In the late 2000s Britain’s Daily Mail was described as Middle England’s newspaper. Having once been accused of flirting with fascism, explored in 2017’s Mail Men by Adrian Addison, this wasn’t meant to be flattering; its readers were Home County boomers, reasonably-to-impressively prosperous, with political views that stepped, as opposed to edged, rightwards of the centre.

As cities such as London and Manchester volunteered to multiculturalism, the regions from where the Daily Mail drew its readership stayed; these were people who watched British Broadcasting Corporation sitcoms, shopped at Waitrose or Next, listened to the Spice Girls (or Neil Diamond) and generally worked in the upper middle management tiers if they weren’t entrepreneurs. Many had inherited the 1980s opportunity instinct courtesy of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization drive and whilst they weren’t particularly interested in the consequences of the forces unleashed during this era – there was money to be made, children to be educated – and interesting wine varieties emerging from places like New Zealand and Argentina that needed to be drunk.

The Daily Mail, sensing this identity emerging, styled an editorial policy that accentuated its place in the country, gave it what it wanted to hear and emphasised its importance as one feature of prosperity.

It tailored its business section and promoted its horoscope page on its cover yet maintained its allegiance to the national interest of football. It didn’t possess the smut of other tabloids in items like Page 3 (The Sun) which was possibly a reflection of its most successful editor to date, Paul Dacre.

Normal circumstances

Under normal circumstances it would be odd to associate the Daily Mail with Sudan from a news perspective. But last week, the newspaper – or its YouTube channel (which has more subscribers than the newspaper’s average print run of 687 000 and its website membership of 250 000 combined) decided to produce a video explainer on the war and there the presenter, surrounded by state-of-the-art gadgetry, claimed that the region suffers violent conflict – now and in the past (Darfur, mid-2000s) – because of: “climate change”.

This is a phenomenal claim. It's extraordinary. It's akin to Jacob Zuma circa December 2015 firing his finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, then arriving late to address a group of black executives in Sandton (including Patrice Motsepe) and remarking, amongst some other geographical misinterpretations about rivers and quarters, that Saul of Tarsus was actually a black fellow, who came from Sudan and was known affectionately as “uPaul”.

Indeed, Sudan has suffered droughts, but droughts do not qualify as “climate change”, so finding any information to support this claim is like using Google Earth to identify the presence of a child’s lost balloon. It's impossible.

You could argue with more conviction that the present conditions are more related to the country’s colonial management in the 1950s, but criticism of that era isn’t especially popular in Middle England – so the assumption is that readers and viewers will settle for something unquantifiable, a term so overindulged that its lost all sense of practicality or weight.

Cold blood

Earlier in the week videos of a particularly cold-blooded execution flooded social media platforms. Most troubling was the ease at which it happened: a line of black men were sat on the ground before officials from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the rebranded Janjaweed militia who terrorised Darfur previously.

One official, ostensibly a Muslim, raises his AK-47 and starts firing – pop, pop then more rapid succession – pop-pop-pop. The camera then captures the men folding over onto each other still seated. Their hopelessness, coupled to the hollow sound of their end is a haunting spectacle – even by today’s hyper-accessible violence standard. The officials make neither an effort to disguise themselves nor demonstrate any outwardly intimidating behaviour indicating that the war-est of war crimes has just occurred, so the execution appears routine, perhaps not the first of the day, almost certainly not the last of the war.

While television channels blur the actual murder in their broadcasts, outrage is largely muted, possibly because outrage is still the preserve of pro-Palestinian groups – perhaps there just isn’t enough to go around at the moment, especially when you’re talking persecuted, impoverished black Africans.

Few know that in the background the United Arab Emirates who have supported the RSF, is the subject of “complicity in genocide”; in May the International Courts of Justice issued an order described as “an exercise in restraint”, if not a vortex of legalese and technicalities absent the kind of clarity evident in other inquiries. So perhaps the question should shift from reach from the likes of the Daily Mail to where tolerance usurps origin – and why.

Diminished

One view is that diminished outrage here can be linked to the rise of the unofficial Islamo-left elsewhere. This can be found in cities – in New York, where Zohran Mamdani looks a shoo-in for Mayor, but also in London and Paris.

This peculiar, convenient if evidently unsustainable, arrangement is positioned at two of humanity’s fault lines - religion and ideology – and is being twisted and crunched to incorporate both along with their respective excesses. This explains the impunity with which the RSF’s leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti, behaves.

Seizing control of the country’s gold mines has been a profitable exercise for the man known as the butcher of Darfur, allowing his children to boast that their family is Africa’s richest (the warlord’s family is said to reside in Dubai). By all accounts he is a psychopathic monster hellbent on total power, who will do anything to achieve it.

But he’s also more. By today’s measurements he is a Muslim man of the “global south”, and these forces join to insulate him from scrutiny and condemnation others aren’t lucky enough to evade – so he isn’t the subject of death protest, or smeared as a tyrannical supremacist pig by The New York Times.

The obstacle of identity privilege he presents affords him rare, enviable agency, which silences most, and leaves those once positioned as opposition to such extremes talking about absolute rubbish, like climate change.