DEMAGOGUES AND DESPOTS

Awards & Accolades Likes 28 Our Verdict GET IT New York Times Bestseller National Book Award Winner by Omar El Akkad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2025 A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy. Awards & Accolades Likes 28 Our Verdict GET IT New York Times Bestseller National Book Award Winner An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war. “Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he...