By Ali Bordbar Jahantighi, European Conservative.
For the progressive West, suffering acquires meaning only when it can be traced to guilt. Without that connection, empathy falters.
In the city of Al-Fashir, Sudan, Islamists have killed in such numbers that the blood is visible in satellite images. A real genocide. Do you know Al-Fashir? Do you know where it is and how long this tragedy has been unfolding?
For months, this ancient city has been under siege. Entire neighborhoods have been erased, villages burned to the ground, and tens of thousands starved to death in the desert. The United Nations estimates that nearly 25 million Sudanese face acute hunger, and over half a million children have already died in a man-made famine born of war. Islamist militias, armed with Iranian drones, Turkish weapons, and a moral certainty that calls itself divine, have turned Sudan’s civil war into a theater of extermination. Some soldiers, caught on camera, were seen eating the hearts of their victims. It is a horror that defies comparison—not primitive but absolute; not ancient but modern.
And yet, the moral noise of the world remains eerily quiet. No great demonstrations in New York or London, no cries from ‘anti-colonial’ academics or human rights activists, not even the hollow echoes of hashtags. Only silence, dense and deliberate, a silence of self-protection rather than ignorance.
The Left’s aesthetic of silence
This kind of silence is not the absence of awareness; it is a defense mechanism. The modern Left has built its self-image as the guardian of moral consciousness, the eternal voice against domination and oppression. But Sudan’s agony does not fit this image. There is no ‘white oppressor’ to condemn, no colonial villain to resurrect. The perpetrators are Islamists, brown, African, and ideologically positioned as victims of the West. The moral geometry collapses, and so the Left retreats into quiet.