Moral Amnesia

Already a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Award, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a landmark. It carries the rare distinction of being both urgent and enduring. It appears at a moment when perception itself feels besieged, when language buckles under the weight of manipulation, euphemism, and moral fatigue. In this context, the book feels like a rare intervention – a restoration of lucidity amid moral vertigo. In a culture saturated with managed speech, where distortion wears on the nervous system, I found El Akkad’s voice almost medicinal: a kind of moral and linguistic therapy, recalibrating one’s sense of what words are for.

And when I say this book will last, it is because I believe it will join – unmistakably and on its own terms – the long human conversation that stretches from Primo Levi to Hannah Arendt: the lineage of those who wrote to confront the cruel grammar of history itself, to trace the anatomy of horror, to ask, from the depths of lived anguish, why ‘never again’ is always spoken in the future tense – and why, each time, it must return.

The book is structured as a constellation of essays, memoir fragments, reportage, and moral argument. Each chapter has a prologue that disconcerts and disallows you to read quietly; there is a sequence of memories – about his family fleeing Egypt in the wake of Sadat’s assassination, growing up in a caged culture in Qatar, going to Western schools, believing, at the worst of times, that the West was still salvageable – and there are the harder chapters, which lean heavily into Gaza, into complicity, into the daily witness of images that break you open.

Threaded through these fragments is the quiet drama of disillusionment: a boy who once believed in the promise of the ‘free world’ – its books, its laws, its reason – slowly realising that the cracks run through its very foundations. He writes of how he once thought the West could be repaired, that the core was still sound, ‘until the fall of 2023, until Gaza’. It is this moral unmasking – rendered with calm precision, without bitterness – that gives the book its strange blend of moral ferocity at the same time as unassuming grace.

By the time you close it, you have travelled, in 187 pages, through a landscape that feels immeasurably large: the inner geography of conscience, the habits and failures of western liberalism, the anaesthetic techniques of euphemism, and the small muscles of resistance that might yet jam the machinery of power.

It is not quite a memoir, but a slow act of excavation – a tracing of fractures, Gaza being the last and deepest fissure. The journalist in him is always present, visible in the clean precision of his prose, in the decisions of what to recount and what to let stand. There is discipline in this writing – a deliberate, almost ascetic kind of austerity. Voltaire once remarked that ‘everything too stupid to be said is sung’. The line came to mind, though the comparison is imperfect. Songs live in what they do not say, forcing the imagination to do the work. El Akkad’s utterances, by contrast, are never foolish – on the contrary – yet his prose moves with the quiet inevitability of song. Its leanness gives thought the space to reverberate. Each sentence feels weighed against silence, tuned to let imagination complete what it begins. Stripped to its essence, the writing acquires resonance; it is in the pauses between his lines that the reader begins not only to think, but to feel.

Though composed of fragments that loosely chart the writer’s own biography, the book’s true architecture is conceptual: an inquiry into language and its complicity with power. El Akkad is acutely attuned to the politics of naming, to the quiet violence encoded in words. In a passage about his childhood in Qatar, he observes how survival depends on the swift mastery of the right label – ‘expat’ for some, ‘migrant’ or ‘illegal’ for others. It is a small moment, yet a revelation in political linguistics. Language, in his telling, becomes the battlefield where power and resistance meet. That single, measured observation exposes an entire moral architecture: vocabulary is never neutral; it is the first line of defence for hierarchy. Where language is weaponised, the poor, the brown, the unwanted – the surplus communities of empire – appear only as administrative problems to be contained.

The heart of El Akkad’s work is this vigilance about words. He is interested in the moral ecology of language: how phrases can anaesthetise, how euphemisms can hide the machinery of harm. It is useful here to be explicit about what this euphemistic fog does to a person. When the vocabulary that shapes public life is systematically dishonest, the effect is not rhetorical but existential. Eyes report horror; tongues are told to call it something else. The consequence is moral paralysis: language ceases to perform its human work – to make pain shareable, to build communal response. George Orwell wrote, in the plainest of terms, that political language aims to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. El Akkad carries these lessons forward into our mercurial present. His sentences resist the lullaby of consensus. He calls out the polite syntax of power – a state that can call killing ‘statecraft,’ while a citizen, refusing to buy products complicit in the killing, is accused of ‘economic terrorism.’ That inverted grammar is a technique of domination; El Akkad names it with the quiet authority of someone who has looked too long to be deceived. It is difficult to imagine a reader whose moral radar could resist, even briefly, being resuscitated.

I write this as someone who, like El Akkad, has also grown up between worlds – fluent in dislocation and the strange lucidity it brings. Those of us who live in transit, the quiet nomads of culture, develop a natural allergy to easy sentiment; we learn that words are more often camouflage than revelation. I too once believed in the West’s promise – its books, its open speech, its shimmering idea of freedom – in the faith that knowledge might refine conscience. But reason, it turns out, is an obedient servant: it can polish cruelty until it shines.

El Akkad’s title was born from a tweet he posted on 25 October 2023: ’One day, when it‘s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this’. That single sentence seeded the book. It captures, with unbearable simplicity, the moral choreography of our age – how outrage always arrives too late, how the arc of opinion bends not toward justice but toward safety. One of the ways El Akkad captures this pattern is through what he calls ‘modular opinion’: the kind of moral posture that appears responsive to fact and experience yet is, in truth, engineered for survival within the frameworks of acceptability. Its allegiance is not to truth but to belonging. It keeps one foot in every future, ready to pivot when the tide of consensus turns.

We like to imagine our convictions are shaped by evidence, witness, empathy – but more often they are tuned to the frequencies of our tribe. We hold the belief that we are guided by the rational mind, but our true guiding star always navigates back to comfort. We learn, almost instinctively, to phrase outrage in ways that will not cost us, to express compassion only once it is socially inexpensive. And so, by the time a moral position becomes broadly acceptable, the catastrophe it names has already run its course. The framework shifts, the conscience cleanses itself, and history rehearses its ritual of absolution once there is nothing left to save.

If Nietzsche was right that only the slave truly sees the master, it is because survival sharpens perception. Only the dispossessed can map the subtle machinery of domination. The vantage point on the human condition does not belong to the powerful; it belongs to those who must study power in order to live beneath it. Illusion about the law is a privilege of those who do not live under its weight. It is those on the receiving end of empire who must read reality in its raw form. This double consciousness – the capacity to see both through one’s own eyes and through the eyes of authority – is the inheritance of the colonised, the exiled, the unwanted. It breeds a kind of moral and cognitive precision that those at ease in the world will never know.

The powerful can afford a counterfeit language – words that decorate rather than reveal – but the powerless must become anatomists of truth. They learn to read omission, to detect hypocrisy, to decipher the syntax of evasion. Their knowledge is forensic: a study of systems beneath the skin. There is an important corollary here about culture-making. Those on the receiving end of injustice often end up inventing the idioms that wake us up. When the official language abandons you, you must make one that will not. El Akkad is alert to this – he listens to poets, to small acts, to marginal narratives.

And this is the bitter paradox of civilisation – that while the powerful claim the right to interpret, the most enduring human commentary has always belonged to those denied that privilege. El Akkad understands this perfectly. In writing this book, he quietly reclaims the sovereign right to interpret the world – a gesture more radical than any overt declaration. The coloniser may own the archive, but the colonised hold the commentary. They see not only the edifice of power but the scaffolding that sustains it; they dwell in the space where language meets its limits. Theirs is the clarity of those who have seen the world unmasked – and who know that to restore meaning to words is to push against the grip of power.

El Akkad writes from this terrain. His gaze does not avert itself, does not soften for civility’s sake. It is the gaze of one who has lived long enough on the underside of power to know that moral vision begins where comfort ends.

If there is a grief threaded through this work, it is the grief of unflinching clarity – the pain of seeing through every veil and knowing that such vision offers no comfort. El Akkad writes from the understanding that our institutions have perfected a choreography of blindness: they can name atrocity only once it has become history. What he calls the ‘moral arithmetic’ of the West is precisely this – its talent for compassion in hindsight, its need to convert the suffering it ignored into moral capital. ‘One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism,’ he notes, ‘is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism.’ The powerful, he implies, do not simply inherit the spoils of empire; they inherit its narrative voice. The victor’s language inhabits the mythology of triumph, while the victims inherit only experience.

You feel the effect of El Akkad’s economy the way one feels the knock of a bell: it draws you, briefly, out of the habitual. He writes as if language itself were wounded, and each sentence an attempt at healing. In interviews, El Akkad has said that during Gaza he could not write ‘as though language were neutral.’ To write, he decided, was not to explain the senseless but to refuse the pretence of sense altogether. This refusal – to normalise, to aestheticise, to find moral consolation – is the book’s most radical discipline.

He asks, again and again, what kind of resistance remains possible in a system that has learned to monetise everything – even dissent. Is it even possible to speak of tampering with the calculus of power? His answer is not a program but a posture: the practice of refusal, the refusal to let power script our speech. To cast off euphemism is a quiet revolt; it reopens the circuit between language and reality. When words find their measure, we may yet stand a little taller. In fact, every small act counts. He quotes the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi, who urges: ‘wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw at the gears of genocide, do it. If it’s a handful, throw it’. El Akkad’s book is full of such handfuls – small disruptions that slow the machinery of moral anaesthesia.

If the political imagination today feels exhausted, this book quietly proposes another way of conceiving power: not through spectacle or certainty, but through attention, through small acts of refusal, through disciplined hope – the kind that endures without the comfort of answers or the promise of arrival. ‘Giving up hope,’ El Akkad writes, ‘is a surrender to the very machine one must resist.’

There is a rare solace in reading a writer who reminds us that language still matters, that small acts still matter. For those of us who, like him, have kept a billion tabs open to Gaza, helpless before the flood of images, the act of reading this work feels like an act of resuscitation: a slow restoration of the capacity to feel, to name, to mean. It is a book for those who have run out of words, it offers companionship in the search for meaning.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This feels like both an autopsy and a manual: an anatomy of how conscience fails, and a quiet rehearsal in how it might gain power. It teaches us to resist skimming over the surface of language, to look longer, to reclaim words from the machinery of gaslight.

If you recognise what I am describing – if you have struggled, as many have, to endure the public language of our time, the news, the statements, the endless commentary that numbs and infuriates more than it illuminates – or if you are simply curious to hear how the world sounds from the other side of your argument – then this is the book I most sincerely recommend. For some, it will feel like therapy; for others, like a challenge. Whoever you are, read it slowly, as you would a letter from someone who refuses to lie to you. Let it test your endurance, the measure of what you can bear to know, and your capacity to look without flinching.

And when you close this book, you may feel, as I did, that the borders of your inner world have quietly expanded, that a new equilibrium has formed between your mind and the world, not through any softening of reality, but through the enlargement of the self that has to face it.