Memes

"Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. 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 as though living was an aberration.

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 of 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 days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism."

— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This