By John Kiriakou / Original to ScheerPost

Three Iraqi survivors of U.S. torture won a major victory in early November when a jury in the federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia awarded each of them $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages to be paid by American defense contractor CACI, which was responsible for the cruel and inhumane treatment that they endured in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison more than two decades ago.

The judgment is notable for several reasons. First, it is the first time that a U.S. defense contractor has ever been successfully sued for managing a torture program.  Second, the jury verdict came in the notorious Eastern District of Virginia, the home district of the CIA, the Pentagon, and countless defense contractors, including CACI. And third, this is the first finding in any federal court that there was a torture program during the so-called War on Terror, that people were harmed through torture, and that torture was illegal.  Oddly, the story gained almost no traction in the mainstream media.

The facts of the case were relatively straightforward. The suit alleged that employees of CACI detained and tortured Salah al-Ejaili, a reporter for Al Jazeera; Suhail al-Shimari, a middle school principal; and Asad al-Zuba’i, a fruit vendor. They were tortured by CACI employees over a period of several weeks using techniques including electric shock, stress positions, starvation, attack dogs, and humiliation through forced nudity.  These techniques were consistent with those used by the CIA on so-called “high-value prisoners” at secret “black sites” around the world.  The Abu Ghraib torturers apparently learned of the techniques from CIA officers serving at the prison at the same time.

One of the men was shot in the head with a taser and the others suffered broken bones.  The plaintiffs also testified that they were sexually assaulted by a female CACI contractor and forced to watch the rape of a female Iraqi prisoner. The men alleged that they continue to suffer the mental effects of the torture nearly 20 years after the fact.

CACI’s defense was quite simple. The company’s attorneys said the employees had “minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case and that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government, not CACI, because the civilian interrogators were acting under the command and control of the military.”  In other words, the defense was “we were just following orders.” We heard that same excuse at Nuremberg.  

The lawsuit had a long road. The span of 16 years is long even for a federal case.  The delay in trial was due primarily to CACI’s contention that, as a government contractor whose employees were acting on behalf of the government, it should have been indemnified against civil lawsuits.  In the end, the District Court said that the company did not enjoy such protections.

Originally filed in 2008 on the plaintiffs’ behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the case finally made it to trial in the summer of 2024. But in August, Judge Leonie Brinkema declared a mistrial when the jury failed to reach a verdict. In many cases, the plaintiffs would have walked away. The cost of a trial already is prohibitive. The cost of two is astronomical. But the plaintiffs were determined to move forward and the suit was refiled.

Brinkema has been supportive of the intelligence community since being named to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Brinkema was the judge in my case, when I was charged with five felonies after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. During my sentencing, in which I had agreed to a Justice Department offer of 30 months in a federal prison, Brinkema said, “Mr. Kiriakou, this sentence is too short.  If I could, I would give you 10 years. But my hands are tied.” (My attorneys told me later that, if she had wanted to, Brinkema could indeed have rejected the plea deal and could have sentenced me to 10 years. In the end, she was probably posing for the literally dozens of national security journalists who were in the courtroom that day.)

Just two-and-a-half years later, she sentenced CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling to three-and-a-half years in prison for “espionage,” despite the fact that there was literally no documentary evidence that Sterling had ever committed espionage. Sterling had been accused of providing information on a failed CIA operation against Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times journalist James Risen. The only evidence was that Sterling and Risen had spoken by phone more than 50 times over the previous year. But Sterling had filed a racial discrimination suit against the CIA, a story that Risen had been covering. Sterling argued that that suit was the subject of their calls.  Sterling later said in his book, The Unwanted Spy, that when former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whom he had never met, testified in court that revelation of the Iran operation was revealed, he was “doomed,” despite the fact that there was no evidence that the information had come from him.

The CACI verdict is notable also for the fact that the jury was made up of residents of the Eastern District of Virginia. Imagine seating a jury where the pool includes people who work for, or who have friends and relatives who work for, the CIA, the Defense Department, or dozens of federal defense contractors. An impartial trial involving a national security issue in the Eastern District is rare.

Yet despite these roadblocks, the plaintiffs were successful.  

Another issue here is that there was virtually no media coverage of this landmark decision. Sure, there were short articles in the Associated Press and the New York Times, but the real coverage came from the alternative media, like Kevin Gosztola’s The Dissenter and The Intercept. And there was literally no commentary in the editorial pages of any mainstream outlet. Nothing.  

As an aside, I have been teaching a graduate school course at Spain’s University of Salamanca for the past year called The History of Terrorism. An important part of this course is the U.S. response to terrorism in the so-called War on Terror, including the torture program. When I raised the issue of torture in the most recent running of the class, in October, I was met with blank stares. I asked the students if they had not heard of the CIA’s torture program. One of the students finally said, “Professor, you realize that we were all born after 9/11, right?” That comment was a non-sequitur. Most of us were born after World War II and we still learned about the Holocaust.  

The fact that young people don’t know about torture, the fact that the mainstream media doesn’t cover developments related to torture, the fact that we still have people who have never been charged with a crime dying slow deaths at Guantanamo are all political, societal, cultural, and media failures.  It’s a very good thing that the CACI plaintiffs won their case.  But what is the lasting positive effect on our society if nobody knows about it?  It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that we not remain silent.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Author Site

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

ScheerPost.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. CC-BY-NC-ND only applies to ORIGINAL ScheerPost content.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

This is the keynote talk I gave on Nov. 1 at the conference, The End of Empite, at University of Califonria Santa Barbara. The conference was oprganized by Professor Butch Ware, who is also the Green Party’s vice-presidential candidate. Univeristy administrators banned advance publicy about the talk on university social media accounts.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

Transcript

Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.   

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation. 

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this. 

But this is a lesson that is nevr learned.

How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. 

Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity. 

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy. 

Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes. 

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. 

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. 

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar. It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat, who I also knew.  But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar’s place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over. 

Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestiniansin Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.

Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.

Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.

But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours. 

Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.

This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.

Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.

We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure. 

We cannot plead ignorance. 

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.

The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence. 

This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry. 

The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afgnaistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children. 

“After the war,” Nick Turse writes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. 

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis. 

The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation. 

We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.

Industrail slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cyniucally, calls “mowing the lawn.”

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians. 

Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide —  in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.

The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to be killed. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked. 

Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.” 

Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000. 

At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.

“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”

In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.

Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 12.6 percent of a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.” 

Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. 

Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.

Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.

These accusations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.  Rappatour for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”

“In August,” Albanes writes in her most recent report, “entry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”

“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”

These measures, sh noters, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”

The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.  And Zionist leaders are open about their goals.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.

As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.  

The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure. 

Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.

“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent, nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.”

Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas” or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are “camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”

Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a ‘Greater Israel.’” 

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.

There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.

The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter. 

In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.

The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil. 

“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” 

To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”

What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day? 

What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die? 

What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents? 

What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount? 

What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters? 

What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms? 

What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?

Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?

If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s conscience.

A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.

“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers. 

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel. 

We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.

But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?

Who were Nero’s guests?

We are Nero’s guests. 

History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.

“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”

The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims. 

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

Author Site

My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.

— Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For

One day in June of 1995, Tim Schafer came to work at LucasArts and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have anything pressing to do. Full Throttle, his biker movie of an adventure game, had been released several weeks before. Now, all of the initial crush of interviews and marketing logistics was behind him. A mountain had been climbed. So, as game designers do, he started to think about what his next Everest should be.

Schafer has told in some detail how he came up with the core ideas behind Grim Fandango over the course of that summer of 1995.

The truth is, I had part of the Fandango idea before I did Full Throttle. I wanted to do a game that would feature those little papier-mâché folk-art skeletons from Mexico. I was looking at their simple shapes and how the bones were just painted on the outside, and I thought, “Texture maps! 3D! The bones will be on the outside! It’ll look cool!”

But then I was stuck. I had these skeletons walking around the Land of the Dead. So what? What did they do? Where were they going? What did they want? Who’s the main character? Who’s the villain? The mythology said that the dead walk the dark plane of the underworld known as Mictlān for four years, after which their souls arrive at the ninth plane, the land of eternal rest. Sounds pretty “questy” to me. There you have it: a game.

“Not cool enough,” said Peter Tscale, my lead artist. “A guy walking in a supernatural world? What’s he doing? Supernatural things? It just sounds boring to me.”

So, I revamped the story. Adventure games are all fantasies really, so I had to ask myself, “Who would people want to be in a game? What would people want to do?” And in the Land of the Dead, who would people rather be than Death himself? Being the Grim Reaper is just as cool as being a biker, I decided. And what does the Grim Reaper do? He picks up people who have died and carts them over from the other world. Just like a driver of a taxi or limo.

Okay, so that’s Manny Calavera, our main character. But who’s the bad guy? What’s the plot? I had just seen Chinatown, and I really liked the whole water-supply/real-estate scam that Noah Cross had going there, so of course I tried to rip that off and have Manny be a real-estate salesman who got caught up in a real-estate scandal. Then he was just like the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross, always looking for the good leads. But why would Hector Lemans, my villain, want real estate? Why would anyone? They’re dead! They’re only souls. What do souls in the Land of the Dead want?

They want to get out! They want safe passage out, just like in Casablanca! The Land of the Dead is a transitory place, and everybody’s waiting around for their travel papers. So Manny is a travel agent, selling tickets on the big train out of town, and Hector’s stealing the tickets…

The missing link between Full Throttle and Grim Fandango is Manny’s chauffeur and mechanic Glottis, a literal speed demon.

This, then, became the elevator pitch for Grim Fandango. Begin with the rich folklore surrounding Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated each year just after Halloween, which combines European Christian myths about death and the afterlife with the older, indigenous ones that still haunt the Aztec ruins of Teopanzolco. Then combine it with classic film noir to wind up with Raymond Chandler in a Latino afterlife. It was nothing if not a strikingly original idea for an adventure game. But there was also one more, almost equally original part of it: to do it in 3D.

To hear Tim Schafer tell the story, the move away from LucasArts’s traditional pixel art and into the realm of points, polygons, and textures was motivated by his desire to deliver a more cinematic experience. By no means does this claim lack credibility; as you can gather by reading what he wrote above, Schafer was and is a passionate film buff, who tends to resort to talking in movie titles when other forms of communication fail him. The environments in previous LucasArts adventure games — even the self-consciously cinematic Full Throttle — could only be shown from the angle the pixel artists had chosen to drawn them from. In this sense, they were like a theatrical play, or a really old movie, from the time before Orson Welles emancipated his camera and let it begin to roam freely through his sets in Citizen Kane. By using 3D, Schafer could become the Orson Welles of adventure games; he would be able to deliver dramatic angles and closeups as the player’s avatar moved about, would be able to put the player in his world rather than forever forcing her to look down on it from on-high. This is the story he still tells today, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true enough, as far as it goes.

Nevertheless, it’s only half of the full story. The other half is a messier, less idealistic tale of process and practical economics.

Reckoned in their cost of production per hour of play time delivered, adventure games stood apart from any other genre in their industry, and not in a good way. Building games entirely out of bespoke, single-use puzzles and assets was expensive in contrast to the more process-intensive genres. As time went on and gamers demanded ever bigger, prettier adventures, in higher resolutions with more colors, this became more and more of a problem. Already in 1995, when adventure games were still selling very well, the production costs that were seemingly inherent to the genre were a cause for concern. And the following year, when the genre failed to produce a single million-plus-selling breakout hit for the first time in half a decade, they began to look like an existential threat. At that point, LucasArts’s decision to address the issue proactively in Grim Fandango by switching from pixel art to 3D suddenly seemed a very wise move indeed. For a handful of Silicon Graphics workstations running 3D-modelling software could churn out images far more quickly than an army of pixel artists, at a fraction of the cost per image. If the graphics that resulted lacked some of the quirky, hand-drawn, cartoon-like personality that had marked LucasArts’s earlier adventure games, they made up for that by virtue of their flexibility: a scene could be shown from a different angle just by changing a few parameters instead of having to redraw it from scratch. This really did raise the prospect of making the more immersive games that Tim Schafer desired. But from a bean counter’s point of view, the best thing about it was the cost savings.

And there was one more advantage as well, one that began to seem ever more important as time went on and the market for adventure games running on personal computers continued to soften. Immersive 3D was more or less the default setting of the Sony PlayStation, which had come roaring out of Japan in 1995 to seize the title of the most successful games console of the twentieth century just before the curtain fell on that epoch. In addition to its 3D hardware, the PlayStation sported a CD drive, memory cards for saving state, and a slightly older typical user than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. And yet, although a number of publishers ported their 2D computer-born adventure games to the PlayStation, they never felt entirely at home there, having been designed for a mouse rather than a game controller.^[1]A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular. A 3D adventure game with a controller-friendly interface might be a very different proposition. If it played its cards right, it would open the door to an installed base of customers five to ten times the size of the extant market for games on personal computers.

Working with 3D graphics in the late 1990s required some clever sleight of hand if they weren’t to end up looking terrible. Grim Fandango’s masterstroke was to make all of its characters — like the protagonist Manny Calavera, whom you see above — mere skeletons, whose faces are literally painted onto their skulls. (The characters are shown to speak by manipulating the texture maps that represent their faces, not by manipulating the underlying 3D models themselves.) This approach gave the game a look reminiscent of another of its cinematic inspirations, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, whilst conveniently avoiding all of the complications of trying to render pliant flesh. A win-win, as they say. Or, as Tim Schafer said: “Instead of fighting the tech limitations of 3D, you have to embrace them and turn them into a style.”

But I’m afraid I’ve gotten slightly ahead of myself. This constellation of ideas, affordances, problems, and solutions was still in a nascent form in November of 1995, when LucasArts hired a young programmer fresh out of university by the name of Bret Mogilefsky. Mogilefsky was a known quantity already, having worked at LucasArts as a tester on and off while he was earning his high-school and university diplomas. Now, he was entrusted with the far more high-profile task of making SCUMM, LucasArts’s venerable adventure engine, safe for 3D.

After struggling for a few months, he concluded that this latest paradigm shift was just too extreme for an engine that had been created on a Commodore 64 circa 1986 and ported and patched from there. He would have to tear SCUMM down so far in order to add 3D functionality that it would be easier and cleaner simply to make a new engine from scratch. He told his superiors this, and they gave him permission to do so — albeit suspecting all the while, Mogilefsky is convinced, that he would eventually realize that game engines are easier envisioned than implemented and come crawling back to SCUMM. By no means was he the first bright spark at LucasArts who thought he could reinvent the adventuring wheel.

But he did prove the first one to call his bosses’ bluff. The engine that he called GrimE (“Grim Engine,” but pronounced like the synonym for “dirt”) used a mixture of pre-rendered and real-time-rendered 3D. The sets in which Manny and his friends and enemies played out their dramas would be the former; the aforementioned actors themselves would be the latter. GrimE was a piebald beast in another sense as well: that of cheerfully appropriating whatever useful code Mogilefsky happened to find lying around the house at LucasArts, most notably from the first-person shooter Jedi Knight.

Like SCUMM before it, GrimE provided relatively non-technical designers like Tim Schafer with a high-level scripting language that they could use themselves to code all of the mechanics of plot and puzzles. Mogilefsky adapted for this task Lua, a new, still fairly obscure programming language out of Brazil. It was an inspired choice. Elegant, learnable, and yet infinitely and easily extendible, Lua has gone on to become a staple language of modern game development, to be found today in such places as the wildly popular Roblox platform.

The most frustrating aspects of GrimE from a development perspective all clustered around the spots where its two approaches to 3D graphics rubbed against one another, producing a good deal of friction in the process. If, for example, Manny was to drink a glass of whiskey, the pre-rendered version of the glass that was part of the background set had to be artfully swapped with its real-time-rendered incarnation as soon as Manny began to interact with it. Getting such actions to look seamless absorbed vastly more time and energy than anyone had expected it to.

In fact, if the bean counters had been asked to pass judgment, they would have had a hard time labeling GrimE a success at all under their metrics. Grim Fandango was in active development for almost three full years, and may have ended up costing as much as $3 million. This was at least two and a half times as much as Full Throttle had cost, and placed it in the same ballpark as The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts’s last and most audiovisually lavish SCUMM adventure, which was released a year before Grim Fandango. Further, despite employing a distinctly console-like control scheme in lieu of pointing and clicking with the mouse, Grim Fandango would never make it to the PlayStation; GrimE ended up being just too demanding to be made to work on such limited hardware.^[2]Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.

All that aside, though, the new engine remained an impressive technical feat, and did succeed in realizing most of Tim Schafer’s aesthetic goals for it. Even the cost savings it apparently failed to deliver come with some mitigating factors. Making the first game with a new engine is always more expensive than making the ones that follow; there was no reason to conclude that GrimE couldn’t deliver real cost savings on LucasArts’s next adventure game. Then, too, for all that Grim Fandango wound up costing two and a half times as much as Full Throttle, it was also well over two and a half times as long as that game.

“Game production schedules are like flying jumbo jets,” says Tim Schafer. “It’s very intense at the takeoff and landing, but in the middle there’s this long lull.” The landing is the time of crunch, of course, and the crunch on Grim Fandango was protracted and brutal even by the industry’s usual standards, stretching out for months and months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. For by the beginning of 1998, the game was way behind schedule and way over budget, facing a marketplace that was growing more and more unkind to the adventure genre in general. This was not a combination to instill patience in the LucasArts executive suite. Schafer’s team did get the game done by the autumn of 1998, as they had been ordered to do in no uncertain terms, but only at a huge cost to their psychological and even physical health.

Bret Mogilefsky remembers coming to Schafer at one point to tell him that he just didn’t think he could go on like this, that he simply had to have a break. He was met with no sympathy whatsoever. To be fair, he probably shouldn’t have expected any. Crunch was considered par for the course in the industry during this era, and LucasArts was among the worst of its practitioners. Long hours spent toiling for ridiculously low wages — Mogilefsky was hired to be the key technical cog in this multi-million-dollar project for a salary of about $30,000 per year — were considered the price you paid for the privilege of working at The Star Wars Company.

Even setting aside the personal toll it took on the people who worked there, crunch did nothing positive for the games themselves. As we’ll see, Grim Fandango shows the scars of crunch most obviously in its dodgy puzzle design. Good puzzles result from a methodical, iterative process of testing and carefully considering the resulting feedback. Grim Fandango did not benefit from such a process, and this lack is all too plainly evident.

But before I continue making some of you very, very mad at me, let me take some time to note the strengths of Grim Fandango, which are every bit as real as its weaknesses. Indeed, if I squint just right, so that my eyes only take in its strengths, I have no problem understanding why it’s to be found on so many lists of “The Best Adventure Games Ever,” sometimes even at the very top.

There’s no denying the stuff that Grim Fandango does well. Its visual aesthetic, which I can best describe as 1930s Art Deco meets Mexican folk art meets 1940s gangster flick, is unforgettable. And it’s married to a script that positively crackles with wit and pathos. Our hero Manny is the rare adventure-game character who can be said to go through an actual character arc, who grows and evolves over the course of his story. The driving force behind the plot is his love for a woman named Meche. But his love isn’t the puppy love that Guybrush Threepwood has for Elaine in the Monkey Island games; the relationship is more nuanced, more adult, more complicated, and its ultimate resolution is all the more moving for that.

How do you create real stakes in a story where everyone is already dead? The Land of the Death’s equivalent of death is “sprouting,” in which a character is turned into a bunch of flowers and forced to live another life in that form. Why shouldn’t the dead fear life as much as the living fear death?

Tim Schafer did not grow up with the Latino traditions that are such an inextricable part of Grim Fandango. Yet the game never feels like the exercise in clueless or condescending cultural tourism it might easily have become. On the contrary, the setting feels full-bodied, lived-in, natural. The cause is greatly aided by a stellar cast of voice actors with just the right accents. The Hollywood veteran Tony Plana, who plays Manny, is particularly good, teasing out exactly the right blend of world-weary cynicism and tarnished romanticism. And Maria Canalas, who plays Meche, is equally perfect in her role. The non-verbal soundtrack by Peter McConnell is likewise superb, a mixture of mariachi music and cool jazz that shouldn’t work but does. Sometimes it soars to the forefront, but more often it tinkles away in the background, setting the mood. You’d only notice it if it was gone — but trust me, then you would really notice.

This is a big game as well as a striking and stylish one — in fact, by most reckonings the biggest adventure that LucasArts ever made. Each of its four acts, which neatly correspond to the four years that the average soul must spend wandering the underworld before going to his or her final rest, is almost big enough to be a self-contained game in its own right. Over the course of Grim Fandango, Manny goes from being a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper cum travel agent to a nightlife impresario, from the captain of an ocean liner to a prisoner laboring in an underwater mine. The story does arguably peak too early; the second act, an extended homage to Casablanca with Manny in the role of Humphrey Bogart, is so beautifully realized that much of what follows is slightly diminished by the comparison. Be that as it may, though, it doesn’t mean any of what follows is bad.

The jump cut to Manny’s new life as a bar owner in the port city of Rubacava at the beginning of the second act is to my mind the most breathtaking moment of the game, the one where you first realize how expansive its scope and ambition really are.

All told, then, I have no real beef with anyone who chooses to label Grim Fandango an aesthetic masterpiece. If there was an annual award for style in adventure games, this game would have won it easily in 1998, just as Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would have taken the prize for 1995. Sadly, though, it seems to me that the weaknesses of both games are also the same. In both of their cases, once I move beyond the aesthetics and the storytelling and turn to the gameplay, some of the air starts to leak out of the balloon.

The interactive aspects of Grim Fandango — you know, all that stuff that actually makes it a game — are dogged by two overarching sets of problems. The first is all too typical for the adventure genre: overly convoluted, often nonsensical puzzle design. Tim Schafer was always more intrinsically interested in the worlds, characters, and stories he dreamed up than he was in puzzles. This is fair enough on the face of it; he is very, very good at those things, after all. But it does mean that he needs a capable support network to ensure that his games play as well as they look and read. He had that support for 1993’s Day of the Tentacle, largely in the person of his co-designer Dave Grossman; the result was one of the best adventure games LucasArts ever made, a perfect combination of inspired fiction with an equally inspired puzzle framework. Unfortunately, he was left to make Full Throttle on his own, and it showed. Ditto Grim Fandango. For all that he loved movies, the auteur model was not a great fit for Tim Schafer the game designer.

Grim Fandango seldom gives you a clear idea of what it is you’re even trying to accomplish. Compare this with The Curse of Monkey Island, the LucasArts adventure just before this one, a game which seemed at the time to herald a renaissance in the studio’s puzzle designs. There, you’re always provided with an explicit set of goals, usually in the form of a literal shopping list. Thus even when the mechanics of the puzzles themselves push the boundaries of real-world logic, you at least have a pretty good sense of where you should be focusing your efforts. Here, you’re mostly left to guess what Tim Schafer would like to have happen to Manny next. You stumble around trying to shake something loose, trying to figure out what you can do and then doing it just because you can. By no means is it lost on me that this sense of confusion arises to a large extent because Grim Fandango is such a character-driven story, one which eschews the mechanistic tic-tac-toe of other adventure-game plots. But recognizing this irony doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you’re wandering around with no clue what the story wants from you.

Compounding the frustrations of the puzzles are the frustrations of the interface. You don’t use the mouse at all; everything is done with the numeric keypad, or, if you’re lucky enough to have one, a console-style controller. (At the time Grim Fandango was released, virtually no one playing games on computers did.) Grim Fandango’s mode of navigation is most reminiscent of the console-based JRPGs of its era, such as the hugely popular Final Fantasy VII, which sold over 10 million copies on the PlayStation during the late 1990s. Yet in practice it’s far more irritating, because you have to interact with the environment here on a much more granular level. LucasArts themselves referred to their method of steering Manny about as a “tank” interface, a descriptor which turns out to be all too descriptive. It really does feel like you’re driving a bulky, none too agile vehicle through an obstacle course of scenery.

Make no mistake: the 3D engine makes possible some truly striking views. But too often the designers prioritize visual aesthetics over playability.

In the final reckoning, then, an approach that is fine in a JRPG makes just about every aspect of an old-school, puzzle-solving adventure game — which is what Grim Fandango remains in form and spirit when you strip all of the details of its implementation away — more awkward and less fun. Instead of having hotspots in the environment that light up when you pass a mouse cursor over them, as you do in a SCUMM adventure, you have to watch Manny’s head carefully as you drive him around; when it turns to look in a certain direction, that means there’s something he can interact with there. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to miss a turn of his head, and thereby to miss something vital to your progress through the game.

The inventory system is also fairly excruciating. Instead of being able to bring up a screen showing all of the items Manny is carrying, you have to cycle through them one by one by punching a key or controller button over and over, listening to him drone out their descriptions over and over as you do so. This approach precludes using one inventory object on another one, cutting off a whole avenue of puzzle design.

Now, the apologists among you — and this game does have an inordinate number of them — might respond to these complaints of mine by making reference to the old cliché that, for every door that is closed in life (and presumably in games as well), another one is opened. And in theory, the new engine really does open a door to new types of puzzles that are more tactile and embodied, that make you feel more a part of the game’s world. To Tim Schafer’s credit, he does try to include these sorts of puzzles in quite a few places. To our detriment, though, they turn out to be the worst puzzles in the game, relying on finicky positioning and timing and giving no useful feedback when you get those things slightly wrong.

But even when Grim Fandango presents puzzles that could easily have been implemented in SCUMM, they’re made way more annoying than they ought to be by the engine and interface. When you’re reduced to that final adventurer’s gambit of just trying everything on everything, as you most assuredly will be from time to time here, the exercise takes many times longer than it would using SCUMM, what with having to laboriously drive Manny about from place to place.

Taken as a game rather than the movie it often seems more interested in being, Grim Fandango boils down to a lumpy stew of overthought and thoughtlessness. In the former category, there’s an unpleasant ideological quality to its approach, with its prioritization of some hazy ethic of 3D-powered “immersion” and its insistence that no visible interface elements whatsoever can appear onscreen, even when these choices actively damage the player’s experience. This is where Sid Meier can helpfully step in to remind us that it is the player who is meant to be having the fun in a game, not the designer.

The thoughtlessness comes in the lack of consideration of what kind of game Grim Fandango is meant to be. Like all big-tent gaming genres, the adventure genre subsumes a lot of different styles of game with different priorities. Some adventures are primarily about exploration and puzzle solving. And that’s fine, although one does hope that those games execute their puzzles better than this one does. But Grim Fandango is not primarily about its puzzles; it wants to take you on a ride, to sweep you along on the wings of a compelling story. And boy, does it have a compelling story to share with you. For this reason, it would be best served by streamlined puzzles that don’t get too much in the way of your progress. The ones we have, however, are not only frustrating in themselves but murder on the story’s pacing, undermining what ought to be Grim Fandango’s greatest strengths. A game like this one that is best enjoyed with a walkthrough open on the desk beside it is, in this critic’s view at least, a broken game by definition.

As with so many near-miss games, the really frustrating thing about Grim Fandango is that the worst of its problems could so easily have been fixed with just a bit more testing, a bit more time, and a few more people who were empowered to push back against Tim Schafer’s more dogmatic tendencies. For the 2015 remastered version of the game, Schafer did grudgingly agree to include an alternative point-and-click interface that is more like that of a SCUMM adventure. The results verge on the transformational. By no means does the addition of a mouse cursor remedy all of the infelicities of the puzzle design, but it does make battering your way through them considerably less painful. If my less-than-systematic investigations on YouTube are anything to go by, this so-old-it’s-new-again interface has become by far the most common way to play the game today.

The Grim Fandango remaster. Note the mouse cursor. The new interface is reportedly implemented entirely in in-engine Lua scripts rather than requiring any re-programming of the GrimE engine itself. This means that it would have been perfectly possible to include as an option in the original release.

In other places, the fixes could have been even simpler than revamping the interface. A shocking number of puzzles could have been converted from infuriating to delightful by nothing more than an extra line or two of dialog from Manny or one of the other characters. As it is, too many of the verbal nudges that do exist are too obscure by half and are given only once in passing, as part of conversations that can never be repeated. Hints for Part Four are to be found only in Part One; I defy even an elephant to remember them when the time comes to apply them. All told, Grim Fandango has the distinct odor of a game that no one other than those who were too close to it to see it clearly ever really tried to play before it was put in a box and shoved out the door. There was a time when seeking the feedback of outsiders was a standard part of LucasArts’s adventure-development loop. Alas, that era was long past by the time of Grim Fandango.

Nonetheless, Grim Fandango was accorded a fairly rapturous reception in the gaming press when it was released in the last week of October in 1998, just in time for Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead which follows it on November 1. Its story, characters, and setting were justifiably praised, while the deficiencies of its interface and puzzle design were more often than not relegated to a paragraph or two near the end of the review. This is surprising, but not inexplicable. There was a certain sadness in the trade press — almost a collective guilt — about the diminished prospects of the adventure game in these latter years of the decade. Meanwhile LucasArts was still the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of goodwill, thanks to the many classics they had served up during those earlier, better years for the genre as a whole. Grim Fandango was held up as a sort of standard bearer for the embattled graphic adventure, the ideal mix of tradition and innovation to serve as proof that the genre was still relevant in a post-Quake, post-Starcraft world.

For many years, the standard narrative had it that the unwashed masses of gamers utterly failed to respond to the magazines’ evangelism, that Grim Fandango became an abject failure in the marketplace. In more recent years, Tim Schafer has muddied those waters somewhat by claiming that the game actually sold close to half a million copies. I rather suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Sales of a quarter of a million certainly don’t strike me as unreasonable once foreign markets are factored into the equation. Such a figure would have been enough to keep Grim Fandango from losing much if any money, but would have provided LucasArts with little motivation to make any more such boldly original adventure games. And indeed, LucasArts would release only one more adventure game of any stripe in their history. It would use the GrimE engine, but it would otherwise play it about as safe as it possibly could, by being yet another sequel to the venerable but beloved Secret of Monkey Island.

As I was at pains to note earlier, I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so. For my part, though, I’m something of a stickler on some points. To my mind, interactivity is the very quality that separates games from other forms of media, making it hard for me to pronounce a game “good” that botches it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of games whose most committed fans want to talk about everything other than that which you the player actually do in them. The same applies when a game’s creators display the same tendency. Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Grim Fandango: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 31 and 92; Computer Gaming World of November 1997, May 1998, and February 1999; Ultimate PC of August 1998. Plus the commentary track from the 2015 Grim Fandango remaster.

Online sources include The International House of Mojo’s pages on the game, the self-explanatory Grim Fandango Network, Gamespot’s vintage review of the game, and Daniel Albu’s YouTube conversation with Bret Mogilefsky.

And a special thank-you to reader Matt Campbell, who shared with me the audio of a talk that Bret Mogilefsky gave at the 2005 Lua Workshop, during which he explained how he used that language in GrimE.

Where to Get It: A modestly remastered version of Grim Fandango is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Well, Kamala Harris has had her fun with all those “progressive” voters, in and at the edge of the Democratic Party, who were much taken—or taken in, better put—as the vice president played the empathy card in her many statements of concern for the fate of the Palestinians of Gaza. Let us be clear, to borrow one of Harris’s favorite locutions: If she wins on Nov. 5 and a Harris administration comes to be next Jan. 20, there will be no deviation whatsoever from the Biden regime’s limitless, unconditional support for Zionist Israel’s expanding campaigns of terror in West Asia. 

We know this now, after months of Harris’s “strategic vagueness”—how artful this New York Times phrase, an apologia for political deviousness in two words—because The Times has just published a remarkable piece of “news analysis” making it clear indeed that Harris’s campaign-trail talk “should not be confused with any willingness to break from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.” 

Wow. My mind tumbled instantly back to the leaked transcript of that six-figure speech Hillary Clinton gave to a roomful of Wall Streeters during her 2016 campaign. I say one thing to the great broad masses out on the hustings, she told the assembled financiers, but pay no attention. I’m telling you here that we’re in this together. 

Ah yes, politics in the land where all is artifice and nothing need be sincere. 

If this news meant merely more of the same it would be grim enough, given the spectacle of Israeli savagery that confronts us daily. But in my read the Harris people have put us on notice that the U.S., should she emerge the victor in a few weeks, will back Israel as unequivocally, as it does now, while the Zionist regime continues to ignore international law and escalate across the region. 

Cases in point: Just in the past couple of weeks the U.S. has bombed targets in Yemen from which Houthis have been firing missiles into Israel, while, on President Biden’s orders,  sending Israel a highly sophisticated missile-defense system and 100 troops to operate it. There is only one conclusion to draw at this point: Support of this kind cannot continue without the U.S. taking on another war. 

One can hope only that all those dreamers who dreamed Kamala Harris would bring something new to this U.S.–financed spree of bombing and murder—who don’t understand the dynamics of the American imperium’s policy in West Asia, this is to say—have awakened, none too gently, from their slumber.

Assiduously and cynically, Harris has cultivated delusory expectations at the left-hand end of the Democrats’ garden ever since party elites and donors imposed her as the 2024 candidate last spring. Here she is July 25, as reported by NPR, after a meeting in Washington with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister:

What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating … We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.

And here are Katie Rogers and Erica Green reporting in The New York Times just prior to a Harris campaign stop in Michigan last Friday, Oct. 18:

Ms. Harris’s office and campaign declined to give specifics of what a Harris administration’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza would look like, in large part because the conflict is too volatile to predict how it might be managed days from now, let alone months from now.

But one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Ms. Harris’s thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. Rogers and Green report that the strategically vague Kamala Harris cannot say what her Israel policy will be because things in Gaza and beyond are too dynamic, changing by the day, and then quote an unnamed U.S. official who can assure us her Israel policy will not change no matter what happens one day to the next? You have to love the logic in this reporting. Keep this up, Ms. Rogers and Ms. Green, and you could be on for a Pulitzer next spring. 

Here’s another good ’ern, as an old farmer I knew used to say, from Rogers and Green:

Even if Ms. Harris were not aligned with Mr. Biden’s current approach—and her advisers stress that she is—she would not bow to political pressure and upend U.S. foreign policy at a precarious moment in the conflict, just days before an election. 

Say whaaa? What does “not bow to political pressure” mean? This is The Times’s cotton-wool English at its best, or worst, and as so often it requires translation. In this case: A Harris administration will pay no more attention to popular opinion than the Biden regime has paid to date because American foreign policy must not be subject to the will of the electorate. It does not matter, therefore, how many Americans want the U.S. to stop supporting terrorist Israel’s genocide. The horror show shall go on. 

To keep the scorecard up to date, a CBS poll in June, the most recent I can find, indicated that 61% of those surveyed favored an arms embargo against Israel. This compares with 52% three months earlier, according to a poll commissioned in March by the honorable people at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—not when the direction of the wind is of no account.  

Katie Rogers and Erica Green give us a study in authorized propaganda, pointedly insistent as it is, in four separate passages, that Harris is fully committed to keeping the bombs and money flowing to apartheid Israel. We are left to wonder why a piece of this kind appears out of the blue, a coup de foudre when read in the context of The Times’s coverage of Harris. And why now, given the Harris campaign’s vulnerability to constituencies opposed to the Zionist state’s savagery, chief among them Arab–Americans in Michigan? 

Has Harris’s rhetoric, hollow as it has been, nonetheless prompted a case of nerves among donors who support the Zionist cause? Has the Israel lobby put its foot down? Did the Netanyahu government signal enough already with the sympathy for Gazans, as it makes us look bad? It is impossible to say. My best read is that the American public is being prepared for the U.S. to stay with “the Jewish state” as the mess it makes grows more dangerous and yet more brutal. 

■

If Harris is set to embrace her inheritance in West Asia from the Biden regime, just as her people now say, what is it Harris will face should the vice president become president? This is answerable in two words: very unfortunately. The man who leaves U.S. foreign policy in ruins across both oceans, and the world in greater disorder and peril than it has been since 1945, will bequeath his successor, if Harris so proves, another war. 

We should have seen this coming, actually. The savagery in Gaza will go on until there is nothing left of it or its people: This is clear now that the Israelis have assassinated Yahyah Sinwar, the Hamas leader, and continue—no, escalate—their assault on the Strip’s remaining population. The Pentagon positioned the Navy and a modest contingent of troops off the Lebanese coast shortly before the Israelis began their attacks on Lebanon. Secretary of State Blinken now talks openly of “regime change” in Beirut —a coup, in plain English. There is nothing in this to suggest we can expect even a murmur of objection from a Harris White House as Israel proceeds with Netanyahu’s “seven-front war.” 

Last Thursday, Oct. 17, the U.S. sent B–2 bombers to strike underground bunkers in Yemen, from which the Houthis have for months attacked Red Sea shipping lanes in solidarity with Palestinians. Let’s call it official: The U.S. is now directly waging war alongside the Zionist regime on one of its seven fronts. 

More to the point, in my view, is how Lloyd Austin explained this move. “This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach,” the defense secretary said, “no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified.” If you do not read this as an aggressive warning to Iran you cannot read. 

The yet-bigger news came a week earlier, when the Pentagon confirmed that President Biden had ordered it to send Israel one copy of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, along with 100 uniformed technicians to operate it. THAAD, as this technology is commonly known, is a highly advanced missile-defense shield. Alert readers may recall that the Chinese freaked out some years ago, when the South Koreans agreed, not without coercion, to accept THAAD systems on their soil. 

The Israelis, The Times of Israel reported at the weekend, have already asked for a second such system. Just planning ahead. 

Trita Parsi, who directs the Quincy Institute in Washington, read the significance of this bit of American military largesse as well as did anyone in an email note dated Oct. 15:  

By deploying the THAAD system to Israel, along with roughly 100 U.S. service members, Biden has taken a massive step toward pulling the U.S. into a larger regional war. Rather than deterring Iran, Biden is reducing the risk and cost of widening the war to Israel while increasing the risk and cost to the U.S. Had Biden refrained from adding additional defensive capabilities to Israel after it needlessly intensified the conflict, the cost of escalation would have been higher for Israel—perhaps even prohibitive. Israel would have thought twice. But because Israel knows that Biden will come to its defense every time it ups the ante, Netanyahu has few reasons not to escalate. And with Biden’s latest step, regional war may now have become inevitable.

“Inevitable” is just another word for a very great deal to lose as the unfunny farce of U.S.–Israeli relations proceeds no matter who comes out the winner next month. Sending U.S. troops to Israel to run THAAD systems is to step straight into the trap Netanyahu has set, drawing the U.S. that much closer to direct involvement in the biggest of the Israeli leader’s fronts.  

Friends I greatly respect, several of them, say we have to look past Harris’s shortcomings (to keep things courteous). It all depends on who she names as her top advisers, this line of reasoning runs. This is precisely what Harris will depend upon and this is why the prospect of a Harris presidency is so worrisome. History warns in no uncertain terms these will be the same Deep State ideologues—many of whom are committed to the Zionist cause—who have run foreign policy the whole of the post–Cold War era, if not longer. The electorate’s preferences and aspirations will have no more to do with the formation of policy than they do now.  

In 1935, 89 years ago, W.E.B. du Bois published a book called Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois was concerned with African–American contributions to the post–Civil War United States, but he took on much more than this before he was finished. In this noted work he parsed three renderings of the modernizing U.S. In one, America would finally achieve the democracy expressed in its founding ideals. In another, he pictured an advanced industrial nation whose distinctions were its wealth and potency. And in the third these two versions of America’s destiny were imagined in combination. This would be something new under the sun, an amalgam that would make America history’s truly great exception. 

Empire abroad, democracy at home: It has never been more than an impossible dream. Du Bois considered it “the cant of exceptionalism,” in his biographer’s phrase. And this is the story of American politics as we have it in 2024. It is what Kamala Harris — and hardly is she alone, in fairness — has on offer as she commits to a rogue client while pursuing the White House. It is what those among her supporters who think she can make any difference in West Asia — or anywhere else, for that matter — dream about. 

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

Author Site

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

ScheerPost.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. CC-BY-NC-ND only applies to ORIGINAL ScheerPost content.