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Famous Omar El Akkad Quotes

“My fear buys nothing. I expect it to buy nothing. In this case, I want it to buy nothing--who cares how I feel about flags? And yet, I know other people's fear--as irrational than mine, more irrational than mine--buys everything. It moves armies, obliterates thousands. As with rage, there is an invisible force to fear, a gravity. I can no more push my fear upward into another echelon of privilege than those above me can help but let theirs fall, with terrible force, onto the lives of those below.”

FearPowerPrivilegeDamageIrrationalityPower DynamicsCollateral Damage
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“This work of leaving, of aiming to challenge power on the field where it maintains the least glaring asymmetry, demands one answer the question: What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering? It makes it impossible for one so engaged to not understand, with terrible clarity, that under the auspices of this machine, the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one’s own neighbors is: Nothing at all.”

SufferingPowerSacrificeSelf Sacrifice
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power–the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”

WarLanguagePowerWordsPrivilegePalestineGazaSufficiencyGaza WarLooking Away
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don't actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems will do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.”

PoliticsJusticePowerActivismResistancePolitical SystemsDemandingFighting The Power
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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