Selective Solidarity is Complacency

Six hundred and eighty-eight days of genocide, atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation against Palestinian civilians. Sixty-two thousand Palestinians were killed, and over ninety percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced. One hospital is left operating at full capacity, while documented attacks on journalism, healthcare and sovereignty have climbed since October 7th, 2023 and continue to overwhelm Gaza’s health system. You see that because, after nearly eight decades of violence, Palestinian resilience and suffering have finally forced their way onto your feed.

Ahmed el-Sheikh Eid, seven, who shows signs of malnutrition, sits in his family tent at a camp for displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi. [Abdel Kareem Hana/AP Photo]

But beyond Gaza, the silence is deafening. The algorithm stops short. Sudan and Congo, and countless others, vanish into erasure, their genocides unfolding without witness, their people abandoned to imperialist violence.

Wild boiled leaves are served to orphaned children at the Bruam IDP Camp in South Kordofan, Sudan, last year. [Thomas Mukoya / Reuters file]

Sudan: A Silenced Genocide

Sudan has been suffering through a silent genocide since April 15th, 2023, when war broke out between the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and the RSF (Rapid Support Forces). This latest chapter in a cycle of imperialist-fuelled unrest has displaced nearly 13 million people, left over half of Sudan’s population facing acute starvation, and uprooted five million children. Ninety percent of school-age children are unable to access education, and, similarly to the crisis in Palestine, hospitals are collapsing, sexual violence is surging, and Sudan bears the weight of the world’s largest child displacement crisis and a catastrophic famine.

The violence has engulfed the entire country in a civil war and burdened citizens with the consequences of centuries of colonialism and neglect. Still, Darfur, a region of western Sudan nearly the size of Spain, has borne the worst of it. This is not new for the citizens living in this war-torn area: they have lived this nightmare before. Between 2003 and 2008, over 300,000 lives were taken and 2.7 million were displaced due to the government-sanctioned campaign of terror carried out by the Arab militia, Janjaweed. Today, Janjaweed has since been reborn as the RSF, perpetuating the same cycle of genocidal violence.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: A War For Minerals and Survival

The Democratic Republic of Congo has long suffered under resource exploitation, neocolonial influence, and the legacies of colonialism. The country has an estimated $24 trillion dollar fortune in minerals and resources. Still, it remains among the five poorest nations in the world, with an estimated 74 percent of Congolese people living in extreme poverty. The DRC has been afflicted by war since 1996, and over the past three decades, approximately six million people have died, seven million have been internally displaced, and over twenty-three million are suffering from food insecurity as a result of the turmoil, with armed groups also using sexual violence tied to conflict minerals as a weapon of war.

The M23, a rebel group based in eastern DRC that initially formed in 2012 under the guise of defending the rights of Congolese Tutsis and other minorities, has since sought control over the territory and resources of North Kivu. In 2025, the M23 stormed Goma with the alleged support of Rwanda and Uganda. The assault was horrific, resulting in the death of 900 to 2,000 people before a ceasefire was declared, deepening tensions between the DRC and Rwanda.

In Bulengo camp, DRC, about 400 people with disabilities have organized a group and elected representatives. [Photo: Concern Worldwide]

Selective Solidarity Is Not Solidarity

Proximity to Western power determines whose humanity is legible, whose death is shareable, whose tears count, and whose survival is negotiable. That is why some atrocities dominate timelines while others are buried in silence. It has nothing to do with the scale of suffering; it has everything to do with which lives Western media and governments deem visible. What trends are not a reflection of justice; it’s a mirror of society’s appetite and our own media diets.

When politics are curated by virality, empathy becomes conditional. It hinges on shock value and spectacle. Outrage turns into desensitized content, endlessly consumed but rarely transformed into action. That is how genocide gets reduced to a headline instead of becoming a line in the sand, a line that no decent society should ever allow to be crossed.

If I can emphasize one point above all: advocacy that widens only for Gaza while excluding Sudan and Congo is not a moral awakening. It is performativity, a byproduct of algorithmic conditioning. Real solidarity refuses to obey those limits. It stands unyielding, screaming in the face of hierarchies of suffering and those who sustain them. It endures past the walls created by algorithms because, in the wake of injustice, nothing less is enough.

The Manufactured Comfort of Silence

Silence does not emerge independently; it is engineered. It is the product of platforms that reward spectacle over substance, of newsrooms and algorithms that translate “audience interest” into a license for neglect, and of an imperial common sense that codes African suffering as background noise and Palestinian survival as a “controversial question” to be debated. Silence is not, and has never been, neutral. Silence is violence.

Sudan’s thirteen million displaced, Congo’s six million dead, Gaza’s sixty thousand killed, numbers that should be shattering timelines and dominating media. Instead, they are buried, spoken quietly if at all. Not because they are less catastrophic, but because catastrophe without geopolitical convenience is dismissed as static: too complex to explain, too far to empathize with, too Black to amplify.

This message is etched into society blatantly and subliminally, repeated until it feels natural, almost inevitable. It is not ignorance but omission, orchestrated through centuries of imperial choreography. The invisibility of Sudan and Congo is not a failure of information; it is the success of a system designed to delegitimize the pain of some to elevate the power of others. A system built to decide who has value in a white world, where proximity to whiteness determines desirability and desirability determines whose survival is negotiable, and whose death can be turned into profit.

The Architecture of Disposability

Sudan’s displacement, Congo’s commodified chaos, and Palestine’s dispossession are not isolated tragedies. They are patterned fractures of a single global order that treat specific populations as endlessly usable and disposable. The names shift, Janjaweed mutates into RSF, militias are rebranded as “proxies", sieges are sanitized as “security”, but the logic holds steady: extract, erase, abandon. Violence does not fade; it's repackaged.

This is the architecture of disposability. Genocide becomes a “controversial conflict”. Pillage and devastation are softened into “trade”. Starvation is dismissed as “instability”. Language becomes the mask desensitizing societies, laundering atrocity, and making the unbearable palatable. What appears as chaos is, in truth, the choreography of empire: colonialism’s capitalist engine, still running, still consuming lives.

This Is Not a Competition, It Is a Continuum

Palestine sparked your concern for human rights; Sudan and Congo must sustain it. These countries and many more are bleeding, demanding your attention not to stop one crisis. To be very clear, this is not, and will never be, about weighing which cause is more deserving, nor is it about diverting your gaze from Palestine. It's about broadening it.

The point is to implore you to see the root cause of these global and widespread atrocities: the recurring pattern of imperial extraction, racial hierarchy, and disposable lives. Without action and advocacy, naming and dismantling these systems, without fighting for peace, security and equity, the violence will never end. None of us is free while these oppressive structures stand, because when your solidarity ends where the algorithm stops, it is not solidarity; it is complacency.

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Where We Go Next

Part Two will trace the empire’s bloodstream, from Darfur to Janjaweed to RSF, Leopold’s lash to cobalt and coltan, and “strategic partnerships” bleeding into proxy wars and genocides. It will foster an understanding of the machinery of harm for what it is and encourage us all to stop mistaking symptoms for the disease.