Sudan

Feints, refrains and unfinished business. 2025 in review

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach

We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.

It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.

From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.

Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”

The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.

Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.

By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.

Iran, Israel and America’s bunker busters

Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.

The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.

Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”

Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.

The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.

Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads

A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and  justice for past crimes remained distant.

Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

Sudan: what genocide actually looks like

Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.

America: a country divided against itself

The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.

Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership.

Monroe Redux: the rerun of “the Ugly American”

US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.

Europe at a inflection point

Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.

Uncle Sam’s  cold-shoulder

Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but  cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.

The post-war order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States withdrew from the world, but because it remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.

Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing

Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.

But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground,  sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.

Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles

Featured photograph and above:

A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.

The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk

And now, a break from the doom and gloom …

2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.

The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.

Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.

By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.

Algorithm and blues

Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.

Passion Without Wisdom

I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.

Looking Toward 2026

Looking back on 2025, it seems that there  were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.

Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.

Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation.  In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”

After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.

And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.

What we wrote in 2025

It was a year that refused neat endings.

It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book.

It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.

What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a  particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century;  and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.

In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.

January

The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country

February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads

March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)

May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history

July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson

August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song

September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma

October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer

November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard

December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain

A song for 2026: Lost love at world’s end …

The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.

The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.

The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.

Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.

Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by

They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark

The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
American poet and author Stephen Crane, 1899

Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.

But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction.

In what can only be described as a melancholy case of selective blindness, the gaze of western mainstream and social media, distracted by other conflicts and causes has been turned away. The global conscience has appeared unmoved. The numbers are obscene, the silence more so.

El Fasher, in Sudan’s far western province of Darfur, is once again the world’s unacknowledged abyss. The UN warns of genocide; videos show unarmed men executed in cold blood, hospitals shelled, aid workers vanished, women violated, and civilians starved into submission. The Rapid Support Forces – the Janjaweed (colloquial Arabic for “devil riders”) in new fatigues – are methodically annihilating ethnic groups such as the Masalit. El Fasher was the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur and its capture marks a milestone in the two yea long civil war, giving the RSF de facto control of more than a quarter of the territory.

Why the silence?

Because Sudan resists the narrative template that powers modern activism. There is no imperial villain, no clear coloniser or colonised, no simple choreography of oppression and resistance. The slaughter of black Africans does not fit the anti-Western moral geometry upon which contemporary protest movements are built. Sudanese bodies fall outside the moral lens of the global North even as they fall in their thousands.

This is not to rank suffering but to note the selectivity of empathy. Sudan’s tragedy lacks the aesthetic of victimhood that flatters Western guilt. The WHO pleads for hospitals; journalists beg for their detained colleagues. It all sounds chillingly familiar – yet no outrage follows. Perhaps because Sudan offers no convenient villain, no redemption arc, no social currency.

At the heart of the moral selectivity of the globalised conscience lies outrage as performance, empathy as branding. Sudan exposes the performative element of protest: empathy contingent on narrative utility. Its tragedy has no liturgy, no public ritual of belonging. It shows what our age truly worships: not justice, but self-expression masquerading as it. And in El Fasher’s unmarked graves lies the measure of this hypocrisy – a mute testimony to the moral vanity of a world that rages for Palestine, hashtags for Ukraine, and sleeps through Sudan.

In That Howling Infinite has touched on this dissonance before in  The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality We wrote back then, in December 2023, when the Sudanese civil war has been raging for the best part of a year: “Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims … There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists”. 

Journey to an civil war

American journalist Anne Applebaum wrote very long essay the August edition of The Atlantic: Sudan … the most nihilistic war ever. She believes that Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed. Her essay reads like a missive from a civilisation already past the point of rescue. The country she describes is less a state than a geography of ruin — a landscape where the coordinates of morality, nationhood, and even information itself have come apart. The title is no exaggeration; it is diagnosis and prognosis both. Sudan, she argues, is not an aberration but a preview — the shape of the world when the liberal order finally collapses, when wars are fought not for gods or ideas but for bullion and bodies.

Sudan’s civil war began, at least formally, as a contest between two men: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the regular army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who rose from the Janjaweed militias to command the Rapid Support Forces. Both were products of the same regime; both were once partners in repression. When they turned upon each other in 2023, the result was not ideological conflict but a kind of mutual devouring. Each accused the other of betrayal; each proceeded to loot, starve, and bomb the very population he claimed to protect.

Applebaum’s Sudan is not one country but many — an archipelago of fiefdoms and frontiers, each governed by whoever holds the nearest airstrip or gold mine. And gold, indeed, is the keyword: the new oil of an old desert. Sudan possesses vast deposits of it, and with them a vast invitation to corruption. Wagner mercenaries mine and smuggle it northward to fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. The United Arab Emirates bankrolls Hemedti’s RSF in exchange for access and influence. Egypt and Chad manoeuvre for position; Iran quietly re-enters the game. The Sudanese warlords themselves fight not to win the nation but to control the veins of the earth — the alluvial goldfields of Darfur and the Nile Basin that glitter beneath the dust like a curse.

Western governments, overstretched and inward-turned, offer gestures in place of policy. Applebaum notes that the world’s great democracies — once self-appointed custodians of human rights — now behave like distracted landlords. There is a knock at the door, another tenant murdered in the basement, but the owner is on the phone about something else.

In this sense, Sudan is less an anomaly than a mirror. It shows us what happens when international law becomes theatre, when moral outrage is rationed by proximity and profit. It is not merely a humanitarian disaster but a philosophical one: a demonstration that without belief — in justice, in shared reality, in the notion that human suffering still obliges response — politics decays into predation.

Applebaum’s prose, always measured, carries a note of exhausted mourning. The old ideological world — that twentieth-century drama of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy — at least believed in something, even if those beliefs destroyed millions. Today’s warlords believe in nothing at all. They are not even tyrants in the grand style; they are contractors of chaos, CEOs of slaughter, men who weaponise hunger for leverage and sell access to ruins.

What makes her essay so haunting is that Sudan’s nihilism feels contagious. The war may be geographically distant, but morally it is next door. The same disintegration of purpose infects the international response — the shrugging cynicism, the moral fatigue, the slow erosion of empathy. Applebaum’s Sudan is what remains when the “rules-based order” becomes a slogan muttered by people who no longer believe it themselves.

Coda: A Mirror in the Sand

The desert, Applebaum implies, has turned into a mirror of the world’s soul — reflecting its avarice, its indifference, its slow retreat from meaning.

What lingers after Applebaum’s account is not simply pity for Sudan, though that would be reason enough, but unease — the feeling that the world’s moral compass has slipped its pole and is spinning uselessly in our hands. Sudan is not the exception; it is the precedent. It is the world without illusion: borders drawn in dust, governments as rackets, truth dissolved into overlapping transparencies.

Once, wars were waged for empire, for creed, for revolution — each claiming, however falsely, to serve a higher cause. Now they are fought for metal, for markets, for motion itself. The soldiers are mercenaries, the civilians collateral, the nations staging grounds for someone else’s ledger. Applebaum’s overlapping maps are more than an image of Sudan’s confusion; they are an x-ray of a civilisation that no longer shares a moral reference point. We are all now drawing our own maps, colouring the world according to our comfort zones, overlaying them until the truth beneath is invisible.

And so Sudan becomes both tragedy and parable. Its gold mines glitter like tombs of the old order — the liberal dream of rules, rights, and reason — while above them drones and scavengers circle. A century ago, Conrad called it the horror; today it is merely another tab on a newsfeed. The anarchy is not confined to Khartoum or Darfur. It is spreading quietly through the arteries of global indifference, through our own fatigue, our own appetite for distraction.

If Applebaum is right, Sudan is not at the edge of the world but at its centre. The future, it turns out, is already here: gilded, godless, and for sale to the highest bidder.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/

Postscript: selective empathy in a world of sorrow

Comparing the international outcry over Gaza to the silence on Sudan has been condemned as intellectual dishonesty. One comment on this post ran this:

“The mainstream media can stir outrage on any topic when its political masters and financial backers want it to. Why has it not done so in this instance? Follow the money is one rule of thumb. I assume it suits the powers that be to let the slaughter continue. I hope more people are inspired to become activists against this dreadful situation, but public opinion tends to follow the narrative manufactured by the media more than impel it. When it comes to pro-Palestinian activism it is the story of a long hard grind of dedicated protestors to get any traction at all against the powerful political and media interests which have supported the Israeli narrative and manufactured global consent for the genocide of Palestinians over many years. And still, although the tide is gradually turning, the West supports Israel to the hilt and crushes dissent. Using the silence in the media and in the streets over the slaughter in Sudan as an excuse to try and invalidate pro-Palestinian activism is a low blow and intellectually dishonest”.

This particular response is articulate and impassioned, but it also illustrates precisely the reflexive narrowing of moral vision that the comparison between Gaza and Sudan was meant to illuminate. The argument hinges on a familiar syllogism: that Western media outrage is never organic but always orchestrated (“follow the money”), that silence on Sudan therefore reflects elite indifference rather than public apathy, and that to highlight that silence is somehow to attack or “invalidate” the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian activism. It is a neat, closed circuit—morally reassuring, rhetorically watertight, but intellectually fragile.

For one thing, the claim that outrage over Gaza is a product of “a long hard grind” of dissenters battling pro-Israel hegemony may be partly true, but it fails to account for the asymmetry of moral attention. Why, if media outrage can be manufactured at will, does it attach so selectively? Why is one tragedy magnified until it becomes the world’s moral touchstone, while another, numerically and humanly no less immense, barely registers? This is not to invalidate solidarity with Gaza—it is to interrogate the mechanisms by which empathy itself is distributed, channelled, and constrained.

The “follow the money” thesis also misses something subtler and more disturbing. Western silence on Sudan is not an act of conspiracy but of exhaustion: no villains clearly marked, no sides easily named, no tidy narrative of good and evil to moralise upon. Sudan’s war—fragmented, internecine, post-ideological—does not lend itself to hashtags or flags on Instagram profiles. It is a horror too complex to package and too distant to own. By contrast, Gaza offers clarity, identity, and the reassuring architecture of blame: victims and oppressors, martyrs and monsters, the colonial morality play in perfect focus.

Thus, when critics accuse those who draw this comparison of “intellectual dishonesty,” they mistake the argument. To juxtapose Gaza and Sudan is not to weigh one body count against another, or to diminish Palestinian suffering. It is to expose the limits of our moral imagination – how empathy becomes performative when it is contingent on narrative simplicity or political fashion.

In Sudan, the gold glitters under the rubble. Warlords, mercenaries, and foreign patrons all claw for it while millions starve. In Gaza, the ruins are televised, moralised, and weaponised. Both are human catastrophes, but only one has an audience.

The point, then, is not that activists for Gaza are wrong—it is that they are lonely. If their struggle truly seeks a universal human justice, it must be capacious enough to include Darfur, Khartoum, El Fasher—to grieve what the cameras do not show. Otherwise, our compassion becomes another form of exceptionalism: the selective virtue of those who need their tragedies to fit the script.

In truth, to compare Gaza and Sudan is not to rank suffering or diminish solidarity, but to expose the limits of our moral bandwidth. Gaza compels because its story is legible—villains, victims, a script the world knows by heart. Sudan confounds because it is too fractured, too many nations within one, too little meaning to hold. There is no clear narrative, only greed, hunger, and gold buried beneath the ruins.

The real dishonesty is not in caring for Gaza, but in mistaking selective empathy for universal conscience. If our outrage depends on simplicity, we risk turning compassion into performance – mourning only what the cameras show, and averting our eyes from what they cannot.