Things are more complicated than they seem

“Things are more complicated than they seem” is a recurring expression through which the narrator tests the difference between genuine uncertainty and a convenient refusal to judge. Its force changes across the account: in the discussion of the Bosnian war, it can blur responsibility; in a disputed story about Limonov, it marks uncertainty about what happened; later, it becomes an uncomfortable admission that complexity is sometimes real. The phrase is neither simply endorsed nor discarded. Its recurrence records the narrator’s effort to distinguish open-mindedness from evasion.

A phrase that suspends judgment

The expression first appears in the narrator’s account of listening to arguments that challenged the prevailing description of the Bosnian war. He recalls being receptive to the claim that Alija Izetbegović, publicly presented as an apostle of tolerance, was a Muslim fundamentalist intent on establishing an Islamic republic in Sarajevo and wanted the siege and war to continue. Other claims invoked the historical Ottoman subjection of the Serbs and disputed the apparent identity of victims in press photographs. The narrator says he nodded and accepted that things were more complicated than they seemed. The phrase here describes not a conclusion reached after resolving competing evidence, but a readiness to be persuaded by a sequence of claims that unsettles an existing moral account.

That admission matters because the claims do more than add detail: in the narrator’s description, they make it possible to hesitate over the responsibility of Slobodan Milošević and his associates for ethnic cleansing. The expression can therefore serve as a bridge from uncertainty about particular accounts to reluctance to condemn. The narrator does not present his earlier assent as proof that the arguments were true. He presents it as evidence of his own political suggestibility: he could be drawn toward the position of the last person who had spoken. In this setting, the phrase names a vulnerability in judgment as much as a property of the subject under discussion.

Lévy’s counterargument

Bernard-Henri Lévy objects to the expression precisely because of what it can license. He argues that answering denunciations of Milošević’s ethnic cleansing by insisting that things are more complicated resembles acknowledging the Holocaust and then using complexity to qualify the fact of the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. His point, as the narrator recounts it, is not that historical events contain no complexity; it is that invoking complexity can function as resignation, procrastination, or diplomatic cowardice when a basic moral fact is at stake. Lévy insists, “No, things are not more complicated than they seem.” He calls the situation tragically simple, and the narrator says he nods again.

The repeated gesture makes the passage more unsettled than a conversion from one view to its opposite. The narrator has nodded first at the arguments that complicated the prevailing account, then at Lévy’s rejection of that complication as an excuse. The phrase thus exposes how readily an apparently fair-minded posture can be recruited by opposing positions. Its ethical problem is not that careful distinctions are always false, but that the language of nuance can obscure the difference between examining evidence and deferring judgment. Lévy’s intervention forces that distinction into view without making the narrator’s earlier susceptibility disappear.

Uncertain accounts and competing versions

The phrase returns when the narrator considers an episode involving Limonov and a violinist imprisoned in Sarajevo. In Limonov’s account, a well-intentioned gaffe humiliates the prisoner; later, when Limonov tries to justify himself, the violinist tells him that he hates him. Limonov answers that the prisoner has won and that he can only put up with the hatred. The narrator initially observes that there was no apparent reason for Limonov to tell the story unless it had happened as he described it. But he immediately qualifies that inference: a Hungarian photographer had already reported the incident as an example of Limonov’s cruelty, so Limonov had reason to provide his own version.

Here, “Things are more complicated than they seem” does not operate chiefly as a political slogan. It marks a problem of evidence and self-presentation. The narrator considers whether the account of a misunderstanding could have covered up more disgraceful behavior committed in the heat of Limonov’s Chetnik fervor. He says he does not believe that explanation, because he does not think Limonov vile or a liar, but leaves open the question of whether that trust is justified. Neither the prisoner’s reported exchange nor Limonov’s explanation settles the incident for the reader. The phrase holds together the eyewitness report, the self-account, and the narrator’s personal judgment without pretending that they amount to certainty.

The phrase put under pressure

Later, after a break in the narrative, the narrator turns toward the beginnings of a neofascist party and its newspaper, while admitting uncertainty about whether he or his readers want to hear more. He invokes the phrase again, then says he dislikes it and dislikes the subtle minds who use it. Yet he also concedes that it is often true, adding that this is such a case. The return is significant because it acknowledges the expression’s two uses at once: it can shelter evasions, but rejecting it categorically would deny the genuine difficulty of some accounts.

Across these passages, the phrase changes from the narrator’s record of being persuaded, to Lévy’s target, to a shorthand for unresolved testimony, and finally to a proposition the narrator distrusts but cannot abandon. Its recurrence does not settle the political disputes or resolve the disputed episode. Instead, it makes the act of invoking complexity itself an object of scrutiny. The question is not merely whether matters are complicated, but what follows from saying so: closer attention to evidence, or a retreat from responsibility.