“What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as it benefits me. Only later when it ceases to benefit me will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.”
This book is simultaneously the most devastating and most uplifting things I have ever read (or rather, listened to, and I do recommend listening to it, because the author reads it so eloquently, and there is the loving beauty of the correct pronunciation of place names and people devastated by murderous violence). It is above all a searing indictment of Western hypocrisy, and especially of those on the left who paint peaceful protest as an act of terrorism. The so-called liberals who reserve their moral condemnation for those who protest genocide rather than those who commit it.
Omar El Akkad is absolutely scathing in his detailing of the euphemisms and obfuscations and pearl-clutching that parade as moral superiority and concern for the common good. It’s about ideology, and but it’s also about language, and the language really is astonishing, when you start to notice it (the same point was made in another book I’m currently reading, Marcin Wicha’s Nic Drobniej Nie Będzie — roughly translated, “Unfolding before our very eyes is a talent for not naming things by their names. This is an art.”). The ways that power masquerades as virtuous necessity — it’s something to behold.
But the book is also a moving meditation on living with the knowledge of atrocity. The reality of being a morally flawed and contradictory person who is nonetheless capable of recognizing wrongs, keenly aware of how little one person can do but trying to find the courage and persistence to do it anyway. Wanting to do the right thing but knowing that sometimes you might not.
And perhaps most surprisingly, amidst the painful reckoning of truly mind-blowing horrors, somehow there is also love. Love for what is being destroyed, and also for humanity at large. A faith that there will always be those who fight back, and awe at their courage. Perhaps what is ultimately most powerful in the book is its insistent reminder that things do not have to be this way. They can be different.
Kasia Reads 