Buried in the middle of the interview is this nugget:
DONALD RUMSFELD: Let me come back to that Axis of Evil speech. When President Reagan said that the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire, everyone got all a-twitter. All of the elites in the world. They thought, "Oh, my goodness gracious. Isn't that something. This president of the United States really doesn't get it, and he doesn't realise how important it is to have good relationships with Russia" and whoever happened to be the head of that time.
On the other hand, the people of Russia and the Russian republics, I think probably had a very different view of that. The people who'd been in the gulags. The people that weren't allowed to vote freely, and weren't allowed to practice their religion freely, and the people of neighbouring countries that were being repressed, and the people on neighbouring continents that felt that the Soviet Union was trying to expand its empire in their direction, they had quite a different view of it.
And that tended not to be carried in the press, or carried in the television of the world. Let's take North Korea. I've got to think of what's classified and what's not classified. But let's just, for the sake of argument, say there are tens and tens and tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of Koreans, political prisoners, in prison camps. Camps, more than a handful of camps, that are the size of cities. That are being starved.
Why are Korean people trying to get out of North Korea into China? It is a regime that is vicious. It's developing weapons of mass destruction. It is selling them all across the globe.
Now, if someone can come up with a better adjective than "evil," fine. But to turn your head and pretend that's not going on is wrong. And not only is it wrong, it is unhelpful if one cares at all about all those human beings.
If one cares at all about the risks that the world faces as we examine the nexus between countries like that and weapons of mass destruction and their relationship with other nations of the world that they're willing to sell to, or other terrorist networks that they're willing to sell to.
We're at a moment where we no longer have the margin for error we, as humanity, had decades ago, where our weapons were relatively short range, and where the warheads were relatively modest. Today, we're dealing with weapons of mass destruction, with generally free and open societies where the reach of those weapons was vastly greater than it was, the lethality of those weapons is vastly greater than it was.
And to sit back and say, "Oh, my goodness. He called those countries an Axis of Evil. Isn't that terrible." Well, exactly what is terrible about it? I think putting the microscope, the floodlight, on what is going on in those three countries is just enormously valuable for the world.
And it is constructive. It is enlightened. I don't doubt for a minute but that it's giving encouragement to those people. And I don't doubt for a minute - in fact, I know of certain knowledge - that it's giving pause to those governments.
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