One [CounterPunch] Article Made Me Think About African Refugees

 

I have a lot of problems with some of the stuff that Jeffrey St Clair of CounterPunch writes and publishes.  But this is a good article: "Global Complicity: Who Kills in the Congo?"

Rather than delivering prosperity, Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth has produced a “resource curse.” Competition for coltan, cobalt, gold, and diamonds drives violent conflict, forcing miners, often children, into brutal, unsafe conditions while forests are cleared and rivers contaminated in the scramble for profit. In November 2025, dozens were killed when a bridge at a mine collapsed, a tragedy that illustrates how extraction proceeds with total disregard for human life. Because the richest deposits lie in the eastern provinces, these territories have become the epicentre of militarization, where armed groups, militias, and even state forces battle for control while communities are displaced and terrorized.

The environmental destruction deepens the crisis: forests are cleared to reach mineral deposits, mining releases vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen dioxide, and toxic mining waste poisons rivers and lakes, wiping out agriculture and fishing, the very means by which people survive.

The humanitarian consequences are catastrophic. By 2025, there are over 6.9 million people internally displaced, the highest number in Africa, 1.2 million refugees in neighbouring countries, and 28 million people suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, more than 3 million people in eastern Congo are in the emergency phase of hunger. Children as young as five work in dangerous artisanal mines, digging by hand, inhaling toxic dust and risking suffocation or burial in tunnel collapses. Conflict-related sexual violence affects thousands, with almost 40% of sexual violence survivors being children. Armed groups are committing gang rapes, abductions, attacks on hospitals, and unlawful detentions, abuses that may constitute war crimes. This is not simply a story of conflict happening near minerals; it is a system in which minerals fund the conflict, and conflict makes the minerals easier to steal.

It does a good job of identifying the international scumbags who contribute to this nightmare, this infrastructure of horror and misery.  But the facts presented about poisoned waters and soil and violence and desperation got me thinking about the waves of refugees from Africa trying to reach Europe.

Right-wingers in both North America and Europe are constantly bloviating about "hordes" of black and brown people flooding their shores.  They believe that "globalists" are deliberately trying to dilute the white "race" for various nefarious reasons.  They appear completely ignorant of the true causes of refugees, which is often wars and economic catastrophes caused by international capitalism.

When we look at the tent cities in North American cities that are now looked upon as the new normal, with right-wing voters and their politicians blaming the victims of rapacious oligarchy, and we reflect that this is happening in the core countries of the international capitalist system, we have to wonder about how bad things are in the exploited periphery.

So, in the Congo, there's about 7 million internally displaced people. Libya was turned from the highest quality of life in North Africa to a failed state.  There's the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia where tens of millions of people live.  There's the horrors of US-American and Israeli barbarism in West Asia.

I've often mentioned the theory that the right-wing brain is more prone to fight or flight than it is to rational thinking.  But poverty and uncertainty and the social ills caused by these can turn brains into reactive, right-wing versions.  This causes more people in the core countries to respond to refugees with aggression and fear rather than with rational analysis and compassion.

Just one more example of how decaying capitalism creates fascism.

Bondi Beach?

 

I didn't really have anything original to contribute at the time.  I thought that I would wait until more information came out.  But (and correct me if I'm wrong) it turns out that the Jewish organization that hosted the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach was an intensely zionist [read: murderously racist/fascist] outfit, led by a guy, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who gleefully celebrated the mass-slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children.  Which, if our mainstream news organizations weren't garbage outfits filled with cowards, ignoramuses, hypocrites, careerists and other forms of useless scum, would make this whole thing seem almost like poetic justice.

Australia has strict gun laws and the son of the father-son team of shooters was already being monitored by Australian intelligence for his ties to the rabid, fundamentalist Islamic ISIS.  One could wonder whether this was a deliberate failure on the part of the Australian authorities.  But most police, intelligence agencies, etc., are generally filled with right-wing, stupid, boasting, delusional imbeciles.  They are often lazy and careless.  Don't ascribe to malice what can be blamed on stupidity and incompetence.

Would the psychopaths in Mossad have willingly sacrificed their own people for a propaganda coup, as Israel's reputation deservedly drops into the sewer?  It's possible.  But Schlanger was, I've heard, rather high up in importance both in Israel and Australia.  I don't think the zionists are going to reap that much benefit from the death of a fat, racist, pig who giggled about Palestinian toddlers being shot in the head.

Of course our nauseatingly hypocritical shit-for-brains automatons in the West are blathering about how some guys who started associating with ISIS in 2019 were really influenced by anti-genocide protests starting in 2023 when Israel began its deliberate genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. In the diseased brains of scum like Mark Carney, Australian PM Anthony Albanese, and all the other assortments of "leaders" in their "international community" this is just "antisemitism."  And "antisemitism" is the irrational, bigoted hatred of Jewish people simply for being Jewish.

Someone could be a genuine antisemite (like Charlie Kirk, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or John F. Kennedy) and they would therefore more easily find the murderous racism of Israel to be objectionable.  Other people, primarily but not exclusively, on the political left, have no objection to Judaism, and do not criticize Israel except for its murderously racist apartheid colonialism.  And I mention this about Leftists because in my decades of association with leftist causes and groups I hardly ever hear any talk about Israel's behaviour or Israeli-zionist influence in other countries as being based on the inherently evil dispositions of Jewish people and their terrifying, satanic control over world events.

No. Ninety-nine point some number way above five percent of the time, I only hear criticism of the Israeli state for actions that would be condemned no matter what country was doing them.  It's when I go to right-wing sites (as I tend to do more now as centrists and progressives have let their brains turn to shit with regards to Russia-Ukraine) that I read racist drivel about hook-nosed international bankers taking over countries and sexually molesting Christian adolescents because that's just the way they roll.

Nonetheless, the idiotic thesis that protesting genocide is antisemitic if it is Israel committing the genocide, that an organization that cheered and assisted that genocide, including the revolting figure of Rabbi Eli Schlanger were just innocent people who never meant any harm to anyone, that two guys associated with ISIS since 2019 didn't even know that Israel has been conducting a genocide since 2023 and they attacked that Hannukah celebration simply because they hate Jews, ... all of that insane garbage is how our political leaders and our mainstream media have framed this story. 

Interesting Take [s] On "Free Speech"

 

From a right-wing dude who thinks Biden stole the 2020 election and that Trump is genuinely fighting the Deep State, ... a look at sanctions (travel bans) on European bureaucrats and NGO leaders who are censoring US Americans.

Yesterday for the first time the US announced sanctions against European officials associated with the EU’s Digital Services Act and UK’s Online Safety Act, and specifically for their overreach in attempting to censor Americans extraterritorially on US soil.

These censorial attempts were made via a dense web of NGOs which collaborated with various US institutions, including the Biden administration, in “flagging” American content as well as creating ‘black lists’ of American “offenders” earmarked for deplatformization and other forms of illegal free speech suppression.

The whole thing is a farce.  Performed by monsters and morons.  The European Union is run by neo-liberal shitheads.  Trump's administration is fascists and perverts and plutocrats.

The European Union "un-persons" anyone who speaks out against their war mongering and the Trump MAGA hypocrites arrests and imprisons and deports and oppresses anyone who critcizes any number of things, such as Israel, "Christianity", US-American "values", and so on.

Can't say that I'm all worked up over whatever Trump's dispute with the EU is.  Can't say that I long for a return to the times when those assholes were walking hand-in-hand with scum like Biden, Blinken and the Clintons.

Fuck 'em all.  They all flew on Jeffrey Epstein's plane.

Signs O' the Times

 

If I find a link, I'll put it here.  McDonald's is finding that their low-income customers aren't coming in as often.

McDonald’s continues to lose low-income customers - The …

Nov 5, 2025

McDonald’s is working to hold on to its low-income customers. The company said there’s been a double-digit decline in traffic across the industry from lower-earning consumers....

Place for a link to this story.  Airlines are expanding business and other higher-class areas because coach flyers aren't flying as frequently.

Airlines bet big on luxury cabins as economy passengers feel the pinch

And maybe a link will go here.  Las Vegas isn't providing so much free stuff because the traffic from the poors who consume such stuff isn't big enough.  [Okay.  That link blames Trump's fascist border insanity for a drop in international visitors <especially Canadian> but I don't think foreigners are the main demographic in Las Vegas.  Something I read somewhere said that Las Vegas was trying to make their city a much more exclusive destination.  Therefore, start charging the hoi polloi more for stuff.  And to fuck with the employees hired to deal with the former high volume.  Las Vegas consumes too much water anyway.  So all those fired casino workers and the local jobs they supported can all migrate to the next big job-creating center.

What About The Sudan?

 

Israel supporters have, since time immemorial, complained about the "double-standards" their favourite country is subjected to.  Recently I was watching a video from The Grayzone where Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate were discussing Mark Levin refusing to debate Tucker Carlson.  Blumenthal said that it was the same reason zionists wouldn't debate him.  They know they'd lose.  Then they mentioned him debating one zionist who was losing badly and was snickering when Blumenthal mentioned murdered children.  Blumenthal called the zionist out on that and his opponent blurted out that he suffered from Tourettes Syndrome and could Blumenthal please show some sensitivity.

I went to look up that debate and in my [unsuccessful] search I found a discussion on Reddit that turned out to be several years old.  The participants were commenting on some other debate where Blumenthal destroyed his zionist opponent, with one of the non-entities saying that better speakers for the zionist cause were needed because Blumenthal was such an effective public speaker, even though (the non-entity asserted without any attempt at delivering evidence) Blumenthal was a stupid, clueless, out-of-his-depth, antisemite.

The participants then began to blather about how Western critics of Israel refuse to call out the misogyny, the homophobia, the lack of democracy, the religious intolerance, etc., of the Arab Muslim nations that surround (and supposedly threaten) Israel.  That's when I looked around and that this was the reddit/Israel thread.  And it was, as I said, from several years ago.  So, before the actual genocide, but still, after sixty years of colonial occupation and racism and atrocities that would eventually culminate in the genocide.

So, these stupid, self-righteous, self-pitying zionazi fucks were arguing that because they were [allegedly] a Western-style liberal democracy, they could therefore fester and stew in their racist colonialism and allow them to steal, torture, and murder, because some of their victims don't embrace feminism or gay rights.  Critics of the racist, apartheid, nazi state of Israel should instead criticize the Arabs (if they want to claim any sort of moral legitimacy).  That the zio-nazi agenda renders criticisms of Arabs totally hypocritical never dawns on these maniacs.  These genocidal maniacs.

In the midst of their ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, zio-nazis have taken to pointing fingers at the genocidal levels of violence currently taking place in the Sudan and they are, yet again, shrieking about "double-standards."  I've seen this disgusting drivel being argued both online and in meat-space. (Canadians are polarized between those who think that mass-murder of civilians is always wrong and those who think it is justified if groups they've been brainwashed to identify with are doing the killing.) (Aww, who am I kidding.  Most Canadians don't really give a shit one way or the other.  It doesn't directly affect them so "whaddaya gonna do 'eh?")

Anyway, here's a not-bullshit reference to the ongoing genocide in Sudan.  It was one of the not-stupid essays that CounterPunch still provides from time-to-time.  It's written by one Jared Bell (who CounterPunch tells me is a former US diplomat [for what that's worth]) and it's entitled "The 'Othered' Genocide: Sudan's Suffering and the World's Indifference":

While it has not captured the world’s attention like Gaza or Ukraine, Sudan is enduring the largest humanitarian crisis on earth, with over 25 million people needing urgent assistance and nearly nine million displaced as entire cities are reduced to rubble.

In Darfur, the crisis has taken on genocidal dimensions. ...

The RSF and allied militias have carried out mass killings, ethnic cleansing, and widespread sexual violence against non-Arab communities, particularly theMasalit people. In El Fasher, the last major city still under government control, tens of thousands have been killed or displaced as RSF fighters bombard neighborhoods, hospitals, and displacement camps in what human-rights monitors call a campaign of genocide. Satellite imagery shows scorched earth, blood soaked soil, and mass graves, while witnesses recount entire communities wiped out in systematic attacks.

...

Behind this carnage lies a web of regional enablers. The RSF’s war machine is financed through gold-smuggling networks tied to the United Arab Emirates, while weapons and fuel flow through Chad and Libya. The SAF, meanwhile, receives support from Egypt, Iran, and elements of Russia’s Wagner network, turning Sudan into a proxy battleground for regional power and resource control. The result is a conflict sustained not only by local brutality but by international complicity, fueled as much by foreign interests as by domestic hatred.

...

The United Nations warns of famine, and aid groups say Sudan is collapsing faster than any country since Rwanda in 1994, yet the world remains largely silent. I have been drumming my fingers on the table of humanity, waiting for the marches, the videos, and the podcasts from angry pundits to appear as images of mass graves from El Fasher flood social media, but it seems there will not be any. The genocide, suffering, and carnage in Sudan have been “Othered”, treated as something that happens over there, as if African suffering were inevitable rather than a global moral emergency.

Despite the quiet acceptance that “that is just how it is,” no one can truly become numb to Sudan’s horrors. Mothers search for missing children, families walk for days across deserts to reach safety, and refugees flee only to find hunger waiting across the border. This pattern of apathy is tragically familiar. It echoes the wars in Congo and the atrocities in Darfur two decades ago, each met with fleeting outrage and long silences.

...

Nor is the silence confined to the right. Many liberal factions, once vocal about Gaza due to perceived notions of Israel-Palestine’s settler-colonial dynamic, are now quiet as foreign powers fuel a genocide in Sudan for profit and influence. The silence cuts across ideologies, exposing a deeper moral fatigue, a world more comfortable with outrage as performance than accountability as policy.

...

Humanitarian action should never depend on the strategic interests of great powers, yet history shows that it often does. We should have learned this lesson from the Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda, and countless other crises the world ignored because they did not fit political agendas. Silence is complicity, and we have seen where that leads again and again. Sudan is becoming the next horror we will one day mourn, even as it unfolds before our eyes and the world turns away.

This reminds me of a movie I watched a long time ago; "Burma VJ" which was about the "Saffron Revolution" in Burma in 2007.  Basically, fuel prices sky-rocketed in Burma in 2007 and since the government ran the state-owned fuel sector it was the government's fault. And so they protested against the government.  But the government was a military dictatorship, so it was illegal.  But the crackdown was horrendously brutal.  But some people in Burma had managed to get their hands on video cameras.  And video evidence of the brutality got out to the world via smuggled VHS tapes or VHS tapes somehow uploaded to a clandestine domestic internet capability.

But days after this evidence of a humanitarian crisis in Burma got out to the world some activists in this purposefully isolated nation became agitated at the lack of an international response.  If I remember correctly, they're in hiding from the police and they say for their latest video that they don't know why the world isn't doing anything about this government abusing its people.  They especially wonder why the democracy-loving people of the USA isn't coming to their rescue.

But that's not how the world works.  The governments of this world do not intervene in the affairs of other states unless they are going to profit from it.  The information system in the capitalist countries doesn't inform people of anything their political-economic system's leaders don't want them to care about.  The people in the wealthy countries who care about helping the poor and the downtrodden both at home and abroad are a tiny minority who have no impact on their political systems.  Most people don't care because most of the time they're incapable of noticing anything outside their narrow interests of self, family, friends, co-workers.

Still and all, with regards to the genocides in Sudan and Palestine, even the minority that cares about human rights are far less vocal about the former atrocity than they are about the latter.  So what gives?

Well, there's a number of factors at play.  Israel's abuse of the Palestinians has been a seven-decade story.  Israel's status as a close ally of the leadership classes in the West means that there is more coverage of events there in the news media.  (This news coverage has been consistently slanted to Israel's favour but Israel's behaviour has been so consistently evil that all the spin in the world can't mask it for any informed, non-racist person.)  So people know about it and they have had time to build opposition to it.  The fact that our governments champion Israel and have closely supported its evil makes it that much more of the responsibility of activists to condemn and try to resist this policy.  

Sudan is a very poor country that is generally ignored by our news media.  It is not a place where the Canadian government has much interaction with.  Apparently there are about 20,000 people in Canadian of Sudanese ancestry.  Palestinians in Canada are 44,000.  Having met people from Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in Canada who have expressed their opposition to Israel's abuse of the Palestinians, I feel it relevant to point out that the Arab-Canadian population is 690,000.  So, all these people have to have some activists among them as well as something of a personal stake in the matter.

Add to this the Jewish people in the West who utterly reject Israel's efforts to conflate Judaism with support for zionism.  Many Jewish people, coming from a tradition of resisting Christian persecution in Europe and of advocating for universal human rights, are vocal and active about opposing Israeli apartheid.  That these crimes are done ostensibly in their name gives them a reason to focus on the topic.

So, those are some reasons why we're less noisy about the genocide in Sudan.  And, it also needs to be said that all of this activism from all of these groups has been barely able to restrain our governments' sickeningly enthusiastic support for Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.  It might actually be easier to get our governments to stop shipping weapons to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) the main supporter of the genociders in Sudan.  And, certainly, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.  We can email our politicians and hold rallies for both of these topics.  And we would be just as ineffectual.

But I'd like to close by quoting from two sources who push back against the self-serving cynicism and hypocrisy of zionist assholes trying to deflect from their own degenerate brutality by pointing to the holocaust in Sudan.

First up is from a blog I discovered maybe a year or two ago; "Do Not Panic!" from one "Nate Bear."  This entry is entitled "The Shameless Ghouls Weaponising Sudan For Israel."

After shilling for genocide, losing every argument for the past two years and watching the reputation of their precious little rape colony eat shit, Zionists have turned their attention to another genocide to obscure the stains of their own.

If you haven’t been following, high profile Zionist commentators and

 propagandists have flooded social media this week with tweets, articles and memes about the genocide in Sudan and the lack of protests compared with the genocide of Gaza. People who denied genocide for two years have suddenly become very animated by genocide.

The implicit and often explicit message of their posts and articles is that pro-Palestine people were antisemites all along because if they really cared about human suffering they’d be protesting the genocide in Sudan like they protested the genocide in Gaza.

...

The first thing to say is that making the comparison between Sudan and Gaza actually undermines two years of depraved genocide denial because it’s the first time many have even alluded to the mass killing of civilians in Gaza. As most of them are as thick as mince, it’s not clear they understand they incriminate themselves with implicit comparisons.

...

Those attempting to use the suffering of the Sudanese as a cudgel to beat pro-Palestine protestors never mention that the UAE is the primary financial backer of the Rapid Support Forces, because these Zionist propagandists are nothing if not scribes for the imperial order. And the UAE is a critical component of Zionist power in the Middle East.

...

It is all a grotesque spectacle, breath-taking in its cynicism. The truth as we know is that all of those using Sudan as a cudgel to try and win online points wouldn’t have a fucking word to say about the suffering of the Sudanese if their favourite apartheid torture outpost had been able to do a genocide in peace. These people don’t give a fuck about Sudan. They are cynically abusing human suffering and mass death to try and salvage the reputation of Israel by manufacturing a non-existent double standard and they are doing it because they know they’ve lost the argument.

Indeed.

Next is the incisive Caitlin Johnstone: "Notice Which Genocides You Are And Are Not Allowed To Oppose":

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. Many westerners have been paying special attention to Gaza because of how intimately there own governments are involved in this particular genocide. This is not to say that Sudanese lives matter less than Palestinian lives or that the genocide in Sudan doesn’t need our attention. It is only to note the priority that Israel’s genocidal atrocities have been given in the eyes of the empire.

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: I have a special responsibility to oppose the crimes my circumstances make me more complicit in.

t 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 Gaza, but it’s also about saving ourselves. Saving our free speech. Saving our political systems. Saving our hearts. Saving our minds. Saving our soul.

And so, it's pretty clear that zionists and other assorted idiots (who are themselves not doing anything about Sudan) are only trying to deflect from the genocide (the racist mass murder of an entire people) that they SUPPORT.  I'm pretty sure that 99.9996% of those of us who are opposed to the genocide of the Palestinians are also opposed to the mass slaughter of innocents in Sudan.  As opposed to the zio-nazis who support one or BOTH of the genocides under discussion.