One day, when it's safe...

After all Gazans are dead, the complicit will mourn each of them

This piece is mostly a comment.

Best book title of the decade

Omar El Akkad is a Canadian-Egyptian journalist and author whose first book, American War, is among my favorite near-future climate works. I strongly recommend it. A gripping story well told.

He has since written What Strange Paradise (to rave reviews) and a non-fiction book whose cover you see above. The actual title is the part in white: One day, everyone will have always been against this. But that title was taken from a 2023 viral tweet by the author, the full text of which is this:

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.

Memorize this. You’ll watch play out it in real time. After all Gazans are dead, those who enabled their deaths will mourn each of them.

Murder Always Comes Home

Western crimes in the scramble for empire and wealth (which I’ll write about soon; it starts in the late 1400s) eventually came home.

The Sherlock Holmes writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, recognized this in one of his earliest books, A Study in Scarlet, when Watson described London as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” The cesspool of empire, by which I mean that pit containing those crimes, came home, not just to England, but to all of Europe, and never went back.

Crime begets crime, which leads to “unpopular opinions.” Like this, for example:

If you missed it, look closely: Those are American helmets and a firing squad wall. Who disapproves of images like this?

Me, I’m opposed to murder, but most people aren’t. We’ve seen that in the Mangione case, and we’ll see it again. I used to think our country was just pre-revolutionary. Now I think it’s grown worse:

Thanks to the Gaza genocide and its trumpeted cheering by all of our Western elite, this won’t end when it ends — that will mark just the start, for us and the world. The cesspool of empire, this time in Palestine, is bound to come back.

Music

Enjoy “Who do you love?” by Joe DeVito, one of my favorite soon-to-be-ex TikTok artists.