Reviews and Comments

I wish everyone I knew would read this book. Every paragraph is informative, poignant, and profound. It asks hard questions, exposes neoliberalism for what it is, and challenges us to do better. It is so well written that I could not stop highlighting throughout. One of the most powerful (and maybe even hopeful) passages I highlighted was in his chapter about Resistance.

“What use is any of it, what use?

“But there is a use, always. The first is outward: every derailment of normalcy matters when what's becoming normal is a genocide. It doesn't take much: by the standards of Western normalcy, where the possibility of a missile landing on one's house or a military sniper murdering one's children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from science fiction, even minima inconvenience is tantamount to apocalypse. The second is inward: every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things—trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground—and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance.
Maybe it's not all that much trouble to
avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter.

“It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power-the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don't actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.”