Published By: Canongate
Pages: 208
Released On: 13/03/2025
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various Wars on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more. He won awards for his journalism and his fiction. But now, watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he comes to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.
This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar’s painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means – as a citizen, as a father – to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.
*****
Thanks to Canongate for sending me a proof of this title in return for an honest review.
This will be different to my usual reviews; I don’t think a book like this can be reviewed in the sense of whether it’s written well or formatted correctly etc. I can only talk about this book in terms of how it made me feel.
It’s not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an important one. It may sound cliché and frankly, I don’t care, but this book can and will change lives and I feel it should be on the curriculum of every school around the world.
It isn’t an easy to book to read in one go. I have a tendency to sit and read a book in one sitting, but this was too intense for that.
Books like this, this genre, they’re not ones I generally read. I can’t say it’s a conscious decisions and I can’t give you any reasons why. I just don’t. And so I’m grateful for Canongate for sending met his as it has opened my eyes to what I might have been missing out on.
Omar really did open my eyes to things that, as a fairly sheltered, educated, young white English woman I have unfortunately ignored (even in an unconscious way). The idea that white people tend to be referred to as ‘ex-pats’ who have moved for a better quality of life or better cost of living, but those with an appearance or name that makes them out as “other” are looked down upon and referred to as immigrants, illegal, aliens, seen as trying to take our land and our jobs and money. It’s so obvious when he says it, but it’s something that I sadly have not realised in my day-to-day life.
When people start banning books and saying they’re not important, that kids should take their nose out of a book and do something important – they’re really missing the point. Yes books can be silly and frivolous, there for entertainment and fun (and that’s no bad thing), but like this, books can be one of the most important ways we have to express our opinions, our love, and our despair.
The sad thing about this book is that it could be about any time. Yes I know that in all war there is unfortunately collateral damage – it was true of the World Wars and it’s true now. And so the thing we must do is stop the war from happening in the first place, but I digress. Reading this, give or take a few specificities, this could be about the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World Wars 1 and 2, as well as more recent wats in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and in the Israel-Palestine conflict. These issues, they don’t end, they just repeat and repeat, no matter how much we all say we’re against it, against fighting, against needless death, but it still happens, again and again.
It made me so angry. Not at the book in itself, but what it contains and how helpless I am. I know we can all help in little ways, even if it’s simply voicing our displeasure at something, but knowing that on a day-to-day basis, these thing of things are happening and in my current situation, I cannot do anything substantial, it’s so angering and I think Omar has done wonderfully in drawing out these emotions in his readers.
Generally speaking, I don’t cry at books. I am a big wuss and cry at almost anything, but it’s rare that a book, no matter how sad, actually makes me sob, btu this had achieved it by page 11.
This is my first of Omar’s books but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for his others.
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