Fuck nuance? Gaslighting in a time of genocide, let us count the ways.
Two UK-based scholars explore four ways that academies and academicians avoid looking war crimes and mass slaughter fully in the face.
Let us start with a subject that is controversial, but where the facts are incontrovertible: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
How do we know? Because experts in international law who have studied the facts of the war, and international human rights organizations whose job it is to investigate allegations of war crimes, tell us that is their conclusion. There is a consensus among the experts. Now experts can sometimes be wrong, that is true. But against their conclusions all we have are self-serving denials by the Israeli government and its apologists, and uninformed opinion elsewhere.
Amnesty International has concluded that this is genocide. So has Human Rights Watch. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has concluded that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza, both war crimes and elements of genocide. The United Nations Special Rapporteur has concluded it is genocide. Canadian academic William Schabas, author of “Genocide in International Law,” calls it genocide. So do genocide experts Dirk Moses, Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omer Bartov, among many others. Even those experts who have not yet made up their mind about the “genocide” designation nevertheless agree that Israel is violating international law and committing war crimes.
Over the course of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its people, the term “scholasticide” has become more well known as an aspect of genocide that deserves attention in its own right. Scholasticide is usually defined as the destruction of educational institutions along with the killing of teachers, professors, and others associated with them. Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s universities, schools, and libraries would certainly count under this definition. That is why the annual meeting of the American Historical Association very recently voted strongly in favor of a resolution branding Israel’s actions as scholasticide.
I am not alone in agonizing over how, in the face of so much evidence, the killing has been allowed to go on for 15 months without any pauses, and how those of us who see this genocide clearly have been unable to convince enough people or governments to make it stop. It is a moral failure of epic proportions, involving thousands of people who really know better. How does their denial work, what is facilitating and enabling it?
Earlier this month, two scholars based in the U.K., Basma Hajir of the University of Bristol and Mezna Qato of Cambridge University, published an interesting paper in the journal Globalization, Societies and Education. They sought to extend the concept of scholasticide to the way that scholars themselves often engage in denial of the ongoing genocide—and in denying to others the intellectual right to recognize it as such.
The full title of their paper is “Academia in a time of genocide: scholasticidal tendencies and continuities.”
The full text is available online at the link above, and I strongly recommend reading it. I will summarize its main points here, and engage in some generous quoting.
The authors discuss four main ways that academics—and I would argue many others as well—try to deflect, often to the point of complicity, the reality of the genocide in Gaza. These are the “scholasticidal tendencies” they are referring to.
“Complicities, intentionally or not, extend further in liberal homilies on ‘complexity,’ ‘nuance,’ and ‘reflexivity.’ Liberalism’s furrowed brow drawn up to signal the depth of concern. Shallow it must be, silence often follows. These scholasticidal tendencies, as we call them, manifest in four key ways: silence, the suppression of solidarity, ‘complex’ or ‘nuanced’ arguments, and the threat of theories.”
They then take each of these four “tendencies” in turn.
On silence, they write:
“How and why have the progenitors and advancers of concepts like ‘critical consciousness’, ‘decolonise/decolonisation’, and ‘epistemic and cognitive justice’ fallen so short of the mark in speaking ‘truth to power’? What do we do with scholars who strategically deploy these terms in their publications and grant proposals, and yet shamelessly declare ‘they do not want to be political’ and go selectively mute when it comes to Palestine? What are we to make of scholars and research groups whom ‘the rights, safety, and well-being of children in Southern or conflict-affected contexts’ lie at the very heart of their work, yet they have managed to remain conspicuously silent throughout a year of relentless murder, dispossession, and traumatisation of Palestinian children?”
On suppression of solidarity, the authors consider the response of authorities to protests at British universities:
“At the University of Oxford, for example, the administration bulldozed a memorial built by the Palestine encampment for people killed by Israel in Gaza… Other universities, for example, Aston University, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Bristol, issued eviction notices or took legal action against students for ‘occupying university lands’. A student from Nottingham noted the irony, ‘The university objected to the ‘illegal occupation of land’ while ignoring the illegal occupation of Palestine’.”
As we know, these were mild measures compared to the actions many universities have taken in the United States, which include massive police violence and suspension or expulsion of students acting not only on moral grounds but on the basic principle that the academies stand for truth and knowledge in the face of lies and ignorance.
But the “scholasticidal tendency” I find the most interesting is what they call ‘Complexity’, ‘Nuance’ and ‘Reflexivity.’
We hear this all the time in reference to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We are told it is all extremely complicated, that it goes back thousands of years (if the presence of Palestinians is acknowleged at all), that there are two sides to the story, that one side “started it first,” and so forth.
In other words, there is a strong tendency, well developed in academia but which has infused itself throughout our culture, to use our thought processes to nullify serious thinking about a difficult subject. In effect, it amounts to citing the great number of details to be considered in the service of ignoring the actual details altogether.
To quote the authors at some length:
“About nine months into the genocide, a scholar whose writing is otherwise lauded with sentiments of ‘positive peace’ (peace and justice) and decolonisation discourse, was asked a question in a conference interview about how they see the situation in Gaza. They responded by saying that educators are engaging in ‘reflexivity’ about how to live up to the ideals they are preaching. They then went on to talk about the equal importance of not ‘taking sides’. When Basma communicated her frustration with them for perpetuating a damaging, sanitised ahistorical narrative, they justified their position: they do support Palestinians, but they didn't want to ‘reduce a complex situation to binaries’. Their position exemplifies the broader tendency among scholars to invoke ‘complexity’ and ‘nuance’ to insinuate their supposed superior grasp of the intricate layers of social reality.”
To underscore their point, they cite the sociologist Kieran Healy, whose classic 2017 paper “Fuck Nuance” argued that nuance was not, in fact, a virtue of good sociological theory, and by implication not necessarily a virtue of sound thinking either.
The authors quote Healy and add their own conclusions:
“‘…this is the nuance of the connoisseur. It is mostly a species of self-congratulatory symbolic violence.’ When more than 16,000 children have been murdered over the course of months by a settler colonial machine that has imposed an apartheid regime and has been killing, detaining, and ethnically cleansing for over 76 years, it becomes imperative to heed Healy (Citation2017) and say: Fuck your complexity and nuance.”
Fuck it indeed, if overthinking an issue until it effectively goes away—a time honored intellectual habit—leads to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
I will skip over the last “scholasticidal tendency,” “Promise and the threat of theories,” because for our purposes here it is, as the subtitle implies, fairly theoretical. But I think readers will find it interesting nevertheless.
In their conclusion, the authors point the way to how killing off of scholasticidal tendencies could lead to effective action in the real world:
“Angela Davis once said ‘movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspectives of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements’ (Davis Citation2016, 47). Over one hundred years, and particularly since the Nakba, the Question of Palestine has challenged students and scholars alike to think differently about justice, to dispense inherited toolkits that can’t seem to account for this question and try and forge new ones. And so with this generation. A ‘global Palestine’ is gaining traction within movements everywhere (Hardt and Mezzadra Citation2024). Young people in particular are rejecting neutrality or claims of insufficient knowledge and nuance, in the face of genocidal violence. This new form of solidarity rests on ‘mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests’ (Mohanty Citation2003, 7).”
In a recent post, I pointed out, as have so many others, that the phrase “Never again!” loses all meaning if we sit back and do nothing while one genocide after another unfolds before our eyes. In the case of Israel and Gaza, and for the Americans, British, Germans, and others who are enabling and paying for these war crimes, “nuance” becomes a way of convincing ourselves and others that we bear no responsibility, that there is nothing that we can or even should do, while people are dying by the thousands.
So fuck nuance, and fuck those who deliberately use it to keep the killing going.
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Thank you so much for sharing these perspectives, Michael. This is truth.
Thank you for writing.