My name is Varun Ramrakhiani, a foreign student of an American college, at a time when America and her allies are perpetrating horrible crimes upon a defenceless people. Omar El Akkad’s new book is partly about this experience. One day everyone will have been against this, it is an incredibly important book for those of us not of the west, stranded in the west, for whom the west appears aberrantly wild and without concern for the world. To people like us, all the values of humanistic education seem to us as if somehow grand lies are perpetrated to mask fundamental realities of murder. Who would read literature and philosophy at a time like this, when all the premises of civilization are being to wantonly violated and disregarded?
El Akkad articulates the reason for writing the book in terms that can be generalized to anyone living in the west. The experience he describes does not require heritage from the third world, some lived or told insight into the plight of the dispossessed. Rather the experience the book is about is one of being audience to the horrific, obscene and gruesome, through screens and the funnel of information economies, through the ostensibly invisible mediation of news channels and social media outlets. The concept relies on the characterization of the audience being a fundamentally passive entity, for whom all the events of the world, history itself, appears as a ceaseless stream of decontextualized data which cannot be assembled into coherent narratives that mobilise and empower. Instead they create victims of history and spectators of history, making all the crimes of all the world seem inevitable. Of course this is not the only experience. There are a great many people in the west trying to stop the genocide in gaza, stop the american goverment’s uncritical enablement of Isreal, but not nearly enough and these attempts have not been very successful. On the part of these very brave actors, the title of El Akkad’s book seems like a terrible omen. One day everyone will have been against this. The very simple truth is, this is all preventable, so many people do not have to die, do not have to flee, do not have to be shot and maimed and ripped apart by shrapnel and bombs, do not have to plead for help that will not come, do not have to fight for a humanity that is denied them. History is not inevitable.
The language in which history is written, in which the spectators immortalise the victims, El Akkad points out today is the language of liberalism. The political project of the west, the preservation of which defined the cold war, the two world wars and the unnumbered proxy wars of modern history, is today the system that enjoys uncontested global hegemony such that itself is used to justify the crimes in Gaza. It should not be surprising then that people like El Akkad think the project has failed, has not lived up to the promise of the enlightenment, or whatever mythology we impose as the founding narrative of our world. But it is shocking for societies like America to hear that El Akkad simply does not believe in what you may call the American dream, the liberal world order of rights and the institutions meant to protect these rights. The imperializing culture of the west cannot see past its own nose, is addicted to its own self image as the arbiter of the rights and privileges of nations and people, and so retreats into a daydream of its democracies and institutional procedure, such the basic barbarous reality is concealed, cannot be apprehended,is always mystified into an image among a million images. This is the ancient marriage of civilization and barbarism, of murder and humanity.
I remember reading Fanon in Megan Altmans class, about the very phenomenological structure of the master-slave encounter, which already has the specter of violence as a realizable possibility, that violence is somehow in the air at the very sight of the colonial subject, the subject’s basic existence necessitates it. I wonder about how this basic experiential structure must be interpreted by the culture of imperial society to be justifiable, to normalize it in the very language that courts use and presidents use to punish the villains of this or that crime. I wonder, looking forward to further study in the west, how to navigate my very visceral feeling about these events, my very unaccommodating and accusatory view of the cultural discourses of these places, into my actual conversations with people of the west. I find it an impossible situation, without a comfortable resolution, that only further estranged me from everyday life, makes me feel that belonging here will always be impossible.
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