Let's not play politics with murder

This is the original title of an excellent article (what else) from the inestimable Nick Cohen in last Sunday's UK Observer. How he starts tells you everything about the article. Thus, he asks us "Who would want to kill Arab soldiers serving in a western army, a rabbi and three Jewish children? The white far right or the Islamist religious right?" His answer, possibly slightly unexpected to those of a knee-jerk tendency, is "The inability of leftists and conservatives to reply "both" explains half the political hypocrisy of our time."

Cohen hopes (without much expectation of success these days) that what might be called the sane Left and Right would be able to answer "both", and is sorely disappointed that most of them don't. He also opens up the possibility that in order to make sense of the contemporary political world, we might need to discard old ways of viewing that world.

Conventionally, we tend to think of politics in terms of "left" and "right", like a line on a piece of paper, or on a board. Thus, the left, in favour of greater equality, greater central control of the economy, and so forth, is to be found, quite literally, on the left of this line, with their opposites at the other end. Where, exactly, on the line depends on how extreme the measures one is prepared to use to achieve those ends.

Cohen's approach suggests a different way of looking at this (not necessarily one he supports: it just grows out of this sort of approach). This is to put policies (or ends) to one side, for the moment, and focus on means. Thus, at one end of our political continuum, we would have those approaches which focus most strongly on extreme means to achieve what might (or might not), otherwise, be seen as desirable ends.

Such an approach would see Nazis, fascists, bolsheviks, the SWP…huddled together at the "closed" end of the spectrum (extreme measures justified to reach their ends, no argument permitted as to ends or means), with conservatives, liberals and democratic socialists clustered around the centre - they're not arguing about means, but measures or policies to reach their desired ends. They are also prepared to co-operate, where necessary, to preserve the system of non-extreme means. At the other end of the continuum are the anarchists, as defined in dictionaries of politics: complete openness, no rules, because sanity will prevail.

I have no idea whether Nick Cohen would agree with any of what I have said, but the sanity of his approach to the subject he writes about (as noted in the first paragraph) leads me in this direction. He does note that his approach to the question he asks at the start of his article means that Anders Breivik and Mohamed Merah (the Toulouse assassin) become moral equivalents.

If only Western governments would realise this and stop pandering to well-spoken representatives of the extremists.

By Brian Goldfarb.