One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

Jul 06, 2025 em rated it it was amazing

Every word of this book drips with rage that should be felt by everyone but for some reason is only felt by some. Because while over the past 20 months as we have witnessed the first live-broadcasted genocide in human history and still must preface all statements against it with the assurance that we don't support Hamas and we still support Israel's right to exist, because otherwise, speaking against ethnic cleansing must automatically be an endorsement of terrorism. We can't possibly mean that Every word of this book drips with rage that should be felt by everyone but for some reason is only felt by some. Because while over the past 20 months as we have witnessed the first live-broadcasted genocide in human history and still must preface all statements against it with the assurance that we don't support Hamas and we still support Israel's right to exist, because otherwise, speaking against ethnic cleansing must automatically be an endorsement of terrorism. We can't possibly mean that collective punishment is wrong and our tax dollars should not be going to wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. Because both parties in the United States have a fiscal duty to their ally of Israel that trumps any moral duty we've been told the US has as "the world's policeman."

It is an idea deeply steeped into society. "Get out of my house, you're a fucking terrorist supporter" my mother screamed at me after I stated simply, about a year ago now, that Israel air striking refugee camps and hospitals is wrong.

There was a time when I believed that wholeheartedly and proudly waved my American flags and stated I was grateful for our freedom. What a shock I got a few years ago when I really considered, and in some cases learned of for the first time in adulthood, what this country does and has done to those it deems inconsequential.

“In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.”

I've learned that most people are content to lap up the lies we are fed by our government even as they pose as rebels. And that the paycheck of the war machine is enough for my peers to squash any ethics they professed to have. As I listened to my classmates laud their Lockheed Martin internships for "diversity and inclusion" efforts I felt a familiar annoyance. When I was younger I was a conservative and I could sense the hollowness of such statements--but they angered me for the wrong reasons. For stupid reasons. I won't get into that now, because it's not the point. The point is that now the hollowness of Western liberals is even more apparent but for clearer reasons. What I couldn't put my finger on back then, I can now: the lip service to human rights and justice that in reality only extends to how far capital and can motivate it.

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say "these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day." To repeat the famous phrase about "who they came for first" and "who they'll come for next." But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted upon them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing happening coming for you in some distant future. But know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead, if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.” ...more

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