Politics of Hate


The airwaves and newspaper columns are full of hateful language these days and that's between members and supporters of the same parties who are out to blame one another for their disastrous showing at the general election.  

Which reminded me of this post from the blog site archive in which David Aaronovitch points out that it's perfectly possible to have a robust political disagreement without trying to demonise and personally attack the integrity of your opponent. 

But just try telling that just now to rival factions in UKIP or the Labour Party.

Politics of Hate (11/10/13)



David Aaronovitch had thoughtful contribution in the Times the other day - in which he argued that people with strong views about politics can still be good citizens while standing up and arguing for their beliefs.

I imagine the point is lost upon those who rushed to condemn the Daily Mail for its misplaced attack on Ralph Miliband - yet find no contradiction in calling their political opponents 'Tory Scum' or even worse sometimes.  

Planks in the eyes of the haters of hate

By David Aaronovitch

Notebook: Left or Right, we should not think of each other as devils

Someone asked me last week whether Ralph Miliband could possibly not have hated Britain, given that he wanted to change it to East Germany. I heard someone else on the radio explain patiently, as a teacher might, that Milidad would have been OK about the country because while he may have been a Marxist, “he wasn’t a communist”.

This made me smile. My father was, for almost his entire adult life, a Communist. He was brought up in poverty (the real, die-early thing) in the Jewish East End and the way he rationalised his situation — the dirt and the lack of opportunity — was the Party. Yet he loved an idea of Britain.

His younger self, questing for an education that the State wouldn’t provide, read everything Dickens and Shakespeare wrote. He was taught history at the badly shod feet of hedge-historians, whose version of British history went in a line from outlaws in the woods, through the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and up to the General Strike. He adored Scotland and Wales far more than most English people do and so was far more pro-British than many of them.

My father hated the British ruling class. Why wouldn’t he? That much might have been obvious, yet it wasn’t to quite a lot of people including, it seems, the Daily Mail. They simply could not compute that the views of someone of the Left might contain complexities or contradictions.

But last week, as the row rumbled on, it became apparent that people on the Centre Left harboured very similar views about folk on the Right. In other words, they simply denied the Mail and those who read it any moral virtues of their own. And I was reminded of the work of the American moral philosopher Jonathan Haidt, who has attempted to get American liberals to understand the values that their compatriots from the Tea Party and religious Right hold so dearly. Such as self-sufficiency and the danger of moral hazard from welfarism.

In other words, people like me have to try to understand that people not like me don’t simply hate humanity. Just like they have to understand that Ralph Miliband did not hate Britain. We don’t have to agree, but we don’t have to turn each other into devils either.

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