Word: demon
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...Ellello*u, the drought that brings his nation to the limits of starvation is more than a mischance of the elements or even, as one of his enemies calls it, "bad ecology." It represents a blot on the nation's soul, a demon that has to be exorcised, the work of an angry Allah demanding sacrifice. So he sacrifices. First goes the ancient king who had been his prisoner since the revolution, then an American foreign service officer who tries to bring food supplies across the border from a less doctrinaire socialist, and less impoverished, neighbor. In each case Ellello...
These are the legacy of the Puritan's Covenant psychology, and they are a great source of the old American demon, absolutism. The movements epitomize one half of the national psyche, the Puritan conscience, and contend with the other half, democratic license. They take up, once again, the Puritan's vision of an ideal community and a steadying of morals and manners. Their history is mostly a history of failures--the continent is littered with testimonies to American visions. And the People's Temple was really no different: it sought the ideal community, too. Like all its American predecessors...
Advice for the demon-worn...
...Demon Frisbee...
...Cambodian revolution, in its own degraded "purity," has demonstrated what happens when the Marxian denial of moral absolutes is taken with total seriousness by its adherents. Pol Pot and his friends decide what good is, what bad is, and how many corpses must pile up before this rapacious demon of "purity" is appeased...