Caitlin Johnstone – Notice Which Genocides You Are And Are Not Allowed To Oppose

The West’s hypocrisy is not even subtle

Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. Her political writings can be found on Medium. Articles are re-posted from Caitlins Newsletter

Cross-posted from Caitlin’s website

Feature image via Diane Krauthamer (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Do you notice how nobody’s losing their jobs or getting deported for criticizing the genocidal atrocities in Sudan?

How mainstream western politicians are able to call out the RSF and the UAE without having their careers nuked by high-powered lobby groups?

How the western media aren’t churning out op-eds concern trolling about the possibility that anyone who opposes the el-Fasher massacres is actually a closet Nazi?

How opposition to mass murder in Darfur isn’t being algorithmically hidden by Silicon Valley plutocrats?

How anyone who posts footage of an RSF war crime online isn’t being swarmed by an army of full-time trolls making excuses justifying the atrocities and accusing those who denounce them of being hateful bigots?

How western governments and institutions aren’t doing everything they can to stomp out all speech that is critical of this particular humanitarian crisis?

That’s the difference, right there. That’s why many westerners have been paying special attention to Gaza.

For the last two years anyone who publicly criticized Israel’s genocidal abuses in the Gaza Strip would be confronted by hasbarists saying “Why are you paying so much attention to Gaza instead of Sudan? You must just HATE JEWS!!”

No, dipshit, I’m paying more attention to Gaza because my government isn’t trying to make it illegal for me to criticize the RSF. Every major western institution isn’t dedicated to facilitating genocide in Sudan and crushing all speech which opposes it. My rulers aren’t backing a genocide in Sudan and commanding me to support it.

The ongoing nightmare in Sudan is largely a product of the abuses of the western empire. The UAE is an imperial client state who the US and its allies recently supported in its years-long genocidal war on Yemen in partnership with Saudi Arabia. There are all kinds of threads you can trace back to western allies and partners in this genocide, as is the case for most of the worst things that happen in our world these days.

But it’s clearly different. Clearly. The evidence for this is in the extent to which western institutions have been protecting the genocide in Gaza versus the genocide in Sudan. Israel’s abuses are much more intimately interwoven into the guts of the imperial machine than those of the RSF, who Washington will take a blowtorch to the instant it becomes geopolitically advantageous.

Israel’s abuses are completely inseparable and indistinct from the abuses of my own government. I’ve been focusing more on Gaza than on Sudan for the same reason I’d be more concerned if I knew my husband was murdering hitch hikers than I would be about reports of a serial killer in Brazil.

It is right and good that the world is turning against the UAE, opposing western backing for that malignant state, and standing in firm opposition to what is happening in Sudan. But the complete lack of institutional resistance we’ve been seeing to this opposition shows that this genocide is much less dear to the foul little heart of the empire than the genocide in Gaza.

Opposing the genocide in Sudan is about saving Sudan. Opposing the genocide in Gaza is about saving ourselves. Saving our free speech. Saving our political systems. Saving our hearts. Saving our minds. Saving our soul.

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