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I’m becoming so sick of constantly hearing ‘it’s complicated’, every.fucking.time the Middle East comes up. I feel like I can see advertising just running through this person’s head, repeating the emphasis (not the point, just the emphasis) that they heard before.
If any sensible person makes some point about the horrors of Stalin’s mass-murders, and then hears:
Well, actually it was a complicated matter.
…that should raise alarm-bells.
Obviously it’s true, obviously Russian history isn’t something one can reasonably summarize on an A4 sheet of paper. But if when the simple statement ‘murder is bad, lots of murder is worse’ receives some push-back, something to muddy the water, something to distract, the implication of a thousand strands of conversation and a hundred books to read before we can truly say ‘genocide is not good’ with real certainty.
Try the same for any atrocity - pick something horrid and imagine someone saying ‘yea, well you really don’t sound like you have nuance, and this place has like a long history, and you can’t believe everything you read…’.
North Korea’s standard of living is ‘complex’. It’s also bad.
Losing a finger is complex. And bad.