BRUX BLOG

These are not my words. They are the title of a book by journalist Omar El Akkad, as he writes about Gaza and other cases of devastation. His title began as a tweet, which has been viewed over ten million times: (1)

“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.”

This reference easily applies to Gaza, as it does to the Holocaust. But let me ask you about other events taking place today. Do you know that, according to the UN, Sudan is facing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis? Famine and violent militias have caused tens if not hundreds of thousands of people to die and millions of others to flee. Nearly 25 million people — half of Sudan’s population — is now facing extreme hunger. Perhaps you don’t know that the U.S. has cut off food aid to them, and the babies are dying as I write. Perhaps you also don’t know that the arms used by the Sudanese militias have the name of the U.S. government on them. Yes, they came from the U.S. via the United Arab Emirates. After all, that is what the U.S. defense industry is for.

Do you know about the gangs in Haiti? They rape, maim, and murder the population. No one is safe. Boys are recruited by the promise of a loaf of bread, or perhaps a pledge that their mothers will be spared. Perhaps you don’t know that our government has ended Temporary Protected Status for existing and potential Haitian refugees. But the gang violence is getting worse and virtually all their guns come from the U.S. After all, that is what the U.S. gun lobby is for.

Perhaps you know about the reoccurring devastating storms in Mozambique and other parts of southern Africa—not only storms, but periods of intense drought and famine, followed by torrential floods. These, of course, are triggered by climate change, which is caused by the climate emissions of far more developed countries. The poorest countries contribute just a fraction of a percent. But then, that is what “beautiful clean coal” is all about. (2)

So maybe you don’t know about Sudan, Haiti, and Mozambique. Maybe you know about the unlawful and mistaken deportation of two lawful immigrants and their imprisonment in El Salvador, where an authoritarian leader is friends with our own. Says NYT editorialist, Michelle Goldberg, “Someday, maybe, we’ll remember this moment as one of American shame.” (3) But maybe not.

As much as I admire El Akkad for his vision and compassion in the opening quotation, I don’t know that I accept his thesis that one day we will all be against these things—even if we ignore them today. After all, if you are old enough to remember the world food crisis of the early 1970s, are you plagued with regret for the hundreds of thousands of children who starved to death—due in small part to weather and large part to manipulation of global grain markets? After all, corporate farmers and the shipping industry made $millions. (4) Are you finally horrified by the Rwandan genocide where more than one million people were killed over 100 days in 1994—the genocide where people were rounded up in airports, churches, and school buildings, calling out to the world for help, yet ignored and later excused by false statements of “we didn’t know.” (5) Are you finally free to be thoroughly outraged by the U.S. invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people in pursuit of fantasy weapons of mass destruction and characterized by that president as a “crusade?” (6) After all, that’s how profits go to reconstruction companies owned by U.S. vice presidents. (7)

I guess I don’t see the outrage. It wasn’t there before, and I doubt it will be there in the future. To be honest, the time for outrage is now. Outrage for Gaza. Outrage for Sudan, Haiti, and Mozambique. Outrage for all the innocents and all the power and profits, politics and special interests, that supersede the broken hearts of the devastated.

_{1. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, New York: Random House, 2025.}

_{2. The White House,, “President Donald J. Trump Reinvigorates America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” Ap 8, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/.../fact-sheet-president.../}

_{3. Michelle Goldberg, “The Trump Victim I Can’t Stop Thinking About,” NYT, 4-26-25. https://www.nytimes.com/.../trump-el-salvador-makeup... .}

_{4. Bread for the World (www.bread.org) sought to publicize and bring aid to the people affected by the crisis.}

_{5. Clinton said, “we didn’t know,” which I know to be false because I contacted the White House and my legislators every day for months before the devastation even began. Clinton later lied and said he had "done all he could do." Dana Hughes, ABC News, February 28, 2014, “Bill Clinton Regrets Rwanda Now (Not So Much In 1994),” https://abcnews.go.com/.../bill-clinton-regrets-rwanda...}

_{6. “Crusade. I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the President’s use of that word, the outrageous ineptitude of it. The vertigo lifted, and what I felt then was fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude. … A thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the severed heads of Muslim fighters as missiles, catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities under siege. Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade or jihad.” James Carroll, “The Bush Crusade,” The Nation, Sept 2,2004, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bush-crusade/}

_{7. Dick Cheney, Halliburton}