Rail: It’s interesting to hear you say that spending time with Bosnian Serbs complicated whatever assumptions you brought with you to the conflict. That reminds me of another quote that’s been on my mind recently, and I’ve been searching to find the exact quote. I’d love to attribute it to James Connolly, a very important socialist, and one of the leaders of Ireland’s revolutionary Easter Rising of 1916, but I can’t confirm it. It was something to the effect of—you can hate the idea of an entire nation without hating a single person from it. This was obviously said in relation to England, but the sentiment, that an individual isn’t always representative of the state, has something to it—something that many people aren’t willing to grant at the minute.
Sacco: No, they’re not. Even what you’re talking about, about what happened in Ireland recently. You mentioned a ten-year-old girl was assaulted by an immigrant, right?
Rail: That’s the allegation and what prompted the riot.
Sacco: So, I understand it’s hard for people to do. I really do. But, if you want to talk about trying to be rational, you say, well, that individual then should be punished. There has to be justice, but that shouldn’t make you leap to painting the whole community that way. But, it’s quite difficult to start talking about the complexities of these social problems and say, well, if we provided them avenues of this and this, there’d be less of these sorts of problems. Convincing people on that level doesn’t fly when you can just say, they’re all like this. It responds, like I said, to the lizard brain—the one that’s fearful and wants vengeance. We haven’t really evolved that much. Ten thousand years ago, we were in little family groups roaming around. Now we’re nations of millions, and even billions, of people at this point. I don’t think we’ve really evolved properly to look at these things, at the problems we have. Our brains just aren’t there yet. I’m not sure they’ll ever be.
Rail: Is there a lesson in here for Americans about the kind of increasingly fractured society they live in, not just from the perspective of obscene material differences in wealth, but also the fact that many Americans now seem to live in different versions of reality from one another?
Sacco: I think we’re reaching an authoritarian moment here. I would hope that people can look at examples on the outside, let’s say what’s going on in India, and see how it parallels what’s going on here. I think people have to be as aware as possible about how manipulation works, and they have to check themselves a little about buying in. For example, Charlie Kirk’s assassination immediately, very quickly turned into, “the far left is the problem.” Stephen Miller even called the Democrats—and I don’t think of the Democrats as the far left, or even the left—a terrorist organisation. This rhetoric is just so out of hand.
I start to look at what some right-wing conservatives are saying, and it’s really troubling. The people want to pile on and really get engaged in it and let themselves be carried away. What can I say? Honestly, I think the lesson is: be careful. Don’t get carried away by even troubling incidents. You have to sort of take a step back and say, what happened here? What could have been done to have solved this?
Even in the story I did, it was an incident between Jats and Muslims, a fatal incident, where two Jats and one Muslim were killed. If a police investigation had been allowed to go forward—Muslims were telling me this—probably there wouldn’t have been any problem. But it wasn’t. I think we need to be on our toes about the manipulation from above. We have to be on our toes. We can easily end up at each other’s throats. And why, exactly?
Rail: One hundred percent. I sometimes feel like we’re in a doom loop. Something happens—or, more often than not, someone decides to fan the flames—then everyone jumps in, wittingly or unwittingly taking sides, and it turns into a race to the bottom where the risk of tit-for-tat violence increases and becomes more normalized. Not quite everyone loses, but most people do, while politicians and the capitalist class cashes out on it.
Sacco: And I think the other part is, in a society where people are generally satisfied with where they are—they have some level of, let’s say, comfort, and they’re not so worried about the future, that things are orderly enough—these things are less likely to happen. But, I think we live in societies now—particularly you can talk about the United States—where there’s been an unwinding of what the society is. We don’t feel a sense of security. We’re worried about our status, and how we are doing in relation to other people. We feel our status is being eroded.
My generation thought we would do better than my parents’ generation, and some of us did, but most of my friends probably didn’t do as well as their middle-class parents. Rents are going up, healthcare costs are enormous. There is incredible student debt. All this stuff is troubling, and I almost feel like something is missing in people, too. Beyond all that stuff, there’s something spiritually lacking in people. Maybe it’s Freudian in a way, but there’s an inner loathing, and politicians are telling you who to turn it outward against. Like I say, I have almost no respect for politicians. There are very few I would give the time of day to.
Rail: I can sense that! I share your antipathy towards them. [Laughter]
Sacco: I guess I have an anarchist streak, not that I think that’s really a way to run any place.
Rail: I’ve heard you say that this might be your last book-length work of journalism. Is that right?
Sacco: I wanted it to be, but then the genocide in Gaza escalated, so I’m working on a book about Gaza with Chris Hedges.
Rail: Big fan of Chris Hedges’s work. I love his podcast.
Sacco: He’s great. So we’re working on a book together. We went to Egypt and we interviewed Palestinians who got out of Gaza during the genocide.
I would rather be drawing other things, but Gaza calls.