{"id":586036,"date":"2025-11-22T04:15:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T04:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/586036\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T04:15:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T04:15:21","slug":"ireland-is-my-favourite-place-in-europe-its-sane-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/586036\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Ireland is my favourite place in Europe. It\u2019s sane\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019ve been to Ireland twice now and it\u2019s my favourite place in Europe,\u201d the comic book artist and journalist Joe Sacco tells me soon after realising that I\u2019m Irish. Why? \u201cIt\u2019s sane,\u201d he adds, in a nod to Ireland\u2019s support for Palestine. He was born in Malta but raised mostly in the United States, and his award-winning comics Palestine (2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) are often credited with having helped contradict the heavily-biased narratives pushed by western political and media establishments. <\/p>\n

In the US, shops haven\u2019t been able to keep enough copies of them on their shelves since October 2023. \u201cYou guys were colonised, so you get it,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re the least western of all Europeans somehow \u2013 in a good way.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon, about The Once and Future Riot, his new book charting his attempts at understanding a particularly volatile moment of sectarian violence between Hindu Jats and Muslims in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Though there remains disagreement over the origins of that flare-up, known as the 2013 Muzaffarnagar Riots, most agree that lynchings, rapes, arson attacks and displacements took place \u2013 though, as Sacco\u2019s book shows, both sides rarely agreed over who suffered more. <\/p>\n

The meaning of the title is that, as democracy further declines, these temporary riots will become increasingly common.<\/p>\n

\"WarWar on Gaza by Joe Sacco <\/p>\n

Sacco is no stranger to conflicts. Since beginning his career in earnest in the early 1990s, he has reported on and written books about Palestine, the Bosnian Genocide (2000s Safe Area Goradze and 2004\u2019s The Fixer), Russia\u2019s Chechen wars and the Iraq War. He has built a reputation by complicating simplistic political narratives pushed by warmongering governments by giving a voice to those suffering under bombs or occupation. Many of his books also highlight the plight of the downtrodden and dispossessed, such as 2012\u2019s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (cowritten with Chris Hedges) about poverty in the US or 2020s Paying the Land, about the indigenous Dene people in Canadian\u2019s Northwest Territories witnessing their way of life being destroyed by developers, addiction, mining and the state-run schools that forcibly removed their children.<\/p>\n

Behind his deceptively simple drawing style lies not only a rigorously investigative approach \u2013 often meaning spending months with his subjects \u2013 but, perhaps most notably, a profound empathy and capacity for understanding suffering. Perhaps it has to do with the fact Sacco\u2019s mother was a child when the Nazis and Italians waged their two-year bombing campaign against Malta. Perhaps his intense awareness of the senselessness of war stems from the fact that, for the rest of her life, his mother, who had witnessed friends, family and neighbours lying dead in the streets, would wonder how she survived it and leave her son with a sense of the dumb luck that means the difference between one family\u2019s death or their survival.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Narratively ingenious with gorgeously toothsome art and character design\u2019: The best graphic novels of 2024Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

His latest book is not his first look at India. What took him back? \u201cIt\u2019s a fascinating place,\u201d he says. \u201cGeopolitically it should be a major player: 1.3 billion people, and also the world\u2019s largest democracy.\u201d After he learned about the Muzaffarnagar Riots, he wanted to investigate. In much of Sacco\u2019s work, he tries to report on events as they become available. For The Once and Future Riot, however, Sacco arrived a year after the riots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it would be interesting to find out what people say about what they did in an incident of violence like that, sometime afterwards.\u201d The main idea, he explained, was to try to uncover the narratives people had created for themselves. \u201cOf course, when you get there \u2013 when you get to any place like this \u2013 other things start to open up. You begin to look at things like: Oh, this is connected to electoral politics. This is also about politicians manipulating certain situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some believe the riots began with an incident of sexual harassment, others say a traffic incident. Whatever started it, each rumoured act took on a greater significance, as though each act of violence was representative of an entire group\u2019s bad intentions and had to be defined as such. Sacco\u2019s book underlines that the conflicting accounts make it difficult to discern what actually happened during that period. He wanted to focus on single events and get the perspective of both sides \u2013 alleged victim and alleged aggressor. People, it seemed, were exaggerating and potentially even lying to either highlight their victimhood or downplay the accusations against them. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe main example I used was a Jat village called Lasar, where it seemed clear that about 13 people were missing and probably dead,\u201d Sacco says. \u201cBut I was told in the village that no one was harmed there, and the stories they\u2019re coming up with about why no Muslims were even in the village at the time were just ludicrous \u2013 they really seem made up. So you listen, you record, and then, okay, if you say no Muslims were harmed here, let me see if I can find Muslims who were harmed there. It takes time, but, to me, this was kind of a book of pure journalism \u2013 that\u2019s how I thought about it. I\u2019m going to not just listen to what people say, but find out how close to the facts what they\u2019re saying is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Illustration:Illustration: Joe Sacco <\/p>\n

Muslims were disproportionately affected by the riots, with many forced to flee to relief camps and unable to return to their villages. Hindu Jats make up almost 80 per cent of Uttar Pradesh\u2019s population and are highly represented among the region\u2019s landowners. Muslims, on the other hand, represent just 20 per cent and are mostly landless and over-represented in poorly paid agricultural day labour. Despite this, Jats argue Muslims are a threat to their safety.<\/p>\n

The riots fell into a larger pattern of anti-Muslim violence in India. Soon after the riot, Narendra Modi<\/a>, now India\u2019s prime minister, rose to power partly thanks to rising nationwide anti-Muslim sentiment. Modi\u2019s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played a significant role in stoking hatred and often using violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric. A decade earlier, in 2002, when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims went up in flames, killing almost 60 of them, Modi blamed Muslims, helping inflame the Gujarat Riots. Similarly, a disproportionate number of the 1,000 killed and 150,000 displaced were Muslims.<\/p>\n

Sacco dedicated The Once and Future Riot to the \u201chardworking, rural journalists of India\u201d. He relied on many journalists and fixers, Muslim and Hindu, to introduce him to the region\u2019s people. Early on Sacco depicts a scene where he meets Momin, a respected elder Muslim within his community, and a Hindu Jat journalist named Madan. Both men, Sacco writes, abide by their caste\u2019s norms, but \u201cas a journalist\u201d, Madan \u201chas no qualms pointing fingers at both Muslims and his own people\u201d. Madan says that, before recent unrest, there had been a lot of love and co-operation between the communities, adding that \u201cYou find lots of liberal people like Momim \u2013 Jats and Muslims \u2013 with extremes on each end. But if something happens, you will find no one left in the middle.\u201d One of the few things that gave Sacco hope were the several instances of Muslims and Jats helping one another \u2013 often hiding people in their homes \u2013 from roaming mobs. <\/p>\n

\"TheThe Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco <\/p>\n

Is Sacco, with more than 30 years\u2019 experience reporting, surprised by how quickly the middle ground disappears when something occurs between two communities who live in tension with one another? He pauses for a moment. \u201cI suppose I shouldn\u2019t be surprised,\u201d he says, \u201cbut it still startles me. It always startles me when societal fabric begins to fray.\u201d He has been in close enough proximity to enough conflict to understand how tribalism takes hold when one group feels threatened by another \u2013 and he is cynical about politicians, knowing how often they exploit conflicts like this for their political gain. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe famous Nazi jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt said politics needs an enemy. I think there\u2019s just less work to be done to get people on your side if you can provide an enemy. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is someone like Modi or the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] were able to make a lot of ground based on finding an internal and external enemy. In India\u2019s case, Pakistan is the external, Muslim enemy, and there are at least a couple hundred million Muslims in India that can be cast as an [internal] enemy.\u201d The \u201cfuture riot\u201d referred to in the book\u2019s title refers to a not-so-distant future in which political polarisation, and its attendant violence, will become a chronic issue, normalised and stoked by leaders with antidemocratic ambitions.<\/p>\n

His exasperation with the state of world affairs only heightens when the conversation turns to the US, where he and his parents moved when he was 12. He says it has entered into an \u201cauthoritarian moment,\u201d pointing to Trump\u2019s rhetoric and scapegoating as well as his tendency to exploit anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment. <\/p>\n

Americans, he believes, are \u201clooking for someone to blame for the loss of jobs, for the way there\u2019s been basically almost societal collapse in the United States. I look around me and I see homelessness and drug use and all that, and, instead of talking about what are the economic reasons for this or what are the policies that have been instituted that have made this manifest, instead of looking at those things \u2013 it\u2019s like, well, this group\u2019s to blame, and the drugs are coming from here, and let\u2019s do this and let\u2019s do that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Were the Troubles something he ever considered covering? By the time he felt professionally equipped to handle a conflict such as that, he says, the Belfast Agreement was within sight. Ireland, though, remains a subject of fascination for him, particularly its early colonial history. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always thought if I was to do something about Ireland, it would be more about Cromwell and what happened in the 1600s,\u201d he says. \u201cIrish history is really interesting to me. It would be interesting to do something about how a country in Europe was colonised by another country in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JoeJoe Sacco self-portrait <\/p>\n

At 60, he has put in more than his fair share of time covering politics and violence. He has been working on a book about The Rolling Stones for more than a decade now, and it\u2019s shaping up to be a very different type of work. The Once and Future Riot was supposed to be his last avowedly journalistic work. Then October 7th happened. He and Hedges travelled to Egypt to interview Palestinians who escaped. He has already written one book about the genocide, 2024\u2019s War on Gaza \u2013 his most polemical yet. It is both tragic and ironic that he is returning, 30 years later, at the end of this part of his career, to the conflict that he began it with.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would rather be drawing other things, but Gaza calls.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Once and Future Riot is published by Jonathan Cape<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019ve been to Ireland twice now and it\u2019s my favourite place in Europe,\u201d the comic book artist and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,730,22817,1814],"class_list":{"0":"post-586036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-india","12":"tag-narendra-modi","13":"tag-palestine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115591416361890199","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}