Sudan 's link with Gaza

Israel wants to dump the Palestinians in South Sudan. We can expand our geopolitical sense. We can connect dots. We can talk more clearly about Sudan. 

By the way, watch this: David Hundeyin| | US Secret War in Sudan: The Hidden Truth Revealed. I was excited to see this interview on Jamarl Thomas's channel. 

Once again, laying the charge that you are talking about Gaza but not about Sudan or DRC or Haiti and this shows you don't value black lives is not a sound political statement. Again, can you prove folks don't care for black lives? Who are you directing this outrage to? For what purpose? Can you goad someone to say something for the sake of saying it? 

At the end of it, online activism by individuals is for their own: their own rage, their own stances, their own sense of activism. Online activism by political movements is local and, addresses local issues first and then makes the global connections. So, directing allegations of racism against individuals is random and, really useless. 

If you direct your critique at major well known personalities, public figures, celebrities, political figures and, attack them for their silence, you have the right to do so. But, attacking individuals for not talking about this while they are talking about something else has little or no use. 

Also, using the "you don't care about black people" is a veiled threat , allegation of racism , which of course can't be proven because individuals are not institutions that perpetuate structural racism, the latter which need to be dismantled. Can you dismantle an individual? Or is it more about cancelling them in the online digital world? 

This hyper frenzied sentiment of attacking folks for their alleged racism is a little on the lines of the allegations of anti Semitism. Anyone protesting Israeli crimes is now an anti Semite, is racist towards Jews. And, if you are saying something about Gaza online but haven't said anything about Sudan, means you are a racist. 

Also, if you know someone has racist attitudes , why do you want them to advocate for Sudan, anyway ? 

Craft your arguments so they actually make sense and are, useful. Direct your rage against the silence of organisations, leaders, celebrities, public figures, politicians, and hypocritical individuals if you must. For individuals, be prepared to have proof they are indeed racist and, knowingly are silent. 

If you think about, can you prove someone is racist because they are talking more about one issue online than another

I want to have a thought exercise here regarding how we engage with each other in online spaces while performing political activism: 

- we write our opinions (I do a lot of that)
- we re-tweet/re-post others' opinions
- we re-tweet/re-post articles, headlines , memes we agree with 

The online spaces are as critical as political organising by political actors whether they are bonafide political parties or movements or individual activists. 

I often feel I am either expressing myself in an echo chamber (on X/Twitter) or being ignored on Facebook. 

There is an imperative online to express outrage that no one else is expressing it. (Me included) 

Ultimately, it's a self righteous sentiment and, I don't think you can goad anyone to express rage online by online performative activism. I know it! I have expressed enough outrage about how deafening a silence it has been since the Genocide started. Nothing really happens. Instead, it seems to invite anger at having their silence pointed out. 

Many of us feel angry, helpless and, are full of rage. Online spaces are where we go and express these sentiments. Is it meaningless? No, I don't think so because, as least for me, I want to express loud and clear which side of history I stand on. 

In this small selection of people who are expressing their political views, there is a charge of hypocrisy and selective rage. It's this what I want to focus on. 

The imperative to say something like for example "If you talk about Gaza but can't talk about Sudan, then your activism is limited." This sentiment will go so far as to insinuate that those who protest for Gaza but not for Sudan are ultimately racist because black lives are less important. And, in fact, there's also a Genocide going on in Sudan. I think the word Genocide gets thrown a lot and, given how detailed and thorough the case South Africa made in the ICJ to prove that Israel had the intent to commit a Genocide, the same detailed case should be made where ever activists claim one is being committed. 

But back to the idea that those of us who are not talking enough about Sudan are ignoring it simply don't care for African lives has really been rubbing me the wrong way. I've been mulling over it and these are a few points: 

- how can you prove that someone doesn't care about one people 

- the Genocide unfolding in Gaza has been documented , recorded by Palestinians themselves and, we are all witness to it

- I don't think the Genocide in Gaza and the civil war (yes, there are proxies and there are Imperial and Gulf State interests, funding) in Sudan are the same. I understand that the regime in pre partitioned Sudan may have committed ethnic cleansing in Darfur but these claims have to be substantiated. 

- we can't equate the horror that is Gaza which is in full view being documented by dying Palestinians themselves with the civil war in Sudan because they are different wars , for the ignorant who can't tell the difference, but for us who have a little bit more knowledge, we should make the differentiations because each part of the formerly colonised world has different dynamics, histories and we can't lump everything together for the sake of a stupid Tweet

- Gaza and Sudan are historically different , both legacies of colonialism but this Genocide is so horrific not only because Palestinians are documenting it in real time their own horrifying suffering but because of all the ways, the West is literally criminalising anyone who dares to speak against Israel 

- This Genocide has been a horror show in full view, it shows us in real time, what happened in the Americas, this Genocide is happening in a literal concentration camp, it started with bombing of hospitals journalists schools , the bombing has been relentless and Gaza has been reduced to rubble, more bombs were dropped here than even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Americans and Europeans are literally aiding the Israelis with arms, money, tech support, they have created the largest number of children amputees, they have bombed churches, mosques, and, deliberately massacred entire families, children, journalists, buried them, shot them, burned them alive, anyone protesting against Israel in the West is being shot at, arrested and thrown out,  and now Palestinians are being starved, emaciated children are begging for food, and again, the best part is that the Palestinians are filming themselves as they die

- Sudan is suffering , a large humanitarian crisis has been created, UAE and US and others are behind the warring factions, it is a country with colonial legacies of divide and rule on ethnic/linguistic lines, they tore up the country in half, they let this happen, but it's still a different hellscape than Gaza and the evil that is Israel and the collective West 

- Many of us are deeply conversant, knowledgeable in the Palestinian struggle since childhoods, since university days, and are much more familiar with the geopolitics than with Sudan , it's not a crime that we are more familiar , not knowing doesn't mean we are racist or care less, I was against existence of Israel for as long as I can remember 

- Care less , or less angry aren't quantifiable, not tweeting and talking about Sudan is a useless charge and, unless it is directed at political movements , political leaders who are well versed in global politics these charges are literally useless

- I don't know any political leader from the Left who will not know the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Africa, everyone invokes the great African leaders and knows their work

- literal racist attitudes are different to not talking enough about a particular crisis 

- outcry over what's happening in another part of the world but ignoring oppression in your own home country is lame and ignorant , too 

- political consciousness is built over time and, it also evolves and changes, my own ideas have changed so much over time, I've gone from saying dumb things like China is a a colonial power to being in awe of the accomplishments of Chinese Communism, I've gone from having fairly liberal sense of feminism to being more grounded, I've started to understand geopolitics way more, I've realigned my ideas on Iran, and so on 

- my seething, boiling rage comes from having worked in the International Development sector, with having worked with Westerners, and, their paternalistic pro Imperial world view, and, their stupidity, their complicity, from having an idea that Western consciousness and sense of self is still so racist, colonial, their whole culture, academia, leadership has been exposed as a psychopathic, savage civilisation 

- I don't separate myself from anyone in the Global South, and would always try to point out imperial hands in DRC, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, we are learning and living and, there's so much we still don't know and are learning

- Gaza is amplified and, everywhere because of the horror that we are witnessing, and, the people in the West , students, unions, activists are protesting , there is nothing hidden , there is no ambiguity about who is committing the Genocide and who is helping them 

- It's only now that UAE's hands are being identified in Sudan and, with all the time I've spent on X , Facebook , I really don't see strong clear voices coming out of Sudan to help us , guide us , it's really simple as that 

- You can't accuse someone of not doing something about something they don't know about 

- I've spent time in Liberia and, are Liberians talking about Sudan? No! Liberian Facebook is lame, it's pathetic, they can't even talk about the Sahel, things happening in West Africa, forget about Sudan or DRC, the Liberian liberals and prominent voices just know United States, they know Trump or Clinton, I've seen proud posts of the homeless being removed in DC, it's all lame, and there's hardly any in fact, zero Leftist voices 

- I would never post or write about something for the sake of , I like to understand, read and, then share what I think  

I looked up 'Sudan' on X and these are a few posts I found and wow : 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Studied Yeats' The Second Coming in high school (ACS, Greece, 1995-1998). 

Image from: here. This page is of Mike Ramsey, a graphic artist and illustrator. Striking! 

Needless to say it went over my head but the powerful language , of course, stays with you. This whole stanza got etched in my memory: 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

So, I was moved to read these words again in this piece in the Lit Hub and, what can I say, this poem makes sense. The writer poignantly explains this poem in the 'light' of the Genocide in Gaza. 

Urge you to read this piece. These are some quotes: 

Gaza, in this ongoing catastrophe, cannot be regarded as a distant territory. It has become the trembling fulcrum upon which the gyre of moral collapse turns.

We now dwell entirely inside the gyre of discord, spinning at terrifying velocity, no longer orbiting a center—because the center no longer holds. Its gravity has collapsed beneath the weight of repetition and moral fatigue. And Gaza, stripped bare of illusion, stands at the raw core of that collapse. It is not a rupture from history’s pattern; it is the place where the pattern lays itself bare.

The falcon no longer hears the falconer. The voice that once steadied its wings has gone silent beneath the rubble. The skies above Gaza are filled with motion, yet movement here offers no direction. Flight remains, but its meaning has inverted. What once carried the promise of return now signals erasure. Surveillance, targeting, disappearance—these are the new verbs of air. In this place, the gyre is no longer allegory. It is the shape of days. It is the rhythm of hunger and silence. It is the line that turns and turns and never finds rest.

Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known. It rewires the body’s understanding of itself, distorting perception, dulling memory, blurring the boundary between emotion and need. When it arrives, it does not knock or whisper—it dismantles.  

In the streets, I see children crouched low to the ground, scraping flour from the dirt. They move slowly, with concentration, as if they are memorizing each grain. Their hands sift dust from food without complaint. There are no cries. No dramatics. Only the steady labor of survival. Hunger has become a shared grammar, a collective motion passed silently from child to child, from hand to mouth. The world once responded to these images with shock. Now it turns away. People have stopped flinching.

I cannot explain to the outside world how ordinary things—the right to desire, to imagine, to plan—no longer arrive to us. The mundane gifts of modernity, so freely available elsewhere, are withheld here with cosmic indifference. We are dizzy, drained, barely human, clinging to the frayed edges of dignity, not because we were born weak, but because we are being emptied by design. 

I did not understand then how suffering repeats itself. It circles back with greater precision each time, more efficient, more stripped of illusion. What we call survival is only another form of dying, a prolonged unraveling of body and thought. The gyre, as Yeats wrote, turns again. It tightens around us with the rhythm of a prophecy we no longer need to interpret.

That is Gaza. It is a sustained dismantling of the soul. We do not vanish all at once. We fall in stages, hunger, disillusionment, dispossession, numbness. And still, we write. Still, we speak. Because to name this is to resist its totality.

 image from here: Georgia's Literature Blog. 

What Yeats foresaw as the Second Coming was never a promise of salvation. It was revelation—a monstrous birth in the dust, a moment when history folds in on itself and delivers not progress, but reckoning. Gaza is that reckoning. Here, the myths that once sustained the imagination of modern civilization—human rights, international law, moral values—shatter under the weight of their own contradictions. Their language fails to touch the ground. Their principles are too delicate to survive impact. They collapse where the bomb lands, where the children fall.

Yeats’s spirals, once dismissed as the wild diagrams of a mystic, now settle over this place like soot. What once looked like esoteric symbols now resemble maps drawn too early. His falcon still circles, but the sky above Gaza offers no axis, no return path, no center to descend toward, only a deepening orbit around an absence no language can fill.

Who knew I had to wait for the Gaza Genocide to understand a poem I read in high school in Athens more than 25 years ago.  

Alaa Alqaisi explains that Yeats ' view of history was cyclical and that time is moves through interlocking gyres. 

History has become such a contested political battleground that there are so many ways to think of the past and, our place in it. Nationalists, Marxists, Post Colonial Thinkers, Creationists, Feminists, and everyone else, have a way to think about history. 

But, if Yeats was seeing history in a cyclical sense with discord and concord pushing away from each other, then, suffering is merely repetitive and, inevitable. Are we meant to merely be witness to more and more advanced forms of cruelty and barbarism? Is that the human condition? 

However we interpret history and, our place in it, we can't accept the spectre , the horror that is the Genocide in Gaza. 

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