The moral high ground

Marko's peroration from his most recent anathema suggests to us that we apparently need to choose between our alleged policy of "no enemies to the left" and our claim on the moral high ground. I think that there is a common Decent misunderstanding which needs to be brought out into the open here.

We at Aaronovitch Watch don't really make much of a claim to the moral high ground. We don't live there. We may have visited it once or twice, but found it basically a rather uncongenial place, populated mainly by loudmouthed Decent twats. Let's get this straight - mail addressed to:

"BB, RK, CC, CC and the gang
c/o Aaronovitch Watch
The Moral High Ground
W1 8QT"

will not arrive.

The claim of superiority we make over Decent politics is a claim to the practical high ground. In other words, while we're in general content to believe that our political values are of a kind with other people's, that we can recognise differences without declaring takfir (and indeed we've been criticised a fair few times for being insufficiently condemnatory of various political undesirables), we do have to insist on one important point on which there can be no compromise with our political enemies:

Unlike the politics of either the Decent Left or the Islamists, the political views of Aaronovitch Watch and its mates do not, in operation, tend to cause hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths

This is a pretty important advantage for us, but it's not a matter of politics, it's a matter of empirical fact.

I think that this distinction is vitally important, and it's an aspect of Decency that we've covered in the past. The fact that non-interventionist, non-imperial politics doesn't involve as much violence and that's a good thing, just never seems to compute (recall the hilarious bit in Alan NTM Johnson's interview with Mary Kaldor, where she keeps having to remind him that simply being in a state of peace rather than war is an important political goal to set against all the imaginary benefits of whatever Decent war he is banging on about). And the reason is that Decent politics is fundamentally unserious in a much more important way than merely blogging about tits 'n' pubes - it's concerned with the big game of grouplet politics; the taking of the right line on everything, having solidarity with the right bunch in Lower Bogovia and condemning the deviations of the mob in Upper Fuckoffistan. The idea that there might be any real world consequences of this sort of thing is utterly alien to the beautiful souls of the Decent Left, which is why they make such fuck-awful diplomats and why it was such a disaster when they got the ear of the Prime Minister.