One man's terrorist...

Here's something interesting, John Crace writing about Michael Burleigh in Education Guardian. Five years ago, he begins by telling us, Burleigh 'walked away from academia'...

He now has the freedom to go to Borough market every Friday morning, to go fishing and, most of all, to write and say what he likes.

His latest book, Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, is a case in point. Where other scholars tend to be somewhat guarded in their writings, trading mainly in qualifications and footnotes, Burleigh is refreshingly willing to let rip. And his main target is the wishy-washy relativism of many people on the left in their attitudes to terrorism.

For Burleigh, there are no fine lines to be drawn. One man's terrorist is not another man's freedom fighter; one man's terrorist is another man's terrorist.

"It's nonsense to talk about the war on Islamic terrorism as a clash of civilisations," he says. "The distinction is between civilisation and chaos. Whatever people may claim - and the desire to cut through the political processes can be very powerful - there is never any justification for violence."

It sounds uncompromisingly hardline, and his critics have been queuing up to portray him as "Mad Mike", blood brother to his fellow Daily Mail columnist "Mad Mel". But while he may resemble historians such as Niall Ferguson and David Starkey in his political affiliations, it's a mistake to pigeonhole him as a gobby, rightwing apologist.

If you bother to read what he has actually written, you find a liberal beating heart.

A point in passing here: I take it that what Burleigh meant was that there is never any justification for terrorist violence, since I doubt that he's a pacifist, and war is, obviously, violent, as is legitimate armed struggle against those who uphold tyranny by force of arms.

But this is not the main thing of interest to me here. The main thing is that Crace feels it necessary to assure his readers that Burleigh is no mad 'gobby, rightwing apologist'. And for why? Because Burleigh insists that 'one man's terrorist is another man's terrorist'. Just like that - without complication or prevarication. It's almost as if Crace expects there to be Guardian-readers who will find so forthright a condemnation of terrorism self-evidently 'rightwing'. Terrorism being the deliberate killing of innocent people, i.e. a form of political murder, isn't that a strange expectation to have about people of left and liberal outlook? The sad thing is that you'd be hard put to it, today, to show that Crace's expectation was groundless.