(INSIGHT NEWSMAGAZINE, No. 002, April 2003)
When the American President, George Walker Bush, first uttered his pontifical statement about an ‘axis of evil’, going from Iraq through Iran and Afganistan to North Korea, anyone could have guessed that this evil axis was counter-posed to and counter-balanced by an axis of goodness. Within the Manichean logic, where all the creatures of the earth can be segregated into the absolutely good and the absolutely bad, into angels and demons, good guys and bad guys, this could not but be the case. The putative axis of goodness and universal benevolence, purportedly acting altruistically on behalf of the whole world, with the prerogative of deciding the ultimate evils of the world and eradicating them by force, clearly stretches from Washington, through Sydney and Madrid to London. But, as has sometimes been remarked, “in human affairs, when all’s been said and done, when all accounts and books have been balanced, when the whole story has been told, we may realize that ‘the good’ were not so good and ‘the bad’ not so bad”.
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