Another excerpt from Chris Hedges’ interview with Omar El-Akkad, the author of the newly released One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025). Really, you must listen to the entire interview here.

I describe myself as a pacifist, as a fairly committed proponent of nonviolence. But I have the privilege of saying those words in a relative vacuum, a vacuum created by the fact that I live on the launching end of the bombs. I live within the heart of the empire. And so two things come into clarity that I wish hadn’t, but being as though they have, I need to address them.

The first is my right to tell anybody under a state of occupation how to resist that occupation, which is no right at all. I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. Particularly when there is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that’s economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance. So first of all, I have absolutely no right to tell anybody how to resist their occupation or a state of injustice.

But second, I can sit here and I can tell you how committed I am to nonviolence. And I can believe that fully. But by virtue of the society I live in, by virtue of what my tax dollars are being used to do, I am one of the most violent human beings on earth. And I can’t simply brush that away and say, hey, I haven’t thrown a punch since I was 15 years old, I’m fully committed to non-violence. I am part of a society that exercises great industrial violence. And at the very least, I should acknowledge that. And that makes it much, much more difficult to then go around parading my views about how violence as a whole. Sure, it does, but I am actively engaged in it right now. That has been a very difficult thing to contend with and I wish I had a sort of easy wraparound answer for it, but I don’t.