'To understand' is not 'to condone'

Ken Livingstone, London's mayor, on the news just now. Like a number of others, while condemning utterly any use of violence he understands how people can get so desperate that they resort to it. This is not a popular stance, especially in a city which has recently been on the receiving end of violence, and people like Livingstone are the focus of hostility when they express it.

It is, nevertheless, the only hopeful stance. Unless we can understand without condoning, we are enmeshed in the double standards of which Livingstone et al are accused.

I grew up in a world where the French Maquis were lauded as heroic for actions which would have been described as terrorism in the present tense; where RAF bomber pilots over Germany were heroic while German bomber pilots over Britain were villainous. Such double standards are understandable in time of all out war, but not condonable in later years of peace. So it is with current conflicts: every act of violence is a failure, to be condemned, but may at the same time be understandable without thereby being approved.

By the same token, I reject the assertion recently made by a dismissive British minister something along the lines that "there is a world of difference between civilians being killed as the result of conventional warfare and people being killed by a terrorist bomb". Not for the person killed, there isn't – no difference at all.

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• The Today Programme. Interview with Ken Livingston. 20 July 2005 (about 0710Z) BBC Radio 4.
• Read a related post by Jim Putnam