Sudan and Israel held in the balance

On the value of human life

There’s a new hasbara argument out and it’s a dramatic step up on the regular material of the past two years. Now, to be pedantic about it, ‘you should support Israel because chestnuts are purple’ would actually be a pretty substantial improvement on most of the stuff you hear, but this argument is maybe OK even graded on a normal curve. Basically it goes like this, ‘look at some people whose name you can’t remember killing thousands of people whose name you also can’t remember in Sudan, and, also look, the Left that supposedly cares so much about civilians in Gaza doesn’t even notice. Hypocrites much?’.

Now, this argument is merely OK for a few reasons. The first is that the perpetrators of atrocities, the somewhat absurdly named Rapid Support Forces (henceforth RSF), are doing so in the context of an armed rebellion against the government of Sudan. They are currently under sanctions from the UN Security Council, the EU, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Republican candidates for Presidency certainly do not compete with each other to demonstrate their commitment to the special relationship with the RSF. Precisely no-one in the world has ever gone on TV to defend the proposition that the RSF is the world’s most moral army. That is to say that what all but the most extreme anti-Israel protestors want to happen to Israel is where the RSF already is. If Israel implodes and Zionism survives in the form of a paramilitary fighting brutally for control of gold mines and trades routes, then we’ll be able to draw a direct comparison.

The second is that the main supplier of military equipment to the RSF since its creation in 2013 as an incorporation of the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide a decade before has been the UAE, with whom Israel has the closest thing to a genuinely amicable relationship in the region. The third, not unrelated, reason is that it has been substantially through the RSF that Israel has recently pursued the goal of improved relations with Sudan. The head of the RSF, Hemedti, is what is known as a pragmatist, that is to say he uses Arab-nationalism, Islam and whatever else might be to hand in pursuit of gaining control over rents for himself and his clan. Thus, in contrast to the strict anti-Zionism of the regime up until its collapse in 2019, he has shown willingness to make overtures to Israel if it helps with military procurement. As far as I can tell, all of the outreach was before the eruption of recent fighting in April 2023 (if only because Israel has been busy with other stuff for most of that period), but it was certainly a long time after well documented and appalling Janjaweed atrocities in the Darfur genocide. I have not been able to find any evidence of Israeli government actions taken against the RSF over the past two years. So, before hasbarists demand of leftist activists that they take up the cause of the embattled peoples of eastern and central Sudan, they might first demand it of the Light Unto the Nations which sits in Jerusalem.

There is, however, a more brooding, dark version of this argument. It’s not that people should care about Sudan, it’s that they shouldn’t. Life is a battle between races and nations, with the strongest and most competent justly enjoying the fruits of the spoils. The whole idea of caring whether a foreign people is getting slaughtered is a con, a trick employed by liberals to practice class warfare or some such. We must embrace a world where alliances are made based upon what is real - resources, manpower, equipment, technology - and not on effeminate, deceptive moral pettifogging. That’s a sombre vision and then some. Is it the message Judaism has to offer the world? Seems rash to say so, but you wanted to go there, so let’s go there. We’re going dark, and we’re going deep.

It’s not psychologically feasible to care about Africa

Africa is a big place, and it’s an awful place. I’m not saying there aren’t spots of joy and beauty to be found, but I am saying that you’re too distracted to see them by all the endless incredible squalor. Lagos has an estimated population of 21 million, and it grows by 3-4% a year. About 70% of that is slums. And the slums grow so fast that they literally ran out of land and had to start building them on water. Here’s the ‘Venice of Africa’:

?

A decade ago I watched the following documentary about Liberia. I couldn’t finish it, but it still haunts me:

You get the point. There’s not 1 or 2 things in Africa that are too awful to bear contemplation; there’s not even 1 or 2 million. And nothing you can do is anything more than a drop in the bucket. There’s only one solution: let Bill Gates put contraceptives in their vaccines until there’s only 100 million left, and then just give them all the stuff they need for free, and shower them with messages imploring them not to kill each other. But we can’t do that because all the conspiracy tards won’t let us. Something about a slippery slope. So it’s just going to get worse and worse quantitatively and you can’t possibly let it faze you, even a bit, because once you allot any degree of emotional space to African suffering, simple arithmetic means you will spend every waking second of the rest of your life possessed by uncontrollable grief. So you don’t.

Sudan, for its part, is the Africa of Africa, rivalled only by the Congo. The killing just swims around and around in circles long beyond what you can keep track of. Originally, from 1955-2005, it seemed to have a rationale. It was Muslim Arabs in power vs. Black Christians out of it. Then when that finally ended with the South Sudanese achieving independence so they could start slaughtering each other, a new division emerged. This time both sides were Muslims, but one was still the government, and the other rebels. Now, though, officially, the RSF are rebelling against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), but attacking various different ethnic groups who are not affiliated with the SAF in any way, while the SAF either does nothing to help, or takes part itself. The victims are Muslims, so there’s no religion angle, which mean we turn to race to understand what is going on. The RSF are Arabs, Arabs who look like this:

Umm.

Their Black victims look like this:

Maybe there’s a difference, I don’t know, but you’d have to be a lot more racist than this blog to know what it was. Spend more time on EthnoGuessr. So, apparently, the real distinction is between between pastoralists and agriculturalists, but, like, hello, this is 2025. You don’t kill people because of their occupation anymore.

Look, this is honestly getting kind of gross. What’s going on there is awful. There’s nothing funny about it. But what I’m trying to get across is that it’s all just too … much. I can’t say that trying to care doesn’t make you a better person; obviously it does, but you just probably won’t succeed.

You’re probably saying that’s all obvious, though, when are we going to get to the dark bit? Right now, but we are going to need to take a detour through a famous article by Richard Hanania.

Palestinians are ‘White enough’ where it counts