody who’s trying to imagine a better world are unlimited. If you and I both want something better than this, I guarantee you, within 5 minutes of talking about it, we will have some kind of disagreement as to what ‘better’ looks like, because the imaginative obligations placed on us are infinite.

“Somebody who is served by the system doesn’t have to imagine anything else and so can safely live within the confines of this fantasy where, yes, either these people be killed or those people will be killed; either this genocide happens this way, or an even worse genocide is going to happen. And it is such imaginative poverty. And it’s applicable to virtually every facet of life under an empire. It has to be this way because somebody has to do the killing and it may as well be us.”

At about 20:00,

“[…] when I wrote the the title of this book—when I was first thinking about it—I wasn’t thinking in terms of weeks, or even years. I was thinking, if I’m fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world, by the end of my life, I’ll be watching a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement.”