Word: manichaean
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International crime will probably never attract the sort of headlines and public anxieties that were expended on the Manichaean struggle between the West and the U.S.S.R. Compared with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, hoodlums smuggling things across borders strike most people as an inevitable and tolerable fact of life. But John le Carre, the most artful chronicler of fictionalized cold war espionage (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), takes a less sanguine view of the outlaw capitalism that only intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the old world...
...confusing moment. In the campaign of 1996, Bob Dole became almost an irrelevance. The real struggle was between the two versions, almost Manichaean, of Bill Clinton: the President bound for Rushmore, or the incipient felon. Both scenarios are speculations about the future, as all elections are. For the present, the American voter found a way between the two extremes (best hope, worst fear) by acquiescing to what seemed, on balance, the least unsatisfactory of the candidates...
...MANICHAEAN CHRIST...
...astonishingly successful faith. St. Augustine was a Manichaean before converting to orthodox Christianity. Horrified Christian bishops would use the word Manichaean as a catch-all invective for all satanic heresies. Indeed, long after the Manichaean Church ceased to exist in the West, the Inquisition was established to put down rashes of what the Catholic Church saw as neo-Manichaeism...
...West, however, was not the only target of Manichaean missionaries. The religion flourished throughout Central Asia, where surviving texts preserve a Jesus who was merged with the Buddhist deity Maitreya, the Boddhisatva of the future, who, like Christ, will come at the end of the world. As the centuries passed, this Manichaean-tinged Maitreya would inspire millenarian revolts in China, one of which helped bring down the empire of Kublai Khan in the 14th century. The leader of the successful rebel coalition rewarded his allies of the "Bright" religion by naming the new regime after their faith--Ming-chiao...