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To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue were used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad details these stories in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. “You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,” he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. “We can all be sorry afterwards.”

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with “neutral,” unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says “What [they’re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,” El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

“I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.”

Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” is a powerful and penetrating examination of the bankrupt morality of industrialized nations, especially the United States, which have sustained the genocide against Palestinians and justified it with racist tropes and lies. He exposes in his book our innate barbarity, our cloying hypocrisy, our latent racism, our narcissistic self-adulation, our demented belief, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we have the right to impose our supposed virtues on the “lesser” breeds of the earth we subjugate and exploit with campaigns of industrial violence whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Palestine. Omar, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar. He moved to Canada as a teenager and currently lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, “American War,” was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. Joining me to discuss “One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This” is Omar El Akkad.

I loved your book. I read it all in one sitting. I'm going to begin right at the beginning. And you talk about language, you do that a lot about your book. I'm just going to read this passage and then have you comment on it.

“Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language. A language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence as though living was an aberration. And this language might protect the empire's most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism, the alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home, without school, without hospital, and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism.”

And, just as a caveat, you and I ran straight into this buzzsaw when we were supposed to do an event together and the organizers refused to allow us to use the word genocide in the description of the talk. But you make this point, I think, very presciently about language and the way it serves as a kind of buffer or a mask from reality especially vis-a-vis but not explicitly not only but vis-a-vis this genocide. Can you talk about that?

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. First of all, I really, really appreciate it. I've been a long time reader of your work. A very long time ago, I was reporting in Guantanamo Bay in the prison camps there, and they were giving us a tour of the place. And I asked a question, I asked something like, you know, so when do the prisoners... When I got to that word, one of the soldiers stopped me and said, we don't have prisoners here, sir. We have detainees. And it was very, very important to that person's worldview that there be no prisoners here because a prisoner implies a prison sentence, which somebody has to define at some point, a detainee you can hold forever. There were no interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Of course, people were interrogated left, right, and center. They just didn't call it that. They called them reservations, as in detainee 8692 has an 8:30 PM reservation, it means they were going to be taken into the interrogation shacks.

I did far, far less war reporting than you did. I did very, very brief stints. But one of the things they sort of informed in terms of my worldview is that the physical layer of violence in wartime or in what might be described as peacetime, even though it isn't, can't stand in a vacuum. It can't stand on its own. It needs other layers holding it up. And one of those layers is linguistic violence, euphemistic violence, the violence of calling a thing something other than what it is, collateral damage instead of, oops we ...