The World’s Silence and the Anthem of the Forsaken
8 December 2025
The Fourth Despatch
This is the fourth and culminating despatch in a series that began with an attempt to find a new pattern for a cursed landscape. In “A New Pattern for a Cursed Landscape,” “The Song of the Oppressor,” and “The Arab World’s Sacred Lies,” I dedicated myself to the intellectual demolition of the myths that sustain the Arab Imperium. Those essays were an act of controlled demolition, clearing the rubble of sanctimonious victimhood to expose the imperial architecture beneath. They were an exercise in negation, in bearing witness to a lie. This article, however, will bear witness to a new, defiant truth emerging from that rubble.
For years, the peoples of the Middle East who are not Arab have been haunted by the question posed in Julia Boutros’s fraudulent anthem: “Where are the millions?” It was always a rhetorical cudgel, designed to enforce a false unity. But now, a new question haunts the Kurds, the Yazidis, The Druze, and others who have been left to the wolves. It is no longer about where the Arabs are, but where, in heaven’s name, is the world? Into the silence that greets this question, two cultural artefacts have emerged. The first is a raw cry of indictment against global indifference. The second, an anthem forged in the fires of the Syrian conflict, is a political event that offers a searing answer. This is the story of a new solidarity being forged in the crucible of that indifference, a song sung not to the world, but between its forsaken.
An Indictment of the Void
The defining condition of the Kurdish struggle has always been betrayal, but the silence that surrounds it today is of a different quality. It is not a passive absence of noise but an active political choice, a deafening consensus of indifference. It is the logical and pathetic continuation of the Western moral cowardice I have previously analysed: the utilitarian calculus that will always sacrifice a friend to appease a mob. Into this silence, a new, song cuts like a shard of glass, giving voice to the raw testimony of abandonment. Its lyrics are not poetry; they are a charge sheet.
The song recounts the recent past with the clarity of a fresh wound. It speaks of the moment “when the black flag crawled and the world froze,” a time when the West was perfectly happy to watch as Kurdish men and women bled to halt a darkness of the world’s making. It recalls how “nations watched you held the line,” paying for global security with the lives of their sons and daughters. It memorialises “10,000 souls under nameless skies yet no headline carried their cries.”
This is not a lament; it is a clinical dissection of geopolitical hypocrisy. The song skewers the fleeting nature of alliances built on convenience, the cynical praise offered by powers who needed a proxy army on the cheap.
“they praised your courage when they needed you... but when the deals changed they changed too.”
This is the “Sheriff counter example” set to music. In the first essay of this series, I described the utilitarian sheriff who, to ensure the “greatest good for the greatest number,” hands an innocent man over to a rioting mob. The Kurds, having fought the world’s war against ISIS, are that innocent soul. The West, desperate to avoid further conflict and appease regional aggressors, is the sheriff. The deals have changed, and the courageous ally has been sacrificed.
The song culminates not in a plea for help, but in a haunting, echoing indictment that hangs in the air long after the music fades. It is a question that demands no answer because the answer is already known.
“where is the world now where are the voices loud... now silence is the only sound.”
This profound and damning silence from the world creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum pours the hollow, self-serving noise that has dominated the region for decades—the anthem of the very empire that created the conditions for this slaughter.
The Echoes of Empire
To fully comprehend the revolutionary nature of the solidarity now being forged, one must first recall the fraudulent anthem of empire it seeks to replace. One must understand the dominant cultural narrative that has for so long drowned out the voices of the indigenous and the oppressed. Before we can appreciate the song of the forsaken, we must remember the song of the oppressor and the brutal honesty of its parody.
I have written before of Julia Boutros’s pan-Arab anthem, “Where Are the Millions?” It is the liturgical music for an imperial death cult, a grand performance of righteous rage staged, with no sense of irony, under the watchful eye of a dictator like Muammar Qaddafi. It is a song that demands unity against external enemies while providing the emotional cover for the relentless persecution of internal ones.
But culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Into the space between the anthem’s sanctimony and the reality of Arab nationalist brutality, a parody emerged from the digital ether. “Where are the Pimps?” it screamed, replacing the original’s call for honour with a savage confession of shame. Using the crudest language imaginable, it flung the empire’s crimes back in its face. It was the testimony of the silenced, and its most damning lines were not insults but statements of fact:
“We killed, chased away, displaced more than the sons of Hitler.”
And who were the victims of this displacement and murder? The parody is explicit, naming the peoples the original anthem so conveniently ignores. It speaks a truth that exposes the entire pan-Arab project as a lie.
“The red blood of the Kurd is cheap, like pomegranate juice.”
This cultural clash—between the polished anthem of imperial grievance and the profane parody of its victims—reveals the moral vacuum at the heart of the “Arab Imperium.” It is a political project that can only preach unity against the Israeli or the Westerner while committing genocide against the Kurds, the Amazighs, the Assyrians, and the Yazidis. Into this landscape of global silence and imperial lies, a new and authentic voice has just emerged, turning away from the world’s void and answering the empire’s fraud not with a question, but with a declaration.
The Dawn of Rojava
Osama Attar’s “Rojava | فجر روج آفا” is more than a song; it is a political and cultural event of profound significance. It is a cinematic war anthem whose importance lies not only in its defiant message but in its very origin: an act of solidarity between two of the Arab Imperium’s most subjugated peoples. This is a tribute dedicated from the Druze of Suwayda in southern Syria to the Kurds of Rojava in the north. It is a bridge of voices built across the ruins of the Ba‘thist state.
Its lyrics are the answer to the abandonment detailed in the first song. It turns its back on the silent world and forges a new pact. Where the empire preaches a fraudulent, racialised unity, the song declares an authentic, civic one:
“From Suwayda to the north, our hearts beat as one.”
It does not appeal to a mythical Arab delusion but honours the real fighters who confronted the darkness while others postured. The anthem celebrates the very forces the regional powers seek to crush, paying tribute to the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG):
“Oh YPJ, oh swords of light, you illuminate the dark.”
The central theme of the song is the “red dawn,” a powerful image of hope and renewal. Crucially, this is not a dawn granted by external saviours or promised by false prophets. It is a dawn painted by the “blood of the martyrs,” a future earned through sacrifice. It is a symbol not of lament, but of unbreakable defiance. This is not a cry for help; it is a declaration of intent. It is a statement that a new creed is being written in the north of Syria, a creed that finds its modern echo in this anthem but its historical roots in an older, even more profound act of defiance.
An Echo of the Barzanis
The solidarity expressed in Osama Attar’s anthem is not a fleeting emotional response to a crisis. It is the modern manifestation of a historical creed, a recurring pattern of indigenous solidarity that stands in total opposition to the empire’s creed of dehumanisation. Its precedent was written in blood during the Anfal genocide, in the final, defiant act of the Christian villagers of Bedyal.
As I documented earlier, these Christians, who lived as Barzanis in every civic and cultural sense, were rounded up for extermination alongside their Muslim Kurdish neighbours. At the precipice of the mass grave, an officer of Saddam’s regime offered them a cynical escape. He told them that as Christians, they were not the targets of the order. All they had to do was renounce their community and walk away. They refused. Their response is one of the most profound statements of communal fidelity ever uttered:
“No, we are Barzanis. Our life and our death are with the Barzanis.”
They chose truth over biology, community over survival, and their remains were later found among the martyrs. This historical sacrifice and the modern artistic declaration from Suwayda—“From Suwayda to the north, our hearts beat as one”—are two verses of the same song. Both are acts that render sectarian and ethnic divisions meaningless in the face of a common oppressor. This is the only form of human solidarity that will ever succeed in this cursed landscape.
This creed manifests in different forms to meet different threats. We see it in the response of the Yazidi community to the ISIS genocide. After thousands of their women were systematically raped and enslaved, the Baba Sheikh, their spiritual leader, issued a dictum of radical inclusion, declaring that the survivors would be welcomed back into the community without stigma. This was not merely compassion; it was an act of strategic genius, a refusal to let the enemy define the boundaries of their community.
The story of Bedyal, the dictum of the Baba Sheikh, and the anthem for Rojava form a triptych of indigenous resilience. The first is a creed of civic-existential solidarity, choosing a shared death over a divided life. The second is one of spiritual-communal solidarity, healing the wounds of genocide from within. The third is an act of political-artistic solidarity, building a bridge of defiance across a shattered state. These are not footnotes to the history of the Middle East; they are the blueprint for its future.
A Future Written in Defiance
The world’s craven silence and the Arab Imperium’s hollow noise have, for decades, created a vacuum filled with blood and lies. But that vacuum is now being filled, not by diplomats, foreign powers, or self-proclaimed revolutionaries, but by the very peoples who were meant to have been erased. The Druze, the Kurds, the Christians, and the Yazidis are forging an organic, bottom-up solidarity that exposes the fraudulent, top-down unity of pan-Arabism for the imperial project it always was.
The question is no longer “Where are the millions?” but “Whose voices will we choose to listen to?” Will we heed the anthem of an empire that glorifies its own imagined purity while murdering its subjects? Or will we listen to the chorus of the forsaken, who have learned through bitter experience that survival depends not on appealing to the world, but on standing with one another?
The cry of the abandoned ends with a promise that serves as a warning to those who would prefer to forget:
“the world may forget but we never will.”
This is the vow of the forsaken, a creed that memory itself has become an act of war against erasure. But the Dawn of Rojava is more than a memory; it is a prophecy. It heralds the slow, bloody, but inevitable dismantling of an empire built on lies and the birth of a new Eden—an Eden built not by conquerors, but by survivors who chose to stand together when the world turned away.
