“There's something happening here”: The sound of the world burning and our silence

“ There's something happening here / But what it is ain't exactly clear.”

This is how the song " For What It's Worth " begins, written by Stephen Stills and immortalized by Buffalo Springfield in 1966 following the Sunset Strip riots in Los Angeles that same year. The song became an anthem of 1960s counterculture in the US, also an anthem against conformity and state repression, in some ways a mirror of the United States at the time, a repressive state both internally and externally, at war in Vietnam and against its own African-American population. Although the song has a calm tone, the message is urgent and increasingly appropriate to the times we live in. The lyrics convey the message that we are taught not to see, not to hear, and not to speak.

Today, almost 60 years later, the opening line remains as important as when it was written: something is happening . What's different is that we know what's happening, yet we're encouraged to forget and ignore it. We know that Gaza is in ruins, Sudan has collapsed, Myanmar is mired in endless war, democracies are retreating in the face of criticism, war is being prophesied and promoted by political leaders. The world is burning, and we see and hear it, and choose to ignore it. There is no international, diplomatic, or even civic response. Silence is the main character of 2025.

This article sees the present in this song and asks: What is this sound we hear and ignore? And what does our refusal to act say?

“ Step out of line, the men come and take you away”

The news that Stephen Colbert's Late Show has been canceled after the end of its next season in 2026 is a clear example of censorship, which, while seemingly irrelevant to the current global situation, speaks volumes about the state of so-called Western democracies. Colbert, who had criticized CBS for making a $16 million deal with the Trump team, was summarily dismissed at the request of Paramount, CBS's owner, led by David Ellison, a well-known Trump supporter. The Writers Guild of America stated that it considers this action by CBS a bribe to the Trump administration . The significance of such an action is profound; the removal of one of television's most critical voices, precisely for playing a political satire role, reveals a landscape where humor is no longer a space for dissent.

Public satire is a barometer of the health of democracy. In the US, extremely important figures like George Carlin, Jon Stewart, and John Oliver challenge and have challenged power through laughter. Colbert, in a way, follows this tradition. His elimination under the influence and pressure of collusion between the business world and politics will not be an isolated incident; it will surely happen again. This event is just another symptom of intolerance to critical thinking, even in supposedly plural and free spaces.

" Step out of line, the men come and take you away" takes on significant weight here and becomes literal. Colbert's silencing and distancing serves to discipline, to demonstrate the cost of criticism, and demonstrates to us all that the line between democracy and authoritarianism can be very easily crossed.

“ Children, what's that sound?”

The shocking image of Palestinian children killed at a water collection point in Gaza is ignored by the vast majority of Western governments, including the Portuguese government! As is the forced starvation. As is the violation of Syrian sovereignty by Israel. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not commented on any of these events, except for when a Catholic church was hit in Gaza, injuring 10 people and killing 3, when the Ministry issued a statement condemning the attack.

This pattern of selectivity is not accidental, but structural. This is how Portuguese and European diplomatic morality works: it acknowledges suffering when the narrative fails to destabilize the alliance with the US and Israel, when the dead are Catholics and not Arabs. When there is political unease, silence is the course of action. The news reported by the newspaper Público that Portugal opposed the reference to Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians in a statement from the CPLP Food and Nutrition Security Council is shocking.

This inaction by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government regarding the Palestinian situation is a betrayal of the Portuguese Constitution, which, in Article 7, obliges the State to defend and promote the self-determination of peoples, respect for human rights, and compliance with international law. When a state, the Portuguese one, imposes on a multilateral organization of which it is a member, the suppression of an expression in an official statement about an occupied people's right to food, we are not engaging in diplomacy, but rather in complicity with the occupier. Hypocritical complicity is becoming the official language of multilateralism. What is erased with each silence is the concept of diplomatic coherence. When human rights apply only to allies, they cease to be rights and become instruments of power and torture used against the weakest and most defenseless.

" Children, what's that sound?" It's the sound of death muffled by communiqués. It's the sound of victims ignored because they're 'the wrong ones,' because for the Portuguese government, only Palestinian Catholics are victims.

“ Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep”

Europe is experiencing a true turning point. Since the beginning of 2025, Europe has increasingly focused on rearmament. The European Commission has developed the Readiness 2030 plan, which foresees the allocation of €800 billion in military funding, including the suspension of budgetary rules and the redirection of funds from other areas to armaments.

"Paranoia" has solidified into European doctrine; war is the objective. German Chancellor Merz himself confirmed this in a BBC Radio 4 interview published on July 19, 2025, defending the comments of his Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, in June 2025. In addition to the destruction and deaths resulting from continued wars, European funds will be diverted from crucial matters , particularly the climate transition, education, and social care, which are of utmost importance in a continent and world where inequality continues to rise.

The current idea that holds us hostage is that the lack of a heavily armed Europe is negligence, and not only do we not question rearmament, but we also wonder why we are not yet ready.

“ Battle lines being drawn / Nobody's right if everyone is wrong” – Sudan and Myanmar

In Sudan, since April 2023, the civil war between the Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has already caused more than 150,000 deaths by January 7, 2025 alone , according to the New York Times . This high death toll is compounded by the number of internally displaced people, which reached 11.6 million at the end of 2024, according to figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre . The UN has already warned of the possibility of genocide, proving the existence of massacres committed by both sides against the civilian population. On June 17, a UN Human Rights Council report warned of the escalation of the conflict, specifically mentioning the increase in sexual violence against girls and women, particularly in areas under RSF control. However, coverage of this tragedy has been largely ignored, and it remains without an adequate and coordinated international response.

Why? Because the United Arab Emirates, the RSF's main financier and shipowner, are crucial allies of Western countries. They supply oil, buy football clubs, and invest in companies across a range of sectors. The bargaining chip is political immunity for themselves and their allies.

The war in Sudan reveals an uncomfortable truth: some wars are invisible because they are politically and economically inconvenient. The UAE owns part of the liberal world order, and therefore, to avoid harming its owners, this order allows massacres in the name of stability.

Besides Sudan, Myanmar has been suffering from war since the 2021 coup. The repression, which had never been fully lifted, has returned to extreme levels. The military regime continues to regularly commit heinous crimes against its own population. Between 2021 and 2024, 6,092 civilians were killed, 28,501 arrested, more than 3.5 million people were internally displaced, and more than 20 million people require humanitarian assistance, according to the UN . However, the Security Council remains inactive, having only prepared a resolution (Resolution 2669 (2022)) regarding the situation, on which China, Russia, and India abstained, with the other 12 countries voting in favor. The European response has also been weak, limiting itself to expressing concern, calling for restraint and stating, at the time of the earthquake of March 28, 2025, which killed more than 3,600 people , that it was monitoring the situation closely.

The situation in Myanmar is paradigmatic of the current international system: the system fails to protect civilians when there is no strategic interest involved. When everyone fails, the system becomes the one at fault. " Nobody's right if everybody's wrong."

“ A thousand people in the street / Singing songs and they carrying signs / Mostly say, 'Hooray for our side'”

The Vietnam War didn't end simply because of military attrition and defeats on the ground. It ended because for more than a decade, millions of people in the US took to the streets in an organized manner, facing censorship and repression from those who wanted the war to continue. It ended because the world saw villages burned, children napalmed, and soldiers traumatized. It ended because American soldiers returned in black body bags and the government's lies about the war no longer worked in the face of civil mobilization.

In the 1960s and 1970s, protest in the US wasn't merely symbolic; it paralyzed cities and exposed the contradictions of government narratives. Universities were centers of resistance and disruption, musicians, writers, and many other artists denounced the war, and prominent figures like Muhammad Ali refused to enlist. The antiwar movement wasn't an abstract call for peace; it was an active force of political struggle that forced a superpower to retreat.

Today, paradoxically, we have access to more images, more data, and more knowledge of human rights violations than at any other time in our history. We see the bombings live, we know precisely and clearly what is happening, and yet, we protest less. Outrage is limited to social media, and confrontations take place there.

What we need today, now, are political and civic movements based on the universal principles of the right to life, dignity, health, food, water, housing, hygiene, and also to self-determination. We need protests that know how and have the courage to challenge injustices, even when committed by our states and allies. May the denunciation of the miserable conditions in Gaza, and the demand for sanctions against the RSF, have the same force as the denunciation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. May we vigorously demand that those responsible for crimes against humanity in Israel, Myanmar, Sudan, and so many other states be legally condemned for their actions.

Today, we need coherence, we need resistance that is not guided by partisan agendas, but by ethical and moral commitments.

“ We better stop / Hey, what's that sound? / Everybody look, what's going down?”

The world is silent. Not for lack of sound, but for too much silence. The sound of war, hunger, and justice remains very loud in 2025, too loud. But the loudest and most dangerous sound is that of the normalization of people's suffering, of democracies that are morally bankrupt, of institutions that hesitate and fail to act, and of societies that grow accustomed.

" Everybody look, what's going down?" serves as a call, a call to name what we saw and heard. It's high time to end the idea of "neutrality" and selective empathy. We don't lack information. We lack courage. We lack the will to shout NO. No to silence. What's happening is clear; we just need to decide whether we want to act.

Silence is not prudence. It is giving up fighting.

The texts in this section reflect the authors' personal opinions. They do not represent VISÃO nor reflect its editorial position.