There are many advantages to silence. If you don’t express a view on a fight between two of your friends, for example, you don’t risk pissing one of them off.
Silence can be safe, and prudent. You can preserve both your friendships and they can “sort it out” between them while you remain silent.
Many white South Africans during apartheid remained silent while the apartheid state obliterated black people’s dignity. Silence was easier for many, as opposed to joining a liberation movement, getting involved with the End Conscription Campaign or voting for Helen Suzman.
You just go about your business, silently, with no risk of the state harassing you or less verligte friends ostracising you.
Silence is convenient, comfortable and good for your blood pressure.
Silence has a variation that masquerades as a virtue, it’s called neutrality. It differs from silence as it requires a speech act for the world to be made aware of your neutrality.
Instead of remaining silent about the fight between your friends, you express a view, “Guys you’re both my friends so I’m not gonna take sides. I’m just gonna remain neutral and I think you’d agree that’s fair.”
In debates about the right mechanisms to bring about justice in a country where citizens’ human rights are trampled on, neutrality can be comfortable too.
Many of us have been neutral about whether or not sanctions against Zimbabwe are a good idea.
Neutrality might seem marginally better than silence. When someone remains silent there’s no guarantee they even think about an issue. Expressing neutrality in respect of a burning debate at least confirms you have actively reflected on the matter.
Silence and neutrality are chosen daily by many of us. You choose it when you ignore sexism in the workplace, the rape of lesbians or racism in your midst.
But silence and neutrality are a moral cop out when you are a witness to injustice. Silence and neutrality are morally culpable if you can speak out, condemn or help halt and reverse injustices.
This brings me to a gross example of a moral cop out playing out at the moment. Many people are silent about Israel’s attack on Gaza. And many choose neutrality rather than taking sides. These responses are poor ones, and morally culpable.
I notice many friends, peers and acquaintances of mine who are deeply committed to social justice in South Africa who choose silence about what’s going on in Gaza. Silence helps them avoid awkwardness. But does it help reduce deaths?
Neutrality too raises its pointless head. If I read one more call for the two sides in the political conflict to please get along and play nicely with each other, I may chuck my coffee mug against the wall in irritation. If it took a simple call for peace to bring about peace, the world would not be filled with so many conflicts.
The DA recently released one of these inherently useless neutrality statements. Neither Israel nor Hamas have been waiting to have their consciences pricked by neutral calls for world peace. Such calls should be left to Miss World pageants.
It’s easier to release this kind of statement than facing the consequences of taking a substantive view about whether or not Israel’s response to the senseless and wrongful deaths of some youth is proportionate. Yet it’s clear that the scale and intensity of the Israeli response is not justified in terms of just war principles. The ANC got it spot-on in condemning Israeli actions.
ANC politician Jessie Duarte compared Israel’s actions with Nazi Germany. That comparison is not justified. People in Gaza are not being systematically exterminated. Nazi Germany was the hell of all hells.
But the ANC is right to not remain silent or neutral – not while women, children and many others are killed unnecessarily.
I notice an attempt to be nuanced about this neutrality has become popular on social media. The issues, some argue, are “complicated”, “deeply historical” and “difficult to understand”. This too is a cop out.
You don’t need to be a historian specialising in the history of the region before you can or should have a view about that which is crystal clear in the present.
If you watch a video that shows people being given a warning of less than one minute before being bombed you must express moral outrage.
What’s clear is that silence and neutrality are not gonna help at all.
It’s time to speak out.