Will Have Always Been Against

EXCERPT

Book Review 

The Santa Barbara Independent

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

A Scathing Look at the Byproducts of Unaccountable Power

By Brian Tanguay - Wed Jul 02, 2025 | 11:20am

As I read Omar El Akkad’s scathing polemic exposing the moral shortcomings of the Western world order, I was reminded of the Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and the Middle East reporting of the late Robert Fisk. Like Baldwin, El Akkad is a novelist (American War and What Strange Paradise), and like Fisk, he worked as a journalist in conflict zones. He has the same righteous anger at the double-standards, obfuscations, justifications, and the evisceration of language employed by the powerful to justify their actions. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This pulls no punches, spares no feelings, and levels its rhetorical finger at those in power, be they politicians, diplomats or the editors of media outlets. El Akkad wants these people to be made uncomfortable for their moral blindness...

“The moral component of history,” writes El Akkad, “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?”

What I find surprising is that El Akkad maintains the hope that when a majority of people are confronted with gross injustice, they will act to stop it. While I believe this is true, it’s also undeniable that the will of the people is often thwarted by their own leaders and institutions. Millions of people around the world have demanded an end to the genocide in Gaza, but mass death by bombs, starvation or disease continues. Capriciousness, hypocrisy, and cruelty are byproducts of unaccountable power.

Source:

https://www.independent.com/2025/07/02/book-review-one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-by-omar-el-akkad/