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The Axis of Evil

© Carey Goodman

Is it the enemy we know, the enemy we do not know, or the enemy we think we know?

In his State of the Union address, US President George W. Bush tried to distill to the American people in the clearest terms exactly who is the enemy in the "war against terror". Specifically he referenced three states: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But why stop there? Surely the list is much more extensive than that.

North Korea on the "Axis of Evil" states list? Well, there goes the idea that the war is an "anti-Islam thing". North Korea, where the people are allowed a daily diet of only approximately 100 grams of rice, where people are indoctrinated to worship Kim Il Sung as "the Dear Leader" with no obvious evidence that Mr. Kim and his father did anything except swindle their country in the name of communism? North Korea, the complete antithesis to a free and open society, ranks on the Axis list? Why?

From the North Korean vantage, the real enemy is South Korea because South Korea is a capitalist state which to some extent recognizes the individual rights of its citizens. And where did vile South Korea learn this wrong behavior? From America, of course. And America is evil because - because Comrade Stalin said so way back in the 1940s. Therefore if North Korea does not take all precautions to defend its borders, those greedy, decadent South Korean influences will seep into the country, and that would be a very bad thing because - because it probably would mean Mr. Kim would be relegated to a daily diet of approximately 100 grams of rice which he would enjoy from the confines of a very sparsely furnished prison cell.

As part of its ongoing efforts to isolate itself from the rest of the world in a way whose results make Afghanistan seem quite modern, the North Korea regime acquired nuclear know-how from its old allies the Russians before the Russians figured out the capitalism thing Comrade Stalin told them was so bad was actually pretty good. Some way or other word leaked out that North Korea wanted nuclear weapons, and the West and the UN decided that would be a very bad thing, so they reached an agreement that would allow the US to provide North Korea "safe" nuclear reactors that could be used only to produce electricity. Apparently the Western diplomats who devised this agreement were unfamiliar with the concept of reverse engineering. But North Korean scientists are quite familiar with the concept.

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