One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

We believe our pasts are fixed, like geological strata. The embarrassing haircut in the high school yearbook, the first job we hated, the political beliefs we once championed—these are treated as immutable artifacts, data points in a settled personal history. We assume that the passage of time only adds new layers, burying the old ones deeper. But what if our past is a living narrative we actively rewrite? What if the most powerful force shaping our identity is the convenience of what we need it to have been?

This act of collective, silent revision becomes a form of psychological gravity, pulling our memories into alignment with our present-day virtues. An unpopular stance that becomes popular isn't just adopted; it's retroactively embraced, as though we were on the right side all along. The past isn't corrected; it's colonized. It’s this subtle, pervasive phenomenon that captivated Omar El Akkad. As a journalist for The Globe and Mail, he spent a decade reporting from conflict zones like Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, and covering crises from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement. He witnessed firsthand how official accounts and public consensus could shift not just day by day, but moment by moment, erasing what was once undeniable. His essays in this collection are an attempt to document this moral and historical shapeshifting as it happens, capturing the bewildering moment before everyone agrees they were always on the right side of history.

Module 1: The Architecture of Apathy

The book opens with a powerful argument. It suggests that large-scale violence doesn't just happen. It requires a carefully constructed architecture of apathy. And the primary tool for building this architecture is language. El Akkad shows how powerful entities use a specific vocabulary to obscure reality. Violence is sanitized through euphemism and passive voice. For example, a journalist in Palestine isn't shot by a soldier. Instead, a headline might read she was "hit by a bullet." Buildings in a warzone don't get bombed. They "spontaneously combust." This is a deliberate strategy. It creates a fog of complexity. It allows the reader or viewer to feel that the situation is too complicated to understand, let alone take a moral stance on. This linguistic trick is what El Akkad calls a "shadow vocabulary." During the "War on Terror," torture became "enhanced interrogation." Civilian deaths became "collateral damage." This language creates emotional distance. It transforms human tragedy into a sterile, bureaucratic event.

This leads to a chilling consequence. Victims of empire are erased, while victims for empire are valorized. El Akkad draws a sharp contrast. When someone from a powerful nation is killed, they are "murdered" by "savages" and "terrorists." Their death is an outrage that demands justice. But when people are killed by that same powerful nation, they simply "perish." They "cease to exist." Their killers are often unnamed, their deaths framed as an unavoidable, tragic consequence of a necessary action. He gives a stark example from his time in Afghanistan. At NATO bases, Afghan soldiers were always stationed at the outer perimeter. They were the most vulnerable to car bombs and ambushes. This physical placement reflected a hierarchy of life. Some lives were simply considered more expendable than others.

And here's the thing. This dehumanization isn't just rhetorical. It has a practical, insidious purpose. Bad-faith propaganda relies on what a group is believed capable of doing. In the chaotic early days of a conflict, narratives are forged with shocking claims that spread faster than facts. El Akkad points to the unverified story of "forty beheaded babies" that circulated after the October 7th attacks. This story, regardless of its truth, immediately shaped the moral landscape. It gave permission for a certain kind of response. It’s a pattern he compares to the phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction that justified the Iraq War. The perception of evil becomes more powerful than the evidence of it. This creates a feedback loop. The more dehumanized a group becomes, the more believable any atrocity claim against them is, which in turn justifies further violence.

Module 2: The Failure of the Neutral Referee

Now, let's turn to the role of the media in all this. El Akkad, a former journalist, is ruthless in his critique of his own profession. He argues that modern journalism is trapped in a fatal contradiction. It’s expected to be a neutral agitator. It’s celebrated for exposing corruption and creating change. Yet, its practitioners are forbidden from openly calling for justice. This paradox creates a system that often fails in the face of bad faith. The core of the problem is what he calls the "referee model." Journalism that acts as a neutral scorekeeper between two sides collapses when one side holds disproportionate power. The model assumes both sides are operating in good faith. When that assumption is false, the coverage becomes absurd.

Think about it. If one political party proposes stripping immigrants of all their rights, and another proposes stripping them of some rights, the "serious" centrist position becomes stripping them of most of their rights. This is presented as a reasonable compromise. The journalist’s job becomes reporting on the political strategy, not the moral bankruptcy of the initial proposal. El Akkad saw this in the 2016 election. A proposal for Muslim ID cards was covered as a clever political tactic, not a repugnant idea. This "horse race" coverage prioritizes polls and optics over substance. It leads to what reporters call "M-copy." This is explainer text that lists opposing claims side-by-side, without context, to appear balanced. The result is morally and intellectually vacant.

From this foundation, we see how economic pressures corrupt the mission. A broken business model pushes journalists toward revenue-generating rage over public service. News, especially on cable, has become a product. The goal is to incite audience anger, keep them watching through the commercial break, and sell ads. El Akkad points to Fox News as the logical endpoint of this model. It severs the relationship between truth and what the audience wishes the truth to be. But the pressure exists everywhere. He recounts a dispute at a major newspaper over "branded content"—advertisements written to look like news articles. The need for revenue was pitted directly against journalistic integrity.

So what happens next? Preemptive deference to power dictates the clarity of news coverage. The sharp, direct language used to describe atrocities committed by official enemies evaporates when covering allies or marginalized communities at home. Violence against Arab children, Black motorists, or Indigenous activists is suddenly shrouded in that same fog of passive voice and euphemism. El Akkad argues this deference comes from the top. Editors and owners move in social and economic circles far removed from the people in these stories. For them, the comfort of the powerful is a more immediate concern than the affliction of the powerless. This creates a chilling reality where a disfigured painting can provoke a greater political response than thousands of dead children.