Goodreads blurb: From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.
My review: Sudan. Afghanistan. New York. Iraq. Syria. Nigeria. Ukraine. Gaza. Israel. In the first quarter of this century, countless civilians have died, caught up in conflicts that they never asked for. How many do we care about? Which ones do we choose to harden our hearts and look away from? If your answers to those questions aren’t respectively “All” and “None,” Omar El Akkad might have written this book for you.
Omar El Akkad – he talks about the preconceived notions that people get in their minds upon hearing his name, but he was born in Egypt, grew up in the USA and Canada, and has lived and worked in various countries as a journalist and author, so he has seen the world through many different viewpoints and offers a well-rounded perspective. He has seen first-hand the effects of Empire on the Victims of Empire, as he puts it, and has heard for himself the different terms each group uses to describe the same things – enhanced interrogation vs torture; collateral damage vs killings; detainees vs prisoners. He has also gained the perspective to see that, while American movies depict American heroes as rebels and underdogs rising above a potentially more powerful enemy threatening to oppress them, the reality is quite the opposite – America is the powerful Empire against which those without power are forced to rebel. (It was strange to be reading this as a Canadian in 2025, with the Empire currently breathing down our necks and the growing fear that my country could soon become the next Ukraine.)
His conclusion is that Western indifference to non-Western suffering needs to stop: “A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.” We’ve seen it happen over and over again throughout human history – if you allow yourself to see one group of humans as having more or less worth than another, mass genocide can occur right under your nose, and you won’t even wince. We can’t pick and choose which sufferings to pity and which to turn a blind eye to, and then call ourselves the good guys. We can’t see news footage of a city becoming “balls of pale white light” and think that’s “just what happen[s] to certain places, to certain people.” If it were happening to us, we would expect the rest of the world to care. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they, too, will think, “At least it isn’t us.”
I listened to this book on audiobook, which is narrated by the author himself, so I heard the empathy, the pleading, and occasionally the tears in his voice as he passionately shared his beautifully-written thoughts. This is a powerful, moving, eye-opening read that I hope a lot of people will pick up and allow to sink in.
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