Jenni Russell today contributes to the comments pages of that newspaper the perfect Guardian opinion piece. It's perfect in the sense that it expresses in pristine form the kind of Guardianista soft moral philosophy that has so often disfigured those pages over the last few years. By its representivity in this regard her article also gives the lie, yet once more, to a theme favoured amongst certain parties made stupid by the misapplication of their intelligence - the theme, namely, that the criticisms levelled in the Euston Manifesto at a section of the anti-war liberal-left apply in reality to no more than George Galloway and a few discredited crazies.
Russell's framing context for the article is introduced with the story of a man she knew, an Eritrean revolutionary, who was 'driven by the conviction that he should fight in the war of liberation for his country'. From him we are led to the generality of others who 'turn their backs on easy lives because they prefer to fight for whatever values they believe in', and then, later, to people who committed 'acts of sabotage against apartheid'. And all of this in aid of what exactly? In aid of better understanding people whose values encompass blowing up travellers on the London underground or at Glasgow airport. Why, it's just as if there's a straight line leading from Amilcar Cabral and Nelson Mandela to those who, for the 'values they believe[d] in', destroyed the World Trade Center and the people in it, or who ended so many lives in Bali, in Madrid, in London...
Don't say that one or two of these values, which they believed in, are just no damned good. No, say rather, with Jenni Russell, 'same sense of mission'; say 'belief that they are fighting for a better world'; scratch your head over others who 'refuse to understand anything about their motivation'.
What Russell herself fails to understand is that it is possible to recognize the sociological truth that not everyone embraces the same values, not everyone grows up with, is taught, the same values, and still think that one has to make a distinction between better values, like, say, helping others in emergency or dire need, and worse ones, like randomly maiming and murdering innocent people. She fails to understand that no 'refusal to recognise others' search for meaning in their lives' is involved in thinking that some meanings are more harmful than other meanings and therefore open to criticism, fails to understand that rejection by some of what she describes as Western values can be understood and at the same time condemned.
In fact, to see antipathy to the murder of the innocent as a specifically Western value nicely concentrates the limitation visible in Russell's own moral and cultural understanding, in what is an egregious little essay in apologia, such as has been too frequent in the pages of that great Guardian of British liberalism.