Answer Every Bloody Body: Gaza and the Fight for Civilization

This week, it’s just Patrick and Finn—no Meg, but plenty of rage, history, and dark humor.

Starting with the unspeakable horrors coming out of Gaza, they explore not only the U.S.’s financial and political complicity but also why this particular atrocity demands our attention. It’s not “just another war.” It’s a stress test for precious, hard-won moral frameworks: international law, human rights, even the idea of civilization itself.

We follow the bloody trail from the Spanish conquest to Israel’s assault on Gaza, with stops in Nicaragua, Ireland, apartheid South Africa, and the U.S. Senate. Along the way, we talk about what it means to be “special carriers” of anti-colonial memory, how ideological tools constrain power, and how we can build that toolbox, even if we have thus far failed to stop the genocide.

Links

• Get ⁠America, América⁠, an amazing new history of the New World from Yale historian Greg Grandin.
• Finn and Patrick's single video episode of Playfully Serious on the history of Israel and Palestine, from December 2023