by Eugene Walker

On one level the murderous, horrendous reality in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, seem separate, unrelated. But they are in fact closely related and expose the indifference of many major countries that could take concrete actions to halt these atrocities. Indeed, some of the world’s powers actively participated in murder, war crimes and even genocide. Consider:

Opposite factions war in Congo since 1996. Photo: ZUMA Press, CC0 1.0

Democratic Republic of the Congo: The ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country has cost approximately six million mostly civilian lives from war, malnutrition and disease since 1996.

Ukraine: By early 2025, estimates suggest nearly 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian military personnel had been killed or wounded. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died by Russian bombs purposefully aimed at them.

Gaza: More than 65,000 Gazans “officially” have died, but probably more than 100,000 are dead, since Israel’s genocidal war following Hamas’ terrorist attack. The Israeli invasion was made possible by the U.S. supplying most of the weapons.

Sudan: In the past two years, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed; millions displaced, rape as a weapon of war, mass starvation, genocide in Darfur. This is not a civil war, but a war by both sides upon the Sudanese masses.

Rio de Janeiro: Just in the last week of October, a mass armed police invasion of a poor Rio neighborhood murdered more than a hundred residents in a “war” against drug dealers. Not for the first time have the police committed such an armed invasion.

U.S. troops in the Caribbean. Photo: Chris Weissenbaum, CC BY 3.0 NZ

Venezuela: The U.S. military has killed more than 60 people in attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific near Central America since September. The attacks on non-military targets that pose no threat are illegal under international and U.S. law. President Donald Trump is building up assault forces in the Caribbean with an apparent aim to start a war on Venezuela.

In truth, there is much more than “indifference” to these crimes against humanity. And it is not enough to point out that several of the world’s powers and leaders have been deeply implicated in most of these atrocities. When is there going to be serious discussion and a reckoning with the fact that it is our capitalist system, in both private and state forms, with its classist, sexist, racist practices, that allowed mass murder, rape and actual genocide to become “normalized”? That needs to be analyzed and overthrown if we are to have truly new human beginnings.