Too much "understanding"; not enough condemning

You know exactly the type of reasoning. Here's the Liberal Democrat peer, then an MP, Jenny Tonge after her sacking from her party's front bench in 2004: "I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from."

Of such rationalisations for terrorism, the historian and former Irish cabinet minister Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote - in the context of Northern Ireland - many years ago (Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, 1978, pp. 11-12):

What was most oppressive was not the legitimation of violence in itself, but the frivolity of this legitimation, the refusal to see that it was legitimation, or that legitimation was important. 'Violence is a by-product of the partition of our country' is a statement by a political leader - Mr Jack Lynch, now [1978] Taoiseach [of a Fianna Fail government] - who has often and sincerely condemned the IRA. But if you tell him that in that and similar statements he and his friends have provided the IRA with its charter of legitimacy, and that it is a sense of legitimacy which sustains a fighting force and keeps up the killing, then he will look at you with those hurt eyes: 'How can you say that of me?'

The form of the argument has been dissected by philosophers including Michael Walzer (see his "Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses", in Arguing About War, 2004, pp. 51-66) and my friend Norman Geras here. I will point merely to one pragmatic objection, which is implied by Norman's comments in the post I have linked to. Once you grant legitimacy to violence by invoking its supposed "root causes", there is no inherent reason for failing to apply it more widely.

I have seen today probably the apotheosis of such argument, and certainly confirmation of my point. It comes from Pat Buchanan. Buchanan is a sometime contender for the Republican Presidential nomination and co-founder of the American Conservative magazine. He has, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League in 1991, a "disturbing pattern of baiting Jews and attacking Israel". He is an isolationist and - I have no hesitation in applying the term - an anti-war campaigner. This is what he has to say this week in support of the campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination by the paleo-libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (emphasis added):

Rudy [Guiliani, in a candidates' televised debate] implied that Ron Paul was unpatriotic to suggest the violence against us out of the Middle East may be in reaction to U.S. policy in the Middle East. Was President Hoover unpatriotic when, the day after Pearl Harbor, he wrote to friends, “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”

Pearl Harbor came out of the blue, but it also came out of the troubled history of U.S.-Japanese relations going back 40 years. Hitler’s attack on Poland was naked aggression. But to understand it, we must understand what was done at Versailles after the Germans laid down their arms based on Wilson’s 14 Points. We do not excuse — but we must understand.

Some years ago Buchanan wrote a disgraceful book, A Republic, Not an Empire, 1999, which maintained that our side's security guarantee to Poland in 1939 was inexcusable provocation. To plead for "understanding" of Hitler's aggression against Poland at least has the merit of consistency.

It makes no difference to the disrepute of Buchanan's position but is incidentally worth mentioning that his historical argument is illiterate. German surrender in 1918 was not based on President Wilson's Fourteen Points. Wilson had promulgated those Points on 8 January 1918 - without consulting Britain and France, who were not formally "allies" but "associated powers" of the United States. Germany belatedly sought peace not in January but in October of that year - after demonstrating an altogether different understanding of a peace settlement (with its imposed Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on the nascent Bolshevik regime) and an unabashedly aggressive stance towards British and American civilians (with the sinking of the passenger ship the Leinster).

It was thus inevitable and reasonable that Wilson - to whom the new German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, turned to negotiate peace terms - would insist that matters had moved on. A negotiated settlement had to prevent future German aggression and secure Germany's transition to a constitutional state. The notion that the Versailles Treaty imposed a punitive peace is a myth. The Treaty in reality wasn't harsh enough. Had it imposed partition on Germany it might have stymied the rise of Nazism. It would also have dealt with the real "root cause" of WWI: an autocratic, militarist and expansionist German state bent on war. Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the infamous "war guilt" clause specifying Germany's responsibility for war, was strictly correct.

(Conspiracies do happen in statecraft, and German planning for war was an instance. The historian Fritz Fischer, of the University of Hamburg, concluded in the 1960s, from archival research, that German war plans had been formed at a War Council called by Kaiser Wilhelm in December 1912. There is debate about how far the so-called Fischer school is justified in this claim; but to my knowledge, while there are differences of emphasis among scholars of German history, no one has refuted the central case. A useful English-language obituary of Fischer, summarising his contributions, can be found here. I would be completely astonished if Pat Buchanan were familiar with this literature.)

I said the historical issue was incidental to the quality - or lack of it - of Buchanan's position, but in fact there may be a slight relevance. There must be few pundits in the UK more pro-German than I, but it is of course the Federal Republic established in 1949 whose political culture I admire. The reason for my admiration is that the nation then broke completely not only with Nazism but also with the traditions of xenophobia, militarism and authoritarianism that had (excepting the brief and doomed Weimar experiment) been integral to Germany's approach to the world since the mid-1890s (the so-called Weltpolitik). With inconsistency, sometimes imprudence, for a long time criminal insouciance, and massive loss of life (especially, for Britain, in 1914-18), our side helped transform Germany to a constitutional order anchored in the liberal West. All my readers (excepting probably one: hello, Mr Irving) will share my view on the tardiness of the West's response to Nazi aggression. It's important to stress that there was also far too much "understanding" of Wilhelmine aggression after the fact. There may be times for dealing with autocrats less absolute than Hitler; there is never a time for regarding them as legitimate state actors whose feelings we must empathise with.