‘I’m doing the work I need to do to live with myself’: Joe Sacco on democracy, genocide, and drawing the truth

1 month ago 12

If an artist can be measured in part by their capacity to look truth squarely in the eye without flinching, let it be said that Joe Sacco is an artist. For more than three decades, Sacco has been perhaps the most prominent and influential cartoonist-journalist in comics. His Palestine, published in 1993, was a probing and ambivalent first-hand report on a people and place trapped in a cycle of war and repression. In the years since, he has followed suit in other troubled regions (Bosnia in 2000’s Safe Area Goražde and 2003’s The Fixer, indigenous communities of northwest Canada in 2020’s Paying the Land), bringing to all of them a simply-delineated illustrative style, and a tone of objective observation that never quite hides his own troubled and humanistic authorial view.

That Sacco has chosen for this mission a medium chiefly associated with flights of escapist fantasy has often worked to his benefit: it was, perhaps, the bracing shock of honest reality on the comics page which made Sacco’s reputation, just as much as his talent at conveying it. It also makes it that much more surprising during those instances where Sacco’s reportorial neutrality breaks down, and speaks with the unvarnished passion of the underground-influenced cartoonist he’s always been.

Such was the case last year, when Sacco returned to the site of his breakout work in The War on Gaza, a brief, brutal political pamphlet that read as a last-ditch shout of passionate protest against Israel’s violence and America’s complicity in it. When that work (initially serialized on TCJ.com) was collected in book form earlier this year, I wrote a somewhat ambivalent review, less on account of Sacco’s politics than the effectiveness of his message. Still, there was no denying that Sacco’s artistry and passionate intensity, to say nothing of his historical knowledge and feel for detail, made even his rare lapses worth considering in full. I wanted to speak to him about what had brought him back to this region and people, what his thoughts were on the tragic failures of peace in the more than 30 years since his initial work, and what he’s learned as a comics journalist (or perhaps journalist comic) from his experience of witnessing and conveying the successive horrors of recent history.

The timing was especially fortuitous because in October, Sacco will have another book coming out, this one a far more extensive undertaking than The War on Gaza. A reported narrative of the smoldering resentments and cyclic retributions that culminated in the 2013 riots in India’s state of Uttar Pradesh, The Once and Future Riot is intended (at least for the moment) as Sacco’s last word on the craft of comics journalism – he’s chosen this point in his career to return to something looser and more evocative of the underground cartooning that brought him into the field to begin with. The book is also, quite simply, an astonishing success: as powerful and unvarnished a statement of journalistic truth and as thoughtful a meditation on political violence as comics has yet produced. It reflects (as did our conversation) Sacco’s increasing occupation with the underlying questions of democracy and societal freedom: how we exercise our collective power, how we surrender it, and how those choices are seized and manipulated by those above us. If it is really Sacco’s swan song in the field he helped to popularize, the closing note is a good one.

Joe Sacco spoke with me from his home in Portland, Oregon on March 10, 2025. One day earlier, Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Palestinian protest movement at Columbia University and a US permanent resident, was seized by immigration officials and taken to a then-unknown location. It was on this topic that I began our conversation.

-Zach Rabiroff

I'll start with this: yesterday, Mahmoud Khalil was seized and detained, apparently without a warrant, apparently with the knowledge of the White House and the President. How surprising is this to you and how do you feel like we got here as a country?

Signs were there during the Biden administration and in the political class in general, braying for a crackdown on student protests, calling school administrators and presidents into Congress to be questioned about what they were doing to combat what they termed as antisemitism. So this has been building up. Of course, once you have Trump in the mix, you realize he's going to take whatever Biden has done and just kick it down the road a fair amount. I have wondered whether they were going to go after not just students, but people who are legal residents of the United States. Now it's starting with permanent residents and it might end up being citizens at some point. I imagine they can't necessarily jail citizens for speech, but who knows.

The definition of “can't” seems like something that's quickly shifting on us.

He (Khalil) doesn't seem to have been charged with anything, and the definitions of “supporting terrorism” or even the word, “terrorist” have kept expanding. There's been an inflation of definitions. So an “anti-Semite”, how we used to think of it, let's say 10 years ago, was someone who hated Jews. Then that became someone who hated Israel. Then it became someone who opposed Israel's policies. This will just keep expanding. That's my assumption at this point. But this has been a long road. I don't think this has just come out of the blue. It's always hard to see. And the first case is always shocking with this one Palestinian green card holder at Columbia. But let's see where it goes now. The trajectory doesn't look good.

It seems to me, and maybe you agree with this, that a protestor for Palestinians was chosen specifically because it's an issue that they knew many factions - including the most powerful factions on the left - would not stand up for.

That's absolutely correct. That's the perfect one to go for because many people on the so-called left have been calling for some similar sorts of action, certainly crackdowns, and of course, this might be the tip of the spear as far as even other speech is concerned. But we see examples of this where laws about terrorism begin to be applied against climate activists. Now maybe they're breaking the law in breaking into a lab or whatever that is, but that starts to get defined as terrorism. There's an expansion or inflation of definition. You have something on the books and then you just keep expanding what that means.

Tell me a little bit about why you went back to the subject of Palestine and Gaza last year.

I didn't really want to. I've been trying to step away from journalism. I've wanted to do other things, and I was finishing up a book on India. As far as I was concerned, that was going to be the last book of journalism I did. I would've done journalistic projects here and there, but I didn't want to devote myself to that, really.

What had made you decide to step away from journalism after you finished the book on Uttar Pradesh?

Because the world is rough, and after a while it sort of gets to you, doing journalism. Maybe for the first 20 years I could deal with everything. But over time, you dig deep into what's going on in the world, how humans behave in certain situations. They're very worthy subjects. I'm never going to say they're not. But for me personally, I've just had my fill and I wanted to approach some of these same subjects, perhaps, but in a very different way, not looking so much at real specifics as trying to pull back and think more philosophically, think of things in a more general way. That's what I wanted my work to focus on. So my future work - though it's satirical perhaps, and though it's even funny - is very serious in my own mind and continues the project that my life is, but in a different way, in a way that I can sustain. It's been difficult to draw what humans do to other humans.

It's interesting to hear you say that you've been motivated to step away from journalism, because when I reviewed The War on Gaza, I argued that it was less journalistic than your previous work; that it was more of a plea to the reader or a personal authorial statement than the more straightforward journalism that you had tended to do before.

I think you're right. In fact, I didn't think of it so much as journalism. I think of what I do as normally reporting on the ground. This was journalistic in a certain sense that I was pulling facts out here and there. But really, I thought of The War on Gaza as a political pamphlet. I didn't want to write a polemic, necessarily. Polemics have their place, but they often don't resonate with me. Polemics aren't particularly artistic. I wanted an artistic component. So I went into satire, and you are right - actually you're clarifying things for me in a way, because I wasn't really going back to journalism. I was going back very pointedly to certain subjects and dwelling on certain subjects rather than pulling myself back as I wanted to think of humanity as a whole. I'm back looking at a very specific subject, but there was simply an obligation to do something. In the end, the side of me that feels obligated to engage very directly with that issue, was overwhelmed by that particular issue. At first it was a bit like pulling teeth, but as I was doing the work and I found my voice, a fire started again in me, and now I really know what I'm doing and I want to complete it.

Was it because of your previous work in Palestine that you felt like you had a personal obligation or need to make another statement?

Certainly. I've spent time in Gaza. I've spent as much as two months at a time in Gaza. I know the cities they're bombing. I have friends there. I've written about the history of those places I've walked in. I've spent time, stayed in Jabalia on my earlier trips. So those places matter a lot to me. But also the issue itself, the issue of the Palestinians, matters a lot to me. It separates those who see politics and see humanity in a moral sense as opposed to just a straightforward out and out, “We are dominant. We will control the issue of Palestine.” It should speak to any person who thinks of themselves as political, but also thinks of themselves as moral, because it's a long-term historical wrong. That became very clear to me when I began learning about the issue myself. It was shocking to me that so many otherwise right-thinking people could so easily dismiss the Palestinians or justify what was happening to them. And I'm talking about justifying what was happening to them long before this war on Gaza.

When you researched and drew Palestine, the earlier work, it was at a moment when we seemed to be inching into a period of peace. What did you think in 1993 might be, or would be, the course of events there?

I thought the occupation would just continue. It would intensify and Palestinians would continue to lose their land and that the settler project would just keep expanding. Now, as I was doing those comics, the Oslo Accords started, and suddenly it became clear that there was this whole channel trying to resolve the issue.

I had my own inclination that settlers weren't going to just agree to leave a certain part of the territory, that there was a final project to own the whole thing. But I was willing to give peace a chance, as they say, and hope – really hope. The proof that a lot of Palestinians believed in that, too, is that if you look at the drawings of the refugee camps that are in the book Palestine and move forward 15 years, all the remittances that were being sent back from Palestinians working in the Gulf States, for example, were now put into building and rebuilding. They thought there was going to be peace. They started to build. Jabalia was unrecognizable to me when I was there from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. I didn't know where I was. There was so much building, so many permanent structures you hardly ever saw before. You saw poverty and you saw poor housing – every single house had an asbestos roof held down by cinder blocks. And now there was new building. A lot of money went into building. And when people build homes, that means they actually think those homes will still be existing [in future years]. I wasn't the only one who thought this might actually work. Palestinians - I think a lot of them - thought, okay, we're here.

So what was the breaking point? We can point to moments like the assassination of [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin or the outbreak of the Second Intifada, but what really seemed to put the nail in the coffin for those hopes that there may be some kind of ongoing path toward permanence and stability for Palestinians?

At some point, the US insisted on an election. It was a quite well-monitored and observed election that was considered to be fair, and Hamas won that election. Now, part of the reason Hamas won that election is that the Palestinian Authority, which is basically the same group of people that had signed the Oslo Accords, had clearly ended up being a security service for the Israelis – sort of an outsourcing of certain security functions. That was quite noticeable. Meanwhile, the settler project had expanded what most people assumed or thought was the spirit - even the letter - of the Oslo agreement: that settlements would not expand. But the number of settlers increased by hundreds of thousands during the Oslo period. People did not see where this was actually going to lead.

Israel had withdrawn from the Gaza Strip at that point as far as physically having settlements in the Gaza Strip. But Hamas won the election and wanted to form a coalition government with the Palestinian Authority, and Israel basically refused to have anything to do with that. The United States was trying to engineer a coup against Hamas. This was almost immediately, within a very short period of time after the election. The Palestinian Authority, though it wasn't elected, ended up taking power in the West Bank, and Hamas ended up taking power in Gaza. That's in brief what happened, and the current period stems from this: when Hamas was elected, and contrary to what a lot of people think – whatever you think about Hamas' tactics – there were many elements within Hamas that were ready for some longer-term solution. They might've talked one way, but they were willing to do another way. If you actually read about what was going on internally within Hamas, you’d see that they've often broached the idea of a long-term truce. But ever since Hamas took over physically in the Gaza Strip - and with some violence also against Palestinians - Israel instituted the blockade. I mean, full blockade. When I went to Gaza in 2001, 2002, I was going with a tourist visa.

Which obviously would be unthinkable now.

You couldn't. The Israeli government wouldn't give me a press pass. They did when I did a short story for the New York Times. But at the press office, they just said, “Well, go to Gaza, and if the soldiers will let you in at the Erez Crossing, then they'll let you in. If they don't, they don't.” I just took the risk and got in, but you could go with a tourist visa.

There was already a tightening of what was going on in Gaza. But after Hamas took power, it was basically complete. And every now and then Israel decides to mow the grass or whatever their euphemism is for knocking the Gazans on their heads, regulating the amount of calories each person gets so they wouldn't necessarily starve, but they wouldn't have enough to eat. There were a lot of restrictions on people in Gaza, great amounts of unemployment. When I was there, the Israelis were still letting in Gazans to work as day laborers in Israel or in the occupied territories. I'm not sure if they worked there, but they were going in and coming back the same day. It was a lifeline to the Gazans, it was some money. Now, after Hamas took over, that was basically shut down, and the amount of people getting out was down to an absolute trickle, maybe some medical cases, but no more workers.

And that's the point, to your mind, when Israel crossed the line into what you would call genocide?

Genocide is considered illegal. It's entered the province of legalities; there is very specific wording, and there are attributes to the genocide that have to be fulfilled for it to be called genocide. I suppose you could maintain that the idea wasn't necessarily genocide. If they were giving you enough calories to live, occasionally bombing you, with the claims that, well, they were firing some rockets which they have to do every once in a while – you could probably make a case that that's not genocide, that's just oppression.

When people walked to the [border] wall, even for a peaceful demonstration -- or the security fence, whatever you want to call it -- they were shot down in large numbers over a number of months, more than 200 killed. And thousands and thousands of peaceful attempts had been tried to get the world's attention. But the Palestinians realize they're on their own when it comes down to it. There are people in the West who think about it and care about it, but most couldn't give a damn, and most actively seem to laud it, somehow. So to me, it becomes a genocide, the legal definition: killing a population, an ethnicity, or a religious group in whole or in part. And there definitely was indiscriminate bombing with this war on Gaza.

But beyond all that, beyond just killing people - because even killing people doesn't necessarily mean it's a genocide, legally speaking - they were destroying the universities, destroying the healthcare systems, destroying agricultural land, which people don't talk about very much. Bulldozing it, ruining it, all those things, destroying the housing. People have nowhere to go. They're destroying sanitation plants, destroying bakeries. You add all these things up and it begins to quack like genocide. ]

It was also the kind of language that was coming out of the Israeli political class – the wide spectrum of the Israeli political class. Not a few nuts like Netanyahu, but except for maybe the extreme left wing, it was prevalent among the political class in Israel. Netanyahu, a couple of days after October 7th, started talking about Amalek. He's talking about a story in the Bible where God commands that every man, woman, child and suckling is killed, and then lists a bunch of domestic animals that have to be destroyed. So when they're referred to as human animals where no one is innocent, all that begins to add up.

What did you feel, or do you feel, that you as an artist and as a journalist could do in the face of that? Because you're obviously trying to do something in going back to this and creating another work?

I've long given up the notion that anything I do in particular is going to make any kind of change. And you know what? If I had to think that way, I wouldn't do anything. I do it because it's the right thing to do and because I feel the need to say it. Do I have more agency in being able to say something than most people? Most people can go to a demo or something like that, or can fulminate with their friends in their living rooms about what's going on. But I do have somewhat more of a voice than most people do. I need to express it. If I think it's going to do something positive is another story altogether. What I do think is that over time - I'm not talking about my work specifically - but over time, the work of many people - it might be a small group of people - can be pretty vociferous.

They've presented facts. They've showed that these things are facts; artists, documentary filmmakers, writers, journalists, a popular front of people basically outlining the same situation. I think it did have an impact over time because perceptions had begun to shift. I'm not saying that 50% or even 20% of Americans were shifting toward really understanding what was going on, but there had been a slight shift. I think this war put it over the edge. I think a lot of younger people not beholden to some of the same things of people my generation were beholden to about the state of Israel, younger people who were not as propagandized, but just viscerally looking at their phones and seeing what was going on, knew in their stomachs that it was wrong. I know people say that you need to learn about the issue and all that. True, but I think the first movement is a visceral one.

And yet here we are in 2025, and it seems that the entire weight of politics in this country has moved in the other direction, so that we now have Trump as president, talking very overtly about taking personal ownership of the Gaza Strip, and releasing bizarre AI animated videos about Trump statues being erected there. So to whatever extent public opinion among young people may have moved, it seems to have had no effect at all in moving the political authorities.

Well, you might be right about that, but I make a distinction between the Americans as a people and the political class in America. The political class in America does what their masters tell them to do. They do what's going to work for them politically. You can see it when the politicians come out and say something very strongly about what's going on in Palestine. AIPAC brags about taking down politicians who do so, but it's the political class.

The “political class” is quite different from people, themselves. If you look at the polls, more and more people in the United States are beginning to see what's going on, understand what's going on, and what the political class then does is see that they're losing control of the narrative. And to me, all these actions, even the arrests of this green-card-holding Palestinian from Columbia University, all this is because the narrative is shifting and they're afraid. So they have to destroy the narrative. They have to keep people from saying anything. Why are people getting fired from jobs? Why are people getting expelled from universities? It's not because the political class is saying, oh, we're totally in command here. It's because they're afraid because they see the shift.

Last month you published, alongside Art Spiegelman, this collaboration reflecting on Israel and Palestine, which ended up in a couple of different publications. It was in The Guardian and it was in The New York Review of Books. Tell me a little bit about how that came about.

Art and I have different recollections. My recollection is that we were sitting in his house in New York having a couple of glasses of wine, talking about Gaza, and he was really upset by what was going on and had strong opinions. And I thought, “And then what?” As I recollect it, when I got back home to Portland, I wrote to him and asked if he would consider collaborating. I know he hasn't done comics in a while, and I didn't think he'd say yes, to be honest. I was surprised when he said yes, but I think it's because he felt he had to say something, he should say something, and it was the right thing to do.

It's interesting to hear that, because the tone of the piece seemed much more conciliatory, much more mild, than what you were saying in The War on Gaza. I don't know if that came from you, or from Art, or where it came from…

It's about as mild a statement as I'm going to make. But to me, it was important to see what Art had to say about it. If I get accused of being an antisemite, it doesn't particularly register with me because I know it's not true, I just get accused of it. There's been a history of antisemitism. We can't forget that, either. And my own feeling is I don't want any people to be swept away from the region.

I think the Israeli project has turned out poorly. I don't think it's necessarily a safe place for Jews in the long run, and I don't think it's been good for the Arab peoples that have lived around there and live around there, certainly not for the Palestinians. But what I don't want is to see anyone cleansed. Now, we think about the Palestinians, but if you take the logic - and all of this is not in this piece, but the piece was three pages long, so there's a lot that's left unsaid - which some Israeli supporters have, which is “we won it in a war,” well, who’s to say the next one doesn’t turn out differently? Then the argument is, we want it, so we own it. I'm not sure that really plays. It's not a good way to think of resolving a long-term issue. How do you reconcile peoples in a long-term way? The piece doesn't get into all the intricacies of that. It skips over things. But I thought it was interesting, Art questioning the state of Israel.

I don't know if there was a divergence in philosophy that the two of you were running into, but the piece doesn't seem to obviously have any answers. And it just sort of concludes that both of these peoples are here, which is a self-evident fact. And I don't know if it's because there was a difference between you and Art in what you felt was the legitimacy of the Israeli project as a whole.

The illegitimacy or the legitimacy, whichever way you want to phrase it. I think the piece talks about there being a false premise: when Herzl was talking about Zionism in the late 1800’s, the idea was this was a land without a people. That sort of foundational myth. I think Art was going after that foundational myth and, coming from Art, I thought it was important that he would say something like that. Or that he would even say that it seemed like genocide to him. Because that’s a controversy for some people. Among some Zionists, they look at the Holocaust as a lesson [only] about this should never happen to the Jews.

Again, we have to remain strong and vigilant and blah, blah, blah. There's a particular truth in all that. But a lot of us, and a lot of great Jewish writers like Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi, saw a more universalist idea that it shouldn't happen to anyone. So in some ways, the piece might be mild, depending on where your politics are. I knew it would be more of a mainstream piece. I'm thinking my tactic is that I say something that the mainstream can swallow when I’m talking to the mainstream, and pull them in a certain direction. You can argue with that concept, that tactic, or that way of thinking.

To get back to your other point, both peoples are here now, and what are we going to do? Because I think both of us are worried now that it is a zero sum game. You can get to a point when it's very hard for the average human mind to think of how you are going to reconcile these two peoples. So is the answer then is that one of them has to prevail? If that is the answer, then that's the end. And what does that mean if one of them prevails?

I have a friend whose theory is that the entire planet has a declining set of resources, especially as climate change gets worse, and that Palestine and Israel are kind of a microcosm for the way that every group is moving more and more toward ethnonationalism as we compete for a smaller and smaller scarcity of resources.

You could say that. Or what you can say is it's actually a template for the future, and it's a real worry of mine. Because if the progression of climate change is going to happen the way it is predicted, then the wheat belts are going to be fried, water resources are going to be at a premium. What do most animals do? They just move to where there are resources. Look at Europe now. There are a lot of people coming across the border or landing in Europe. A lot of that has to do with the climate, and a lot more has to do with the wars - wars, generally, that the West instigated. Libya, Syria, there are Western players in those places, certainly in Libya and in Central America. We've been interfering there for so long. In the end, you can muck things up enough that people need to leave. And they will leave.

That’s a good segway into your new work about the riots in India, a country which also has a legacy of Western interference and Western rule. Tell me a little bit about how that work came about.

I'd done another story in India, a shorter piece about poverty in rural India, that also took place in Uttar Pradesh. I was looking to go back to India because in the end, countries like India, China, are really the future because that's where the population is, and that's where the most dynamism is. The West is in a real state of, maybe slow, maybe fast – I'm not sure which, but a decline. So I'm interested in those countries or those places that really are going to matter in the bigger picture going forward. I was in contact with the guy who'd been one of the people who had helped me out in the earlier story, and he told me there was a riot in Uttar Pradesh. There were riots in India periodically. This guy told me that the riot might be interesting to me.

So I learned a little about it, and I thought it would definitely be interesting to find out about these different communities - Hindus and Muslims - rioting. Why are they rioting? What is this about? I was curious, especially because I was trying to get away from just looking at the facts and figures of violence, and trying to understand dynamics of violence. I was interested in how people would create narratives about what happened. So I went there a year after the riot to talk to people and hear what their version of the story was. I wanted to see if it gelled or coincided with the facts. That's one of the themes of the book. But the other theme, which I hadn't really expected but I probably should have known it, is how violence and electoral politics twirl around each other. In India, you see it in relief.

There are any number of reasons to have a riot, but why do they tend to break out before an election? It's too much of a coincidence to say that it just happened before the election, and now people are polarized and these people will vote for this party out of fear. But that is how it plays out. I think it has a broader aspect to it, as well, because we're starting to see elements of violence in our electoral politics. And I realize that that's just part of what we have in societies that consider ourselves democratic. That's part of the mix, and it will remain part of the mix.

Thematically, the story of the riot becomes, I think, emblematic of something larger in democracy and in the way that democracy interacts with violence. And it does seem like you're establishing a parallel with where we are as a people in the United States right now.

Yeah, it was deliberate. It made me really try to understand what democracy is. I've been reading a lot of ancient sources, and I've interviewed a professor from Cambridge three different times. I went up to Cambridge to interview him about democracy, trying to understand what it was originally, and what Greek democracy was. And what you begin to realize is [the ancient Greek model of] democracy is what I favor as a political system. I prefer democracy. I prefer my own agency and the agency of ordinary people in government or in running a system.

panels from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, 2012)

I would call what we have in the United States, just like what there is in India – at the high level anyway, maybe not at the local levels – but I'll call what we have, “electoral regimes”. They're places where the people come out to stamp approval on whatever the political class decides are going to be the choices. And I don't think we really have agency, even in a representational way. The systems are locked up after a time.

It's something I've been reflecting on quite a bit, because when you look at ancient Greek democracy, for all its faults - it was a slave-owning society, it had an empire and was able to extract resources and money from those in the empire to pay for the democracy it ran - but if you looked at the way they ran their systems, poor and rich, they never got rid of the rich, but they were able to control them democratically by having large courts, with 500 jurors that were picked by lottery a day or two before there was going to be a court case. And usually the court cases were rich people against rich people. They wouldn't necessarily decide a case based on which person was right, on who was actually right in the context of a certain lawsuit. They would, instead, consider what this rich person has done for the community. And there was a process whereby rich people had to pay for people to go to the theater, for instance. You had to pay for everyone who was going to go and everyone was allowed to go. A rich person had to pay for it. A rich person had to buy a warship and fully staff it with rowers. And it was generally because people [on juries] were being chosen by lot. It was mostly poor people who were in these juries, and they were making sure that there are rich people, but they have to justify themselves in this community. And the only way to justify themselves was to basically put out [for society].

There are going to be rich people. You can never get away from it - anyway, that was their thinking. I'm not saying all that whole system makes total sense, but there are elements of it that would be worth examining.

How do you feel like you explored that through looking at this violence in Uttar Pradesh?

India calls itself the world's biggest and greatest democracy, “the mother of all democracies” in Modi's words. But politicians work with fear, and they work with fear in a place like India through violence. Here [in the United States], we are working with fear in other ways. The famous philosopher (who comes out of a Nazi ideology, but some of his thoughts are interesting) Carl Schmitt, said, “politics needs an enemy.” And who would know better than someone like Carl Schmitt? Because in the end, someone like Trump needs an enemy. Who's the enemy? The enemy is the migrant, the illegal migrant or whatever you want to call the unregistered person in your country. And who are those people? They're rapists and murderers. He doesn't say 0.1% came out of prisons. He says they are rapists and murderers, creating fear. And even Biden was expelling people from the United States in quite great numbers. But Trump does it in a certain theatrical way. He's going to release pictures of people shackled. He's going to send them to Guantanamo. He's going to create this whole theater of punishment, even if the numbers are going to be essentially the same as what Biden was doing.

You close the book with this statement drawn from an interview, that “democracy is going to become a curse to the country,” the country in that case being India. I wonder if that's part of what this suggests to you, that the curse is that democracy at its foundation seems to depend on violence directed at some kind of internal or external enemy in order to fuel itself.

I hope not. That was an interesting thing that guy said, and I leave it in there that way so people can think about democracy themselves. I could have had an asterisk and asked, “but is it really a democracy?” The word itself is pretty loaded, and I think a lot of people think of democracy as majority rule, but we have to start thinking in terms of the spirit of democracy. And the spirit of democracy is involvement of people. Now what we try to do, and obviously the Republicans are quite good at this, is exclude people from democracy. Exclude people from their voting rights. The Greeks actually thought that voting was not the most essential part of democracy. Most of their public offices [were chosen] by lot. That's interesting.

They also had a popular assembly. But then again, Athens was one city, and a city of an extraordinarily small population by modern standards.

Absolutely. It's not just a question of scaling up. It's a question of saying how citizens actually trusted each other enough. Their councils were big, even for a small city where maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people actually could have voted, but you would have assemblies of 6,000 people. You would have a council of 500 people. In other words, they were big. They weren't five people. So yes, the intelligence level is going to go up and down, but it's going to be a fairly good average. I think they trusted each other in a certain sense, in a way that we don't, and we sort of have farmed out everything to representatives. I understand that as you scale up, that makes some sense. But the muscle of democracy has atrophied completely.

We don't really think in terms of small assemblies going up. We think we'll vote for our House representative, our Senator. These things have become so rote that when you go through a voters’ pamphlet, you don't know half of anything that's in there. You just read it very quickly. But what's that really getting you? To me, democracy takes a lot of work. It really is citizen involvement. “How much energy do I have to devote to a local council? You're going to talk about the streetlights. I don't want to get dragged into it.” Democracy is actually really difficult to do.

And maybe the more we farm it out to layers upon layers of representatives, the more we become able or willing to think of the whole thing as just entertainment or a video game, which is how you end up with somebody like Donald Trump.

A horse race in the end. When the American Republic was founded, for all its faults, people had a better sense of their participation in what was going on. I think after 250 years, we've got to give credit to time.

It's longer than classical Athens lasted.

It is longer than classical Athens. That's exactly right. And you're basically saying, “Okay, every four years these two parties are going to choose who is going to run, and I can choose between these two people that the parties have decided themselves.” We just have to look at the current state of democracy in the West. We've moved away from even the idea that we have a say in these sorts of things. Now, on a city level, there might be more you have a say in. You can actually go and speak to your representative, or go to a council meeting when they're having some local issues being determined. But once you scale up and there's more and more federal power, it's concentrated in a smaller group of people. It matters more, not less, what's going on at the very top.

So how does that interact with what you were seeing on the ground in India in terms of when all of these layers get peeled off, and what you have left is violence on the streets?

Violence on the street at certain times. You have a society that is very sectarian. It doesn't mean that people cannot live together, because they can. You often hear people talking about how they live together, even with great social inequality. At the very beginning of that book, you'll see that Muslim laborers would still talk to the landowners with some affection because there was an adjustment made for that society to allow for it. That wasn't an equitable adjustment, but when for political reasons, the land owners and the laboring class are no longer aligned, then you [as an ambitious politician] exploit the difference. The difference is where you make your political career.

Why should you vote for Kamala Harris? Well, she's not Trump. It doesn't matter who Kamala Harris is. In fact, she seems like a cipher, but she's not Trump. Once you get to that stage, you're grasping. In India, that violence started around the time of the partition. There might have been sectarian problems before, but once the partition happened, when that many people are killed and populations are moved, there's always this element that is hovering in the background. And suddenly, because politics needs an enemy, you find an enemy. The political class looks around, they're looking around for what's going to work.

So then why does the velocity of societal violence seem to have taken off now? What is it about this moment that we're living in that it seems like in all these areas around the world, it's escalating more and more – maybe not compared to the height of World War II, but compared to the last 50 years.

I'm not exactly a political philosopher. I'm sort of dabbling in it. I'm trying to understand. I'm actually trying to learn all this stuff. Let's say Europe or the United States after World War II, the common market was developed in Europe. That became the European Union, really set up to create a structure so countries like France and Germany wouldn't fight anymore. And actually it was quite successful. It was quite successful in the United States; people were returning from the war, the government was providing, there was a G.I. education bill for returning vets. It didn't include everyone, but it included enough people that it created this – I'd say there was a bubble in both Western Europe and the United States where it felt pretty good. But things have certainly changed.

Now, it's probably partly because of countries like the United States. In the end, they become war economies. All the gains that people made coming back from the war, the New Deal – all those gains were eroded over time. And in Europe, let's take the UK for example. When soldiers came back from the war, they wanted the government to start helping provide for them. And so they set up council housing, basically starting a welfare state that has also been eroded. In Britain, fifteen or twenty years ago, you went to university free. Now you have to pay like you do in the United States. Eventually, all that council housing, which you didn't own, but you had long-term leases on it, got turned into property that you could buy if you wanted. This is from the Thatcher period. But after twenty or thirty years, most of that property ends up in the hands of big real estate companies because people eventually sell their council houses.

All those gains that were made after World War II that made Western society feel so golden were eroded by, for lack of a better term, the capitalist class. They didn't like it. Rents have gone way up. People are unhappy with a lot of the way life is going. Living in Portland, I learned to draw, I developed my craft because rent was so cheap. I could afford a studio or a one-bedroom place and work.

I understand that’s no longer a plausible reality in Portland.

No, it's not. The frog has been boiled slowly, but people know that they're boiling. And it's not just students. It's workers. You look at the way wages have gone, and it creates a shifting environment where people went from doing well, to being uncertain about the future, and actually unhappy about the future. Who are you going to blame? You could blame the ‘welfare queen’. In other words, you are blaming Black people. Now it's the immigrant. Western society has developed in this unfortunate way because it's been devolving and because people are uncertain. They're not doing that well anymore. They're just not.

So how do you feel that you as an artist are able or capable of responding to all of this?

Just by my limited capacity to do the work I'm doing. I respond by trying to understand the world myself. A lot of it isn't so much to tell you, Zach, what's going on. It's really to tell me what's going on, if you know what I mean. All my work has been about me trying to learn how the world works, and maybe I'm just opening up that process because there are probably holes in my thinking. I don't understand everything, but I've been trying to educate myself as much as possible as I'm doing my work. The fact is, I actually care about the world, and that's why I can't withdraw. I could probably have done a lot of things to make my life easier and made better money, but that's not the way I could live with myself. I'm doing the work I need to do to live with myself. I see the necessity for me to do the work. Maybe not the necessity for you to read it, but the necessity for me to do it.

So when you talk about moving away from journalism, then, what have you found yourself moving into?

The Stones book. A book about the Rolling Stones.

Tell me about that.

The Stones are part of it, but really it's everything we're talking about. It's me trying to figure some of this stuff out, but in the bigger picture. It's not specifically focusing on any one small part of the world and trying to blow that up as an example for the rest of it; it's trying to look at much bigger pictures. It's a dialogue with philosophers and with political scientists. I've interviewed a lot of people along the way about the beginnings of civilization, and I'm rolling some of that in. I'm trying for something. It will probably be a spectacular failure, but I'm trying for something bigger. And also, I'll be honest, I want to enjoy drawing. I got into comics because I wanted to make people laugh. That was my original impetus - to draw and show my friends. I'm just trying to get back into it. And in some ways, The War on Gaza book is a much darker version of some of the stuff I'm writing about in the Stones book. But it's still a very serious book, even though it's more like an old underground comic.

Are there particular cartoonists who embodied the style or the aims that you have or that you had coming into field that you've drawn from particularly heavily in finding a way to express all this?

You mean the new work?

Even the older work. One person who comes to my mind frequently when I look at what you've done is, for instance, Harvey Kurtzman, who was known as a humorist, but also did explicit journalism in the form of comics.

It's interesting talking about influences because I think Harvey Kurtzman is one of the greats, of course, but I was much more drawn to his artist [at E.C. Comics], Bill Elder. I was much more drawn to his manic style, which inhabits this new project I'm working on. I liked Kurtzman’s work, but I'm not sure if he was teaching me a worldview, if you know what I mean. I probably got most of my worldview from prose, from fiction, in particular.

It's still fluid. It's still happening. It's not as if I can say it's this person, it's that person. I read a lot of the Russians. Their examination of the human psyche was always really interesting to me. I didn't always agree with some of the political aspects of them, but they seemed to really want to dig deep into psychology. I've been reading a lot of political philosophy. I've read a lot of the classics: Greek, Roman stuff. I'm trying to get to the root of things in that way. But when we're talking about cartooning, I think the ones that really had a big impact on me were the underground cartoonists.

Not necessarily for their political viewpoints, but the fact that they were willing to push boundaries in a certain sense; boundaries which I will never approach, but I can go in those directions. They remind me that comics don't have to be so gentle. I think it's necessary to think seriously about what I'm doing within the scope of journalism when I’m working on my journalism books. That also requires me to think how my art has to serve the journalism.There's always been that part of me chomping on the bit to really let loose the way the underground cartoonists let loose, not necessarily in their way, but in my way reading their work. I am quite aware of how I've had to corral myself.

Because your journalistic works follow such a tight structure, and one of the things that I was skeptical about in my review of The War on Gaza was that it didn't follow as tight a structure: that you were letting yourself be much, much looser as an artist. And it sounds like maybe that's a factor of what you're moving toward right now in the other work that you're doing.

Yeah, I think so. The War on Gaza has a very dark aspect to it. There's a lot of darkness in the new things I'm doing, but there are also light aspects. I was very much influenced by satire. I was very much influenced by Voltaire or Joseph Heller, Jonathan Swift, those people, from an early age. I was really drawn to that sort of thing. I always liked satire.

The War on Gaza had elements that reminded me of Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove.

Dr. Strangelove is probably my favorite film of all time.

For all of the darkness that you're dealing with, do you feel like you are more liberated as an artist now than you have been before?

Yes. Even when I was doing The War on Gaza, I knew it had to be a certain way. I was corralling a different part of my brain and working towards something that was not different from what I'd been doing. But it also follows a certain pattern. I wanted to find a voice. And when you find a voice, it's not like you’re going to switch this, to that, to the other thing. It's a bit more like the project I'm working on now, that shifts around a lot with tone.

I wonder if you have any closing thoughts that you want to offer here, about where you are as an artist and where we are as a society?

I think I'm in a good place as an artist. I'm finally getting to a project that I think of as wholly creative, which I've wanted. Let's see what happens. As far as society goes, we're in a really rough, difficult place. I'm not a Nostradamus, so I can't really predict the future, but it's a scary time. It's a scary time. What can I tell you?

The post ‘I’m doing the work I need to do to live with myself’: Joe Sacco on democracy, genocide, and drawing the truth appeared first on The Comics Journal.

Read Entire Article