"It's Complicated"

A long-standing practice in white society is to feign complexity where there is none.

“It is complicated.”

“This issue is complicated.”

This has become the self-justifying white flag that is waved by white people to excuse their lack of decisive action in certain issues. Or to excuse their allegiance with one side over another. This method is called “manufactured complexity”, and it aims at creating a false balance as a tool for white power.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes how dominant groups preserve power by obscuring moral clarity: “The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders. The people are not to perceive their oppression clearly.” Freire explicitly names confusion and abstraction as strategies that prevent moral action.

If you can convince yourself and others that a matter of injustice has no true sides, has no right or wrong, has no absolutes or black and white conclusions, then you get to continue to debate the matter to death, without taking any sides. As a huge bonus, you get to look like the scholar; the intellectual.

"Look how beautifully he balances on that fences! Weighing both sides of the argument with equal adeptness."

"Look at how much empathy she has – she sees both sides of the argument."

In his book, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explains this white intellectual distancing tactic: “White people often engage in intellectual debates about racism rather than acknowledging how it functions in their lives.” Again – debate over accountability. Looking like a concerned, responsible, righteous citizen, while continuing to delay any real action.

For decades, white society has washed it hands of taking stands in matters of injustice and oppression. Even when it stems from their own governments and society. Pretending complexity is made easier by the legacy of Exoticism and Orientalism, which depict Black and Brown people as "the other".

It's a lot easier to be "in two minds" about the oppression that happens to people you value less than yourself and your people.

If what is happening to the Palestinians happened even for a single day to Norwegians, suddenly none of this would be complicated. I guarantee it. Suddenly there'd be no grey zones or even a moment's hesitation about condemnation. Suddenly it would crystal clear who the villains are and who the victims are.

But because of their deep racism, white society continue towing the line of "complicated" and "two sides".

White people pretended that women's rights was a complicated issue too. White people pretended that the formal abolishment of slavery was a complicated issues. Civil rights was complicated. Invading Iraq was complicated. Human rights for the disabled, for LGBTQ people was complicated. White liberalism, delay, and “complexity” is nothing new.

“There's two sides here. There has been wrongs committed on both sides.”

In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

And he continued: “Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

King's experience is part of greater pattern, and is exactly about feigned complexity delaying justice. The feigned complexity among even those who consider themselves moderates, liberals, and forward thinkers in white society.

The Palestinian genocide is being portrayed as complicated. White-led news stations and friend groups alike discuss among themselves the nuances. Debate. Play Devil's Advocate. Centre their opinions and feelings. And many claim self-righteousness and moral superiority by using pacifism, peace, and "war is bad" rhetoric. After all, it's complicated, right?

In “The Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon writes on colonialism pretending itself morally complex: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” Fanon aptly condemned European intellectuals repeatedly for over-theorising colonial violence to avoid naming it plainly.

White society has fooled itself into thinking that there are “two sides to every fight”, and pretend like both are equally valid and deserve the microphone. It's how the general public keeps itself innocent and white society keeps itself pure.

It's why we have language like "We pray for peace in the Middle East". Oh, you know, that hot and dusty part of the world that loves to fight. Those hot-blooded Arabs with their scimitars raised and their thirst for blood. They just can't seem to settle down over there. Right?

Edward Said wrote about how Western discourse frames colonised peoples as endlessly “complex” while excusing imperial violence: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved, childlike, different; the European is rational, virtuous, mature, normal.” (Source: Orientalism) This framing requires debate instead of accountability, and that's precisely the aim. No action, just discourse.

But the Palestinian genocide is not complicated. It never had been. That is a muddying of the waters, done very much on purpose, by the European colonial project known as “Israel”. We are witnesses beat by beat the common white tactic which makes people get so lost in the "complexity of it all", that they never take sides with the victim, and never come down fully on the side of the oppressed.

The Palestinians are 100% the innocent victims.

The Israelis are 100% the perpetrators of a genocide and ethnic cleansing.

There is no middle ground. There is shared fault.

To pretend complexity here is to have already capitulated to Zionist propaganda. That was the point all along. To get you to frame this like there are two equal sides fighting each other.

This isn't complicated any more than a grown man beating a child to death is complicated.

“Both sides” is a rhetoric used for moral abdication. Tom Nichols, in “The Death of Expertise” highlights the false balance masquerading as intellectualism. “Treating unequal arguments as though they are equal is not open-mindedness. It is intellectual laziness.”

Timothy Snyder writes on the neutrality in the face of oppression: “Do not obey in advance.” An idea echoed by Elie Wiesel: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” Wiesel's quote is often used in genocide studies and human-rights education, and yet is betrayed in real-life white society again and again.

This practice of false balance and moral flattening is reinforced each day by our mainstream media. Our news channels are living proof of how the “both-sides” framing distorts power asymmetry, particularly in colonial or military occupations.

The organisation FAIR has repeatedly shown that U.S. and European media:

1. Frame occupier and occupied as moral equals

2. Prioritise “debate” over legal or humanitarian facts

Alarmingly, Genocide Watch teaches how the denial of genocide is not the beginning, but the end-game of genocide. “Genocide denial is the final stage of genocide. One common form of genocide denial is claiming the situation is ‘too complex’ to judge.“ (Source)

Calling systemic, asymmetrical violence ‘complicated’ is not intellectual humility; it is a political act that protects power and abandons victims. In The Politics of Genocide, by Ben Kiernan, the historian documents how genocides are routinely reframed as “conflicts”, and how moral responsibility is diffused through false equivalence. These are the chronic patterns of genocide. We are in the end-stage of the Palestinian genocide, and white people are continuing to pretend that we're only just in the “warming up for the debate” stage.

If you claim that the Palestinian genocide is a conflict or is complicated, and in any way include these Zionist arguments and rhetoric, you truly are marching in the footsteps of your white, racist, genociding, colonising forefathers. And you have learned nothing at all.

You're not morally superior by feigning complexity in the face of unconditional evil. You're just a Zionist mouthpiece now.