War on Gaza (w/ Joe Sacco) | The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Mary Shelley, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” In the chaos of war and inequity, cartoonist Joe Sacco pioneered the first graphic illustration journalism. Sacco has covered some of the most devastating warzones such as in Bosnia, which gave birth to his book, “Safe Area Gorazde,” and Gaza, which inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” a book host Chris Hedges calls, “A masterpiece… one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down.”

Sacco joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his continued journey through chaos and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza influenced the newest iteration of his invention, his book “War on Gaza.”

Hedges quotes a question Sacco asks in the book, “Is it genocide or is it self-defense? Let's make everyone happy and say it is both. In that case, we'll need new terminology. I propose genocidal self-defense that should give both sides something to work with.”

Through visual renderings, dark humor and objective reporting, Sacco is able evoke responses to events playing out in ways traditional media can never achieve.

“You will find humor in places like Gaza, places like Bosnia, and it's always of the darkest sort. It's their way of sort of managing their own thoughts, being funny, but understanding the underlying darkness of their humor. And I think I picked that up and I'm reflecting it back,” Sacco tells Hedges.

The two reference several parts of Sacco’s new book, touching on the different ways the genocide has altered life in the West, including academic censorship, the question of democracy and biblical interpretation.

In the end, Sacco says it all comes back to his own personal life and the connection it has with such an atrocity. “I've always had this idea that whatever I'm paying in taxes really just adds up to one small piece of shrapnel. I mean, as a nightmare, I just imagine that all my money is funneled into a small part of a bomb that causes someone to lose their life in Gaza.”

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Host:

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

I first met the cartoonist Joe Sacco in Bosnia shortly after the war in 1995 where I was reporting for The New York Times. I knew nothing about comics and was unfamiliar with his work. But I knew something about reporting. And as we worked together in the Bosnian town of Gorazde, where Joe was gathering material for what would become his book Safe Area Gorazde, I very swiftly realized that Joe was a brilliant and meticulous reporter. We later did a book together, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, where 50 pages were given over to his comics. Invariably, once what I thought was an exhaustive interview, often lasting a few hours, was done, Joe would quietly ask the half dozen or so questions I had missed, questions that were vital to the narrative. Joe invented nonfiction, graphic journalism. He not only reports his stories, he draws them out in cartoons, a labor intensive process that can take years.

This marriage of graphic illustrations and panels give a visceral power to his reporting that we as writers often struggle to match. From 1993 to 1995 he published nine comics on the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, later collected in the book Palestine. His book educated a generation about the brutality of Israel’s settler colonial project and system of apartheid. Palestine won an American Book Award and is often included in college syllabuses. Edward Said, in the introduction to Palestine, wrote, “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” I worked again with Joe on an article for Harper’s magazine called A Gaza Diary which chronicled the life of Palestinians in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza in 2001. During our reporting we interviewed survivors of the massacres carried out when Israel occupied the Gaza strip in 1956, massacres in which at least 275 men and boys executed by Israeli soldiers. The editors at Harper’s edited out this part of the story, arguing that it was irrelevant because it was history. This did not sit well with me. It certainly did not sit well with Joe, who spent the next six years making repeated trips to Gaza to doggedly track down victims and eyewitnesses of the massacre.

The result was his masterpiece, Footnotes in Gaza, one of the finest books on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Joe is well aware that context is key, that those who do not understand the past do not understand the present. And now, he and I, who have spent considerable time in Gaza, watch the live-streamed genocide, one where familiar places in Gaza are reduced to rubble, Palestinians we know and care about are killed, disappear, no doubt buried under the rubble, or are forced into exile. We each have devoted considerable time and energy since the genocide began desperately trying to make the voices and the suffering of the Palestinians heard. The result, for Joe, is his new comic. “On Gaza” which we will be discussing today.

Let's begin with your reaction after October 7th. I'm sure it was very similar to mine, this desperate urge to chronicle, express, in your case, of course, also draw about what was happening. But talk about that moment and the impetus for what became this book on Gaza.

Joe Sacco

Well, my first reaction on October 7th was great shock. I mean, first of all, I just heard about a lot of Israeli civilians being killed, I heard about the festival and the killings that took place there. And I was overwhelmed by the numbers and the sense of what must have happened. And to be honest, that sort of paralyzed me for a minute or two. But then the bombing that started almost immediately basically incapacitated me, at least for some weeks. I felt I had to do something. I knew I was going to do something, but for that first period, just as a human being, I couldn't really take it all in myself. I had some news organizations calling me up for a reaction, and I didn't even answer the phone because I had no reaction. I mean, I had nothing to say, nothing geopolitical to say, no great analysis. Just as a human being, I was just taken aback. I tried to do some work. I picked up my pen, took some notes. It was sort of going nowhere. But then a friend wrote to me from Khan Yunis and said, please raise up your voice. And then that was the moment I just decided, okay, just start.

Whatever it is, just begin and let's see what comes out of it. And once I really began, it all just began to flow out of me. I mean, sometimes that's what it takes. It's not a question of thinking about it or mulling it over. It's a question of actually just doing, you think by doing somehow. Like you, I can't go there. I can't report from there, which is what I'd rather do. I'd rather talk to people, get their reactions, see what they have to say, see with my own eyes what's going on. But because I couldn't do that, I had to approach it in some other way. And I didn't want it to be an outright polemic, which is kind of how I felt, like I should write a polemic. But I wanted to bring the reader along with me. And so I fell back on something I'd been doing for a long time, which is satire. That's a place where I'm comfortable, is working with satire. And then I basically found my voice as I was going along with the drawings which first appeared in The Comics Journal. You know, whenever I finished one or two, I would send them in and they would post them as I finished them.

Chris Hedges

I remember you telling me that you worked with—this is with Fantagraphics which publishes your book. Well it has published I think all your books right?

Joe Sacco

Not all, but about half, I'd say.

Chris Hedges

Half, okay. And I remember you saying that you just assumed that although you had been approached by mainstream publications like The Guardian you just assumed they wouldn't run your stuff, is that correct?

Joe Sacco

Well, you know, it was... I was assuming that I would start, in my own head, starting to accommodate myself to a way of doing things. You’d sort of think about what The Guardian would need to sort of balance this or that out. And I thought I didn't want to play that game with myself. I mean, I'm glad they approached me. It was nice, but I knew that Fantagraphics and the publishers there, Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds, were… They got what was going on and they felt very strongly about what was going on and I knew they weren't going to mess with any of my words and I wouldn't have to second think anything.

Chris Hedges

So let's begin as the book begins and that is about—you talk about that paralysis, your initial response. And you reflect, you read a long time ago,

“When I was in Gaza, I told my friend what the Palestinians there ought to do. They ought to take a page from Gandhi's book.”

And that's what they did with the Great March of Return. Talk about that and what you ended up drawing.

Joe Sacco

Well, yeah, I believe nonviolence is the best way to go, ultimately. When I suggested it to my Palestinian friend, he said, if we march to the wall in a great demonstration to protest the blockade or to protest our lives here in the occupation, they'll shoot us. They're gonna shoot us. And when they did have The Great March of Return some years later, they marched to the fortified fence and were shot down in droves. A couple of hundred were killed. This was almost exclusively a peaceful demonstration. And Amnesty [International] reported that it seemed that Israeli snipers were shooting at people to wound them in ways that would require amputations, basically. So at that point I realized, who am I to suggest how the Palestinians should respond to the occupation. I'm not living under the occupation. I wouldn't know how I would react to myself under—if I were in their shoes.

Chris Hedges

You have a full page and you ask as a question,

“Is it genocide or is it self-defense? Let's make everyone happy and say it is both. In that case, we'll need new terminology. I propose genocidal self-defense that should give both sides something to work with.”

Of course, this was early on when the use of the term genocide didn't have as much currency in the mainstream as it does now.

Joe Sacco

That might be the case, but it seemed clear to me almost immediately that's what was going to happen. I mean, hundreds of Palestinians were getting killed every day in the first few weeks especially. And [Benjamin] Netanyahu, I think a couple of days into all this, was talking about Amalek. He was talking about, he was making biblical references to a people that were exterminated and that God had required the extermination of those people down to the sucklings, in other words, the babies at the breast, and the animals. And there was a lot of indications from other Israeli politicians that—[Yoav] Gallant calling the Palestinians human animals. If you coupled what looked to me like intent with great devastation, it was, early on, it seemed like it was gonna be genocidal.

Now self-defense, mean, that's sort of the mantra. Israel has the right to defend itself. It almost has like a biblical feel to it at this point. But then we have to examine what is self-defense? I mean, we throw that around. Does self-defense include everything, every atrocity up to and including genocide? We have to question terminologies like self-defense when it gets to that point.

Chris Hedges

I have to ask you about, because you talk about satire, but this is, there's a very dark humor. When we first met, I think one of the books that we discussed together in Bosnia was Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's “Journey to the End of the Night,” “Death on the Installment Plan.” But it certainly has echoes of Céline. It's not simply satire. There's a very, there's a darkness to what you're doing.

Joe Sacco

There's a darkness, it's sort of the darkness, it’s—you find humor. You will find humor in places like Gaza, places like Bosnia, and it's always of the darkest sort. I mean, it's their way of sort of managing their own thoughts, being funny, but understanding the underlying darkness of their humor. And I think I picked that up and I'm reflecting it back.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, completely. So, you talk about,

“As an overnighted plane load after plane load of 2,000 pound bombs and 155 millimeter artillery rounds to Israel, the White House declared that there would be no red lines for its enraged ally.”

So yeah, let's talk about that whole concept of red lines.

Joe Sacco

Well, this is, I mean, the fact that they would say something like that is basically saying anything you do is okay with us. And any red line that was stated, let's say [Joe] Biden had his red line in Rafah, that was going to be a red line. I mean, even when they had red lines, it meant nothing. Basically it was carte blanche, carte blanche to do whatever they want. And that's what's been going on. I mean, bombs are being shoveled. They're going there by the plane load and they're being used. So there are no red lines for Israel, it seems, as far as America is concerned.

Chris Hedges

There were rhetorical red lines.

Joe Sacco

Rhetorical red lines, even though, again, Biden about Rafah, Israelis crossed that red line, they've obliterated Rafah.

Chris Hedges

Yeah. So let's talk about the aid, which you write about, this kind of assumption that the United States is the chief humanitarian benefactor as well, of course, as the arm supplier.

Joe Sacco

I mean, I don't even know what to say when [White House National Security Communications Advisor] [John] Kirby said that. What do you say to something like that? It's unbelievable that a spokesperson, an official of the White House is saying something like, we are the chief benefactor. You can't find a greater humanitarian in this particular conflict than us, the people who are also providing the bombs. I mean this is beyond, I mean, this is not about satire anymore. And you know, the journalists are just noting it down and it's just being pumped out to us. And of course, I think at this point, everyone sees it for what it is, or everyone should see it for what it is.

Chris Hedges

Well, you call it, America has just invented a kindler, gentler genocide.

Joe Sacco

Right, because you want it both ways. You want to bomb them and you want to feed them. But the feeding part, the so-called humanitarian gestures, are the way of selling the genocide. It's part of the sales, genocidal salesmanship, as you say it's something else.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, that was true with AID and every war that I covered.

Joe Sacco

Okay, there you go.

Chris Hedges

It was a mechanism and of course it was used to mask. I mean the war in El Salvador would be a perfect example there.

Joe Sacco

It's about a narrative and how you shape a narrative while you're committing atrocities.

Chris Hedges

Exactly. So you turn the page and you have the full page of Biden with the new scarlet letter, which is, it's a black and white drawing, but on Biden's forehead is “G” for genocide in red. I just want to ask you, because you do that all the time in all of your work. Your panels are not uniform. They will, in “Footnotes in Gaza,” which we have to mention, which is a masterpiece. It's one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down. You use the size in order to convey emotion, convey feelings of entrapment, feeling… But let's just talk about that reason that you flip the page. Because before, you have more traditional panels. And then it's a full page of Biden with the words, “the new scarlet letter.”

Joe Sacco

Right, I almost wanted that to be a meme, basically. I mean, it already is. We already have the term “genocide Joe.” But, you know, my hope is that this will be his historical legacy. It should be his historical legacy. And of course, I'm taking it from [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's book, The Scarlet Letter, where an adulteress had to wear the scarlet letter “A.” So hopefully people got the reference. I think of Biden as a war criminal. I mean, I'm not sure I understand why—if your listeners think that there's a genocide being committed and that we're culpable, then he should be considered a war criminal, as many other members of his administration. And this is just giving it some, I'm just trying to give it some impact, this whole thought.

Chris Hedges

You have an image on the next page. It's Biden repeating this false claim by Israel about beheaded babies where he said he saw pictures of beheaded babies, which of course was a lie. And right below that image,

“Surely it was the divine that implanted images of beheaded babies and children into the mind of the president, for in fact there were neither beheaded babies nor beheaded children and no images there of…”

Let's talk a little bit about that because it's something that you and I have run into repeatedly, that Israeli, that Hasbara, that Israeli propaganda machine and how it works.

Joe Sacco

Right. There's an Israeli propaganda machine and then there's the president of the United States embracing that and repeating the propaganda and pushing the propaganda. Even when the White House talked it back, he continued to say the same thing in subsequent speeches. So to me, he's embracing the dehumanization of Palestinians. Hamas committed atrocities, that seems like a reasonable charge. But to make up atrocities, to conjure up what we would consider the lowest thing a human can do, beheading a baby. I mean, he is part of the dehumanization project. And I mean, dehumanization is the sort of stepping stone to annihilation. So that's what I'm trying to get across there.

Chris Hedges

You had closed with that last image.

“Oh Israel, let a monument be raised atop the flattened cities of Amalek so that future generations will never forget the miracle of Joe Biden's hallucination. I humbly submit this design to the relevant committee.”

And it's a picture of a child and diapers beheaded with blood gushing out of the top of their head.

Joe Sacco

Well, to me, that's part of his legacy too, is paving the way for genocide with those statements like that. I mean, we have to look at the fact that the United States has sent bombs, but then there's the rhetorical aspect too, where they're not just emphasizing a narrative, but creating one out of whole cloth.

Chris Hedges

The next little section is on your mother. Your mother was a young woman in Malta in World War II, when I think Malta was one the most heavily, at one moment, one of the most heavily bombed places on Earth. It was because it was a major kind of staging area in the Mediterranean for the British in particular. But let's talk exactly about that narrative. And you have also done a longer comic—I can't remember what book it's in—on your mother's experience in Malta. Which book is that? Where is that?

Joe Sacco

That's from “Notes From a Defeatist.”

Chris Hedges

Right. But let's talk about that story that you tell about your mother.

Joe Sacco

Right, well, you know, my mother's 95 and when my sister and I talk in front of her, we've tried to avoid talking about Gaza. But we started talking about it and she overheard and then she started immediately thinking about her own experiences in World War II. And for about two and a half years, Malta was very heavily bombed as you mentioned. And she lived in a quarry, she lived in a shelter, she saw friends killed. She was personally strafed by a German fighter plane. She used to tell us about not having any food, like basically going to school, with one small piece of bread. And that was, that's what she ate for the day and eating it right away. So no one would take it. I mean, she lived under very bad conditions in the war and so did my dad. So I grew up with those stories and it's clear, she doesn't remember a lot of things now, but these are the memories that come back to her. These are the ones that are dredged up in her mind.

And it's clear that the trauma is still—when she'll forget what she did 10 minutes ago, the trauma of what happened in World War II is still with her. She started talking about what was going on when we were talking about Gaza. She was talking about her own experiences. And then of course, at the end of that particular story, I talk about the Israeli minister, May Golan, I think, who hoped that Palestinian babies now, 80 years from now, would be telling their grandchildren, this is what we did, this is what the Israelis had done to the Palestinians, as if to sort of revel in the idea that trauma would be handed down from one generation to another. And it will be. And I mean, to find pleasure in that is so disgusting that you've reached a level of being able to dehumanize people to that extent that you hope their grandchildren's grandchildren perhaps will still suffer the trauma from it.

Chris Hedges

Well, and this is what you did so powerfully in “Footnotes in Gaza.”

Joe Sacco

Well, again, I talked to people who, in the middle of the 1950s, were attacked by the Israelis and a lot of the men were lined up against walls and shot. And people who survived that, when I was talking to them, yeah, half a century later, you could tell the trauma was still there. They remembered very well being beaten over the head as they entered into a school to get screened, for example. So trauma does, it is passed down the generations. And obviously the Jewish people understand this. People who are traumatized, it will just continue with their children and others. I have friends whose parents went through the Holocaust, and my friends are traumatized by that.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about the next—so a reading from the book of genocide. Of course, what you're pulling on is Sodom and Gomorrah. I love the biblical references. But it's Netanyahu, who, in this comic, is Yahweh up in the clouds and Biden looking out and saying, “will thou also destroy the righteous and the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous men in Gaza. Wilt thou then sweep them away and not pardon the place for the sake of the 50?” This is, of course, right out of that biblical story. But talk about that little story.

Joe Sacco

Yeah, mean, that's Abraham asking Yahweh, would you save the city, basically, if it came down to just a few individuals were righteous? And I sort of reverse it. And we start with if there were just a few righteous in Gaza, and I increase the number, I don't decrease it. So at the end, it's if there are 2 million innocent people in Gaza, would you still destroy it?

Chris Hedges

And half of them are children.

Joe Sacco

And half of them are children, exactly. And I mean, obviously, we know the answer to that because we've seen Netanyahu's actions. But then I'm also showing that Biden wasn't being sincere with this question. It was just a joke to him anyway. He's going to provide the bombs to destroy the innocent as well as the guilty.

Chris Hedges

The end of that panel is, I think it gets back to the point you made earlier about Biden's legacy and the genocide. So you said, “And the president looked back and he was turned into a pillar of votes for Jill Stein.” That's of course the pillar of salt. But just mention that a complete moral bankruptcy on the part not just of Biden but the entire US ruling class Republican or Democrat.

Joe Sacco

Well, that's the whole idea. I mean, the biblical story fit quite well because Lot, when he escapes Gamora, is told not to look back and his wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. But that's the whole idea. It's like this is being committed, but it's almost a way of saying, I mean, in this particular case, it's Biden, Blinken, we're not responsible. We're moving on from this. Ignore what we've done. Don't think about it, don't talk about it. But in this particular case, when Biden was still running for election, I felt like he would suffer from this electorally on some level. And he did, or Democrats did.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, and he did. Yeah, and they deserve to. So then we're back in Portland. And you're just talking about, which I think all of us who've worked in Gaza feel, the sense of powerlessness, the sense of frustration, outrage, at just this live streamed genocide. But you immediately, of course, tie it into the unhoused population in the city. So just talk about that narrative and what you're seeking to express in terms of your own feelings.

Joe Sacco

Well, my own feelings are I live in the United States, I pay taxes here. I live in Portland, Oregon. There are a lot of homeless people on the street. There are a lot of people who need help. There are a lot of structural problems with the United States that are causing what I'm seeing on the streets. I would hope that, I mean, in a better world, that's where my tax money would be going, is to helping people who need it that live in America. Instead, it's going to killing people in Gaza. Well, that's what it seems to me. And I've always had this idea that whatever I'm paying in taxes really just adds up to one small piece of shrapnel. I mean, as a nightmare, I just imagine that all my money is funneled into a small part of a bomb that causes someone to lose their life in Gaza.

Chris Hedges

Well, but of course that's true.

Joe Sacco

That is true. I'm paying for it. I mean, I'm culpable. I don't want to be culpable. I don't want to be part of this genocide, but I am part of a genocide. As you are, Chris, whether you like it or not, and as the readers are, or as your listeners are. So I feel a sense of responsibility for what's going on.

Chris Hedges

Your next section is about the forthcoming election and a president who will facilitate a genocide and a former president who will end our democracy. And I have to, as a caveat, say that I totally stole that line because you mentioned it to me when we met in New York. And because you're honest and decent, you called up before you wrote this and said, you just want to know that you'd thought of it first. And I said, of course you thought of it first, I used it.

Joe Sacco

[Laughing] You used it first.

Chris Hedges

I just used it first. But this is the frustration I think I felt in this election. How can we normalize genocide as a governmental policy? How can we vote for anyone who embraces a genocide? And yet none of us want Trump. I mean, Biden's or the Democratic Party's disdain for democracy is perhaps subtler, but it’s there. But Trump's disdain for democracy is quite overt and open. So let's just talk about the last election in light of the genocide and what you drew.

Joe Sacco

Well, I mean, I think you just have to question where we are today, that these are the people our political parties are going to throw up, or these are what our political parties actually represent. One does, the Republicans do seem to represent some movement toward or move toward a completely anti-democratic system. And then the Democratic Party, you know, if you voted for them, you were basically going to give a rubber stamp to what had been going on with the genocide. There was never the sense that this is going to stop if Kamala Harris is elected. She never said anything like that. So I don't understand how you morally can vote for either. I understand that people will say Trump is worse. And I had a lot of discussions with friends who were debating this whole issue. But in the end I'd say, well, you know you're going to be voting for a genocide one way or the other, so how can you actually be part of that? How can you put your name behind any of that? But if we're at that place, then we really have to question where we are as a republic. Who are the people who are representing us? Who are the parties that are representing us?

Chris Hedges

Yeah, well that and also the fact that 66% of the public—it's either 61 or 66% of the public—opposes arms shipments to Israel and 77% of the registered Democrats oppose. And it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter.

Joe Sacco

It's irrelevant and they will still vote for the Democrats.

Chris Hedges

And let's talk about—because this is also a panel on freedom of speech. Because it's become even worse since you drew this, on college campuses. They've become academic gulags. Everything is shut down. Students who participated in the encampments or occupations are on probation or suspended. Faculty members have been terminated, the few who have spoken up. But you see all of this coming. There's that panel of Biden speaking at AIPAC,

“One thing this war taught us is that never again is a registered trademark licensed only under certain conditions that anyone trespassing on this intellectual property will be severely reprimanded.”

Indeed, we now live in a world where saying you want to stop a genocide is hate speech while slandering those who want to stop it is paid speech. And at the end, that last panel and the answer to more speech is a police charge. It's even worse than when you drew this. Let's talk about that suppression of speech and its consequences. I don't think that all of these new rules, which universities and colleges spent the summer, oftentimes in not only collaborating but working with security firms that have close ties to Israel, I don't see how those rules will be lifted even after the genocide.

Joe Sacco

Well, yeah, maybe some of these things are gonna be here to stay. I mean what's really important? I think what the students really, I was really—if you wanna talk about hope, I found it in the students and what they were saying and how they were willing to put themselves on the line. And of course, they were a threat because they were seeing a different narrative. They were understanding things. I think first viscerally, just by looking on their phones and seeing what was going on, I think they were viscerally disgusted and they must have thought this has to stop. And then they began to educate themselves, I think, about what was going on. And the narrative was shifting. The narrative has shifted in many ways. So that narrative has to be suppressed. But it shows how effective they've been that these draconian measures are now being implemented.

You know, this isn't my thought, I heard it somewhere, but someone was saying that here are these students, learning about, they're in these classes learning about Frantz Fanon and reading Edward Said. And then they take this on board. And then when they want to sort of express it in praxis somehow, when they actually want to implement what they're being taught, they're crushed. I mean, you really have to wonder about what the academic institutions are providing. What service are they providing for so much money? Yes, you can talk about this and talk about this, but at some point you can't talk about this because now this is a particular issue where any line, you're going to be crossing a line. And that's the whole idea. You begin to talk about one narrative, let's say the student's narrative as being hate speech. No, you're anti-Semitic. Even Jewish students are being anti-Semitic. I mean, I think the liberal order is sort of twisting itself in knots here, but in the end they have force on their side. They can call the police. They do call the police.

Chris Hedges

They do call the police. You have this full page panel,

“Gaza was where the West went to die. The only truth still held to be self-evident was that the rules-based order weighed 2,000 pounds and could flatten an entire neighborhood.”

I think that's right. I think not that the rules-based order was honored in Iraq or Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and go back to Vietnam. But now there's no pretense anymore of a rules-based order. And what are the consequences of that?

Joe Sacco

Well, I mean, what are the new rules if there's no rules-based order? We don't know what those are. You're right. I mean, the West, especially the United States, has always been hypocritical about rules and international norms. Of course, they're setting the international norms, and they're the ones who are deciding who's following them and who isn't. There's no universal laws, really. They're particular. But what we've seen really, like you say, is the hypocrisy now is, it's on open display. They're not trying to hide it anymore. That international law doesn't matter. mean, an international criminal court can hand down arrest warrants and it's just, the West, the collective West is mostly going to shrug its shoulders at this. The United States is going to ignore it. So what are the rules about? I mean, we have to question all these things.

Chris Hedges

And this is that panel “Human.” So you have these parachuted aid packages, which, of course, it's very cynical publicity, provides nothing in terms of food to Palestinians. So you had this picture with these aid packages being dropped from a plane by parachute and next to a long trench filled with shrouded corpses. You write,

“Human animals would have no right to water, much less to the rights of man and the only inalienable rights endowed with Amalek would be death, servitude, and the pursuit of air drops. One might fairly ask, was the Enlightenment buried in the rubble of Gaza, or was the rubble the Enlightenment's logical conclusion?”

Well, in the Enlightenment's logical conclusion, that is a pretty weighty philosophical argument which we're not going to spend the whole show on.

Joe Sacco

We can talk about it a bit. I mean, if you read those philosophers, and I think they had great contributions to make. But actually, if you read them, you realize they were racist. They were talking— if you read David Hume or Immanuel Kant, I mean, they said things that would get them canceled today. You know, the white race was the superior race. Other races had nothing to offer at all, other races weren't intelligent at all. So with the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment was always an exclusionary project. That's why you could have America's founding fathers have this great document or documents with basically establishing the liberal order here and also have slavery and genocide at the same time. I mean, it's, the Enlightenment was always circling around itself on these particular issues. And so there were good things about the Enlightenment and about the West obviously, but then, let's see what's really happening. Ultimately, there is a racist project in the West.

Chris Hedges

Well, that comment reminds me of the writings of philosopher John Gray, who argues that the Enlightenment believed in educating people to think correctly and behave correctly, but that those who could not be educated or refused to be educated, and this gave birth to the Jacobins, were then eradicated. And he draws a direct line from the Enlightenment project to the Jacobins to, finally, the Stalinists. And I thought about his writings when you asked precisely that question, whether this was the natural denouement of the Enlightenment.

Joe Sacco

Right, exactly.

Chris Hedges

I think that—you go back to the academic institutions. I think the academic institutions, which have been corporatized, become just appendages of the corporate state, have been completely exposed. Not just the ruling governing apparatus, but also the academic institutions have been exposed for their own bankruptcy. Not that they were ever great, but there used to be more space on academic or university or colleges, college campuses. And now even the heads of, I mean, where was [Minouche] Shafik, the president of Columbia, where did she come from? The World Bank? I mean, sometimes they'll have a figurehead president who has a PhD in physics, but then all of the administrators are drawn out of the corporate world.

And you've seen a withering away of the humanities and accentuation on STEM, these gleaming business schools, business schools should not even be on college campuses, and the transformation of big research universities like Stanford, Harvard's underway, Princeton, into essentially becoming vocational schools, technical schools. But you hit the universities. And I just wondered if you could comment on that.

Joe Sacco

Well, I mean, I agree with everything you've been saying there. I'm not sure how students, I really wonder how students are faring now, going back to classes where they're talking about things and they're talking about things only in the theoretical now. Because if they shift to actually acting on some of this theory, they know what's in store for them. So I'm not sure if they really feel like they're—like what's the education they're getting? This is all sort of in the cloud stuff that you've been taught about decolonization or inclusivity or whatever it is. I mean, it's all sort of, it's sort of a chimera, but you're still gonna be paying to be taught the theory. I don't know. That's up to them to figure that out. I hope they do.

Chris Hedges

And you write,

“And so oppression abroad and repression at home orbit each other in an ever tightening circle and will achieve singularity when the last self hating Jewish student is strangled with the entrails of the last child in Gaza.”

You draw that parallel, which I think is smart, between what's happening on the outer reaches of empire and what's happening at home.

Joe Sacco

Yeah, because I think what happens abroad, what we do abroad eventually will come back to us. I mean, look at the militarization of American police forces since the Iraq war. I mean, I think you and I remember pretty ordinary patrol cars going by and police looking just as vulnerable as anyone else when they were on the street just in their blue uniforms. It's not like that anymore. So, we have to think about how we are poisoning ourselves with these wars abroad. It's not just causing damage abroad, we're poisoning ourselves.

Chris Hedges

On that next page you write,

“From universities to journalists,” and this picture of a murdered Palestinian journalist, over 200 of course, have been murdered, “from ambulances to women's lingerie. After a while, one began to wonder what wasn't a military target in Gaza.”

Let's talk about the behavior of the IDF in the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza. And of course, all of this stuff is, the looting itself was chronicled by Israeli soldiers themselves on social media.

Joe Sacco

Right, I mean, the IDF calls itself the world's most moral army. And I know institutions and nations have their myths. And you know, you have to hold people up to their myth. So what is this morality that it claims to have? The actions of the IDF have been atrocious. It seems like all of Gaza is what in Vietnam was called a free fire zone. When IDF sets up places that are safe havens or places where people can go where they're told they're going to be safe, they've moved from their bombed out home to another bombed out place to these safe places and that are also bombed. I'm not sure how we can use the term moral army when we're talking about the IDF. And I mean, but it also shows how the Palestinians have been dehumanized over the decades in Israeli society that the average soldier will behave in this sort of way. I mean, they really have to have an image in their mind of what Palestinians are to do this kind of thing and not flinch. I mean, they're filming themselves blowing up homes, blowing up universities. I'm not sure what else to say about it, Chris.

Chris Hedges

Well, they've been indoctrinated. Ilan Pappé actually wrote a book about it, about the indoctrination machine starting in primary school.

Joe Saccho

Well, there you go. I mean, and they're always accusing the Palestinians of being taught things in their books. The Palestinians are taught to hate. Well, now we're getting a real demonstration of who's being taught to hate.

Chris Hedges

Yeah. That last panel on that next page.

“Meanwhile, those still keeping records in Gaza would have to adapt to circumstances. The birth certificate and the death certificate were hereafter merged into the same form.”

Then you bring us back to Abu Ghraib.

“How many more times do we need to be reminded of our shared values with Israel? Honestly, we were already convinced. And by the way, are we still giving points for democracy?”

I think that's an extremely important point. Israel is us. I mean, we behaved no different in Iraq.

Joe Sacco

No, that's it exactly. I mean, we were often talking about our shared values with Israel. And yeah, we do have shared values with Israel, but what are those values? That's the question.

Chris Hedges

You throw in ancient Athens, but it's an important point. Even ancient Athens, the greatest example of pure democracy the West has ever known, famously left out women and depended on slave labor to make its political experiment work. And speaking of ancient Athens, let me just interject there that even Aristotle did not envision the end of slavery.

Joe Sacco

No, he thought it was a natural thing for certain people. They were natural slaves.

Chris Hedges

Right. And speaking of ancient Athens, this is you, a drawing of you as usual with your glasses with no eyes.

“And speaking of ancient Athens, have we all read Thucydides? Do we all recall the story of the island state of Melos?”

And then you talk about the island state of Melos. Tell us what happened.

Joe Sacco

Well, the Athenians, the great Democrats, the Athenians had their own empire and they wanted the island state of Milos to join their alliance. And the people on Milos didn't want that. So Athens basically descended upon them, killed every man and took all the women and children into slavery and then sent colonists, Athenians to take over the homes of the people that had been eradicated. You know, we call Athens a democracy, but democracies can commit atrocities. I prefer a democracy. I want a democracy. That's the political system that I would fight for. But a democracy itself is not a moral—there's no morality behind democracy itself. I mean, it's what the people decide. And democracies are very good about excluding people. They're very good about saying, these are the people that have these rights and these are the people on the outside. And the people on the outside, there's often not an attempt to bring them in. I think that's true, definitely true with the Athenians. Who was in and who was out. And it's definitely true with us. So I don't like the idea when democracy is used as sort of a, well, you can't talk about them doing this because they're a democracy or democracy somehow washes some atrocity away. It doesn't. Democracies commit atrocities.

Chris Hedges

And towards the end of the book you say,

“We know how this ends. The warmongers,” one thinks of Kissinger, “the warmongers will recast themselves as peacemakers and humbly nominate themselves to the Nobel committee for its prize.”

It reminds me of the website at Columbia University where they proudly show pictures of student protesters from 1968.

Joe Sacco

Well, there you go. I mean, it's just like continual hypocrisy. Now we can talk about these fine students in ‘68 who took over these buildings, it almost becomes part of the institution's lore. It's also, it's almost a selling point. But when it's happening now and push comes to shove now, obviously it has to be suppressed. There's just hypocrisy in those academic institutions, definitely.

Chris Hedges

Yeah. Great. Thanks, Joe. And I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], Thomas [Hedges], and Diego [Ramos] who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Joe Sacco

Thanks Chris.