But Radical doesn't just mean left Radical, InOBU - you can have Radicals at any point on the political spectrum, insofar as there is a spectrum (it's a tempting and often useful metaphor, but it is just a metaphor). Nazism can in some ways be seen not so much as rightwing extremism, but as extreme Radicalism of the centre.

A Radical solution to a problem is to pull things up from the roots, and start all over again. There are times when that's what you need to do - but the crucial thing is knowing what kind of plants you want to plant when you've pulled up the ones that have grown wrong. Some people want top plant very nasty plants indeed.

Sapper 82's point about political misjudgements is valid, but applies across the board. The basic corrupting factor is the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". If you were in a barroom fight there might be some validity to that, but it is so dangerous. It's why you had people who can be reasonably described as "conservative" or for that matter "liberal" who in their time supported, encouraged and financed the most disgusting regimes, like that of Pinochet or even Hitler.

So far as the left is concerned, it is easy to see how, when you are engaged in a fight against people close at hand whom you can see to be vicious and dangerous, youn can be tempted to fool yourself that the people far away who send you words of encouragement, or who are also engaged in some kind of struggle against the same enemies are better than they really are.

Sometimes you have to take help from where you can get it - but you can never afford to trust people just because they help you. Which is very sad.

(And Brendy, yes there was a plane crash on the outskirts of Harlow a couple of days back, two light aeroplanes using a local airfield collided, and the people on board were killed. But all well away from me.)