One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, racism, and death.

“Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language—a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence.”

El Akkad uses metaphor and imagery to illustrate how language functions as a barrier similar to physical fortifications. The description of empire being “cocooned inside its own fortress of language” personifies both the empire and language, suggesting that language actively protects the keepers of power from confronting reality. His use of passive voice in phrases like “buildings are never destroyed” and “people are killed” highlights how linguistic structures remove agency and responsibility from perpetrators of violence. This quote addresses the theme of Sanitized Language as Shield for Collective Complicity by demonstrating how euphemistic language transforms deliberate violence into seemingly natural occurrences, allowing Western audiences to avoid moral responsibility for the consequences of their governments’ actions.

“And this language might protect the empire’s most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.”

El Akkad uses irony and parallel structure to expose the hypocrisy in how liberal-centrist rhetoric justifies violence. The repetition of “the middle” emphasizes his target—not extremists but self-proclaimed moderates—while the deliberate absence of commas in the list of atrocities creates a breathless, overwhelming effect that contrasts sharply with the sanitized language he critiques.