Yet another great column by Barbara Amiel in the Telegraph, which includes yet another hypothesis to explain Euro-lefty "resistance" to the word "evil":
Some of those members of the social democratic international (including critics at the Guardian and the Independent) hate America's use of the word "evil" for other reasons. They dismiss this word as "simplistic".Their derision speaks to the illusions so many of the Left held about the empire that Ronald Reagan named as evil, as well as the myths the Left held about the so-called "colonial" movements that resulted in the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the Ba'athist regime of Iraq or the North Korean dictatorship.
The Left hates having its youthful illusions branded as "evil" and wants a word that pays more tribute to the complexity of its mistakes. Even if they now see their early values as flawed, they want them recognised as being morally complex. None of them, including pacifists and sentimentalists, wants former dreams or present misconceptions trampled by the unambiguous phrase "axis of evil"