The 'Axis of Evil' was - and is - very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.
Back when George W. Bush was identifying his Axis of Evil, it struck me that a longer and more instructive list could be compiled of the Axis of the Humiliated (or Insulted and Injured, to borrow from Dostoevsky).
Syria is still the foundation of the axis of evil, and I'm not sure it's appropriate to transfer Israel's northern front to the axis of evil.
I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
The Germans certainly - the intelligence service believed that there were WMD. It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.
I have been brought up open-minded. If I didn't know any people from other countries, I'd think everyone was evil based on news stories. But I know a lot of people, and know that there is no such thing as stark good and evil. Isn't it possible there is the same amount of evil everywhere?
I think evil is very relative.
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.