fleeting arrangements of convenience
Omar El Akkad, brutal clarity, and the workings of the west
My next novel, Carrion Crow, is out this month, which is making me feel slightly deranged. Pre-orders make such a difference to writers these days, so if you are planning on reading the book, please do consider pre-ordering here:
Maybe the real fear is that, once one begins to consider the root systems of small-scale, sometimes state-supported, but often stateless evil, there’s an obligation to apply the same rigor to the large-scale machinery of imperial evil. And in doing so, one might find that what drives and absolves the state of so much evil isn’t the fear that not doing so will allow some terrorist to destroy the fabric of free society. But rather that the evil itself is necessary to the system it protects. That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.
- Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (emphasis mine)
If you’re on the left wing of the political spectrum, you find yourself on an endless journey of education. Politics, by definition, is not static; it is ever-changing, ever-surprising. You must ground yourself in the history of it; there is more history than you can ever have imagined, and almost all of it pertains, in some way, to the political now. The more history you know, the more your perspectives shift. The further you are on your journey leftwards, the more you find you have to reassess what you thought you once knew. Liberalism becomes an embarrassment, and your baby-leftie beliefs and understanding of the world show themselves to be risible. It is not only a continuous education, but a constant re-education too.
Then there’s theory. On the left we talk about theory as if it is the be-all, but the more academic it becomes, the further it gets from the very people it purports to talk about. In pure theory every human person is a totem, its rough edges and contradictions shaved off, its animal will constrained and tamed, made logical. Theoretical engagement with the world is a lot easier and simpler than human engagement with it, with other humans. And on top of all this are the horrors, the terrible systemic evils that face anyone who seeks to learn about the current world.
And so we find ourselves torn between theoretical positions, trying to be compassionate and empathetic to the inherently frustrating humans around us (including ourselves), overwhelmed by what seem to be insurmountable challenges and drained from constant political losses. The poignancy of real world events are lost somewhere beneath all this, except for when they bubble up and leave us hopeless and helpless and incapable and distraught, from which we then shut things out as a process of recovery. This is a cycle, and it leaves you spent. And then someone writes something that cuts through with a clarity you somehow lost along the way.
Over the last few weeks I have read, and re-read, a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad. In it, the author takes on the unenviable task of reflecting on 20 years reporting on Guantanamo Bay, racial justice movements, the ‘war on terror’, American foreign policy fallout and much more, confronting the harsh truths of what he has learned about the systems of power under which we all labour; to ‘carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times’. The realisations of this period of his life coalesce, of course, around the genocide and displacement in Gaza, the fourteen-month assault on a people committed with arms, military support, moral cover and money from the West, specifically but not only America, in full view of the entire world. It is a book that is both of and about this moment, but so much more as well.
It is a difficult book to read, though beautifully done. The truths here are ones learned by many of us, in different ways; some of us have the privilege of not learning about them until we are ready and willing. Others live these truths, and have never had the freedom to exist in ignorance of them. Omar sits at a precipice between these existences, one foot in one world and one in the other, and the agony of this position is clear in every word he writes. It is a deeply empathetic book, a book full of justified rage, a howl from a person who has seen how power works and is trying, like so many of us, to find a way to subvert it. You may not agree fully with his proposed solution—which is to remove yourself from, rather than attempt to take over and alter, institutions of power, a position which we might argue to be an acceptance of political loss—but his lament, if nothing else, offers a collective grieving space to the many of us who have seen, in the genocide in Gaza, a horrifying encapsulation of the West and how it operates. It provokes all the anger, all the despair that we have to put aside daily, just to continue on in this broken system.
If you have gone on the same journey as Omar with respect to a political education, learning about all the things he has reported on, educating yourself on things he has learned through bitter personal experience, you may not find much in this book that you don’t already know. But this often overwhelming, often stultifyingly brutal knowledge is presented with an urgency and moral precision that is galvanising to the exhausted witness. Through his exceptional prose, he manages to bring his intimate knowledge of the workings of the West to points so fine and sharp they cut through the protective layers of indifference we constantly build around ourselves. When I first read the paragraph quoted above, I found myself unable to breathe. I read it again, and again, then put the book face down on my bed, as if it might hurt me. In the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all. There it was. The evil itself is necessary to the system it protects. All I knew, and put away every day, in order to go on. There was the knife edge, piercing. A fact undeniable, and insisting on action.
When I was 27 I moved for three years to Panama City, for no better reason than I couldn’t stay where I was living, wasn’t ready to come home and had a friend who had moved out there, and was having a fascinating time. I wanted to experience the world, from my little pillow of great relative privilege, and was able to do so between remote working and the ever-welcomed passport that whiteness allows.
If you’re politically minded and end up living in a country like Panama—any country on the American continent that’s south of the US border, that is—you will, at some point, and perhaps against your will, learn about the long decades of American ‘activity’ in Central and South America: the many times that citizens of Latin American countries have been brutalised via sanctions, invasion or political interfering because America wants their oil, or because they have had the audacity to reject capitalism within their own borders in favour of socialism or communism. Both of these things, which stand in the way of America’s domination of finance and resources, result in punishment, which results in the death of a hundred people, or ten thousand people, or hundreds of thousands of people over 65 years and counting. Panama itself was basically created at the behest of US interests, being carved out of Colombia so that American could control the Canal—which their incoming President seems determined to do once again.
And then you learn about the School of the Americas, also known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which began as a training facility adjacent to the Panama Canal (later moving to Georgia), intended to promote American interests among Latin American students, and quickly pivoted to training these students in anti-communist counterinsurgency in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, including education in torture, assassination and extortion (according to a former tutor). This school churned out more than 60,000 Latin American graduates, who were sent back to their home countries in order to participate in coups d’etat, anti-democracy actions and other strategies dictated by their US intelligence handlers, with eleven becoming military dictators in their own countries and more becoming key military and political actors, torturing and murdering tens of thousands of their fellow people.
All these people were allowed to operate as long as they were behaving for the interests of the US. When they were not, the US turned on them. Manuel Noriega, a SOA graduate, rose through the ranks of the Panamanian military after a coup by another SOA graduate, Omar Torrijos; eventually, Noriega (known as pineapple face by Panamanians, due to his unfortunate acne scarring) assumed total power in 1983, becoming the de facto military leader of Panama and a key CIA informant. Through Noriega, the CIA moved money and weapons to US-backed forces all across Central and South America—all while he repressed his own citizens.
The story of Noriega’s downfall is often told like this: he agreed to both train the Contras (the Nicaraguan anti-communist militia) in Panama and support efforts by the US and Israel to arm and fund the Contras, including letting US planes land in Panamanian airfields before they flew onto Nicaragua. Allegedly, he was filling those same planes with cocaine on their way back to the states, and so engaging in trafficking right under the noses of the US government. They knew, it’s said, and turned a blind eye, until Noriega’s habit of feeding intelligence to other countries (including, allegedly, Cuba) came to light, and then suddenly they weren’t so cool with him flying drugs to the US on their money. And then, of course, they came after him, and burned parts of Panama City to the ground, killing at least 500 civilians and destroying El Chorrillo, a small, poor neighbourhood. The US invasion of Panama was the largest since Vietnam and though it only lasted two weeks, it displaced 20,000 Panamanians. When I lived there 24 years later, if you, a white person, found yourself walking through the beautiful old town (Casco Viejo) towards El Chorrillo, well-meaning locals would advise you to turn back, lest you be mistaken for an American by those with long memories. Grotesque renderings of murderous US troops remain on the walls, lamenting to a world that knows little about it that ‘aqui pasó algo’; something happened here.
There is something about living in a city and knowing that, within your lifetime, the relatives of your neighbours were being burned out of their homes and killed on streets just a short walk away from yours—because a person trained and utilised by US forces had finally become a problem for those same forces. Hundreds of poor Panamanians, killed so that the US could dispatch one former informant who spent years terrorising the country under America’s watch. A ‘fleeting arrangement of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest’. If a person was under any assumptions that there is a rule-based order outside of capital interests, learning about things like this—which have happened time and time again throughout Central and South America, not to mention the Middle East and Africa and Asia—disabuses them of that notion. To quote One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:
The dead dig wells in the living.
A couple of years ago I took a turn around the park with a filmmaker in the early stages of production of a documentary about something I attended. He asked me how I felt about the police, and I said something to the effect that, on the day of the event in question, the police where there to remove us, to enable the home office to continue to do something morally reprehensible, violent against all logic, and so on that day I was in opposition to them as they were to me. He asked what I might say to someone who took the position that anyone who found themselves in opposition to the police is a criminal.
What I said to him then was a much shorter and more garbled version of this: when you realise that the concern of the police is not to protect people but to protect capital, and to protect the interests of capital, you quickly realise that you, as a person, are only protected inasmuch as you stand on the side of capital interests. We are all potential criminals when this is the case. This is a limit on the freedom of you as a person; to remain lawful, to remain protected from the retribution of the state, you must stay on the side of capital interests. That line shifts as things become more desperate. You might find, out of nowhere, that you are behaving illegally because all of a sudden you are not allowed to collect the rainwater that falls into your garden, because your government has allowed the water companies to further privatise one of the most inherently shared resources. You might find that a neighbour of yours—or a lover, or a family member, or you—has their long-held citizenship rescinded because of a rightward shift in the politics of the country that has become home, and in trying to stop them being removed forcibly from their residence, you are arrested. Perhaps, after losing your home in the floods that have become common in an era of climate breakdown, you join an environmental activist group’s Zoom meeting in which someone discusses an upcoming action, and before you know it you are up in court charged with conspiracy to cause public nuisance, a crime you didn’t even know existed, and perhaps you are sent to jail for five years of your life. The change from stand-up citizen to criminal takes only one step. There are many people who already know this—the poor, the racialised, the immigrant, the disabled. The line shifts to protect capital, and you might find yourself suddenly on the other side, without ever really understanding how you got there.
Even in the heart of empire. Even in what you are told is the safest space, made safe by sacrificing the lives of many other, less safe people, across many decades, you are only ever a subject of these fleeting moments of convenience. Some are safer than others. But none of us are safe. As Omar El Akkad writes:
We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.
What are we to do with this knowledge? That is the work now ahead of us all. We will disagree, and debate, and perhaps land on different courses. But once we know these things, once we are forced again to look at them, there can be no turning away. This is the moment, and all of us are here.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is out on February 13th. I implore you to read it.
In the summer of last year, I was published in The Stinging Fly alongside Palestinian short story writer and novelist Yousri Alghoul. You can read his piece here.
Yousri and his family have been living in a refugee camp in the most unimaginable conditions. He has decided to try to organise safe passage for his children—Anas, Majd, Osama and Rauf—so that they can leave Gaza, their home, and pursue their studies somewhere safe.
Please consider contributing to Yousri’s crowdfunder below, to allow these children the stability that all people deserve. Whatever you can give will make a difference.