One day, when it's safe

In Eros theatre in Mumbai, my teenaged self had gone with a friend to see a movie, Independence Day. Microdosed with Hindi and Tamil movie sentiment, I was fully primed to applaud when Bill Pullman gave that rousing speech at the end. I enthusiastically did, my claps loud and unaccompanied in the darkness of the theatre. Years later, in college, when I spoke about this to S, the wise person that he was even when young, shrugged, and said that he did not like the movie. Why? I wanted to know. He did not much care for the America is great and will save the world stuff, he said. I was taken aback. Though, we did not have the language for it, what S poked at that day was the propaganda machine that is Hollywood.

These are the things many believed in and perhaps continue to. There is a rules-based world order to guard freedom of humankind. Since the second world war, a time of great darkness, this order has governed the world. The West believes in values of the enlightenment, the freedom and liberation of the individual. The Western Liberal, the embodiment of these values, stands for those freedoms. Whenever the idea of that freedom is threatened, the good people stand against those forces, and the north American president, the leader of the free world, gives a rousing speech. The world claps. Freedom, freedom, freedom.

It is one thing to know theoretically something is propaganda, a drink carefully calibrated to keep you pliant. There are a few like S who have an instinct for smelling the koolaid. Many of us tend to guzzle. For, just the theoretical knowledge that something is manufactured to manipulate is insufficient. The aetiology has to be followed by changing habits developed over a lifetime, a process akin to dealing with a strange kind of loss, for even if you know something is corrosive, if you have sipped it long enough, you tend to find comfort it in. Omar El Akkad’s book is about dealing with this strange kind of loss, the loss of the belief in Western liberalism.

Omar El Akkad’s family moved from Egypt to Qatar to Canada and then the US, a quest for survival. “And survival is not clean, does not subscribe to any one narrative. For every victim of colonialism who resisted, there might be another who, like countless members of my parents’s and grandparents’ generations, looked to the French and the British and thought: This is what winners look like.”

Sounds familiar, no?

In the course of this migration, both literally and philosophically, Omar describes how he started to see the West: “The mind outlines better than it shades. England, Canada, the United States, the West, these places—or rather ideas of places—became in my imagination the negative space of all I despised about the Middle East: the repression, the sheer docility expected of everyone on all matters political or social, the gaggle of idiot Dear Leaders whose embellished jawlines were plastered on most every vertical public surface.”

Recall all those conversations about corruption and rule of law, and freedom of speech and the difference between here and there. Sounds familiar, no?

And there is a desperate need to believe. “I wanted for that other place. I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom. The freedom to become something better than what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear. And more than any of these things, the freedom to be left alone.”

Again, sounds familiar, no?

Omar speaks of the ‘bedrock of this thing called the ‘free world’.’ It is comforting to build houses on this bedrock, raise children, and build a life. There are faultlines; from the different wars, the profiling, the hyphenated phobias, the killings. And yet, one believes.

For instance, take the many articles and social media posts rightly harpooning the New York Times and the BBC about their use of passive voice when it comes to Gaza; the convoluted sentence constructions that evade more than explain; and the leaked memos that asks to restrict use of terms such as genocide and ethnic cleansing. And yet, these articles and social media posts centre these publications and these critiques are a bid to hold them accountable, for there is still a belief in that bedrock. In a way, it is trying to get power to adhere to the values that are supposed to hold it in check.

What happens when power shakes loose of these values? What happens when the fault lines become too wide to bridge? “This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”

In the synopsis, the publisher called it a ‘break-up letter to the west’. It was I thought an apt description, for most parts. There is love, which Omar speaks of, the relationship built over so many years cannot be without it. There is also learning to live together with disappointment, like in any relationship. “To maintain belief in what is commonly called the rules-based order requires a tolerance for disappointment.” Then, there’s the slow erosion of trust, whittling away of maybes, and a growing horror of beholding the full face of one’s beloved who insists: “Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.”

It is an intimate account of this break-up and what struck me was the tentativeness Omar grappled with in narrating it. It is like sitting with a person dazed after ending a long relationship who is recounting how it happened. It articulates the increasing dissonance post Oct 2023 between the promise of what was supposed to be a international rules-based order and the reality on the ground — the rules-based order exists to serve some, and others’ humanity will always a question for a committee.

“What power assumes, ultimately, is that all those who weren’t directly affected by this, who only had to bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar, will move on, will forget. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment. Indeed, in many of these places, what will have a real economic effect is if the bombing stops. In social and professional circles there will be limited tolerance for any talk about the fortunes of some exotic, dangerous-sounding people. In the context of self-interest—and maybe there never was any other context—it is utter madness to risk one’s own prospects standing up for people who can offer nothing in return. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human. For millions of Westerners this will always prove true.”

I could go on pasting all that I had highlighted here, but I shall pause.