I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for

I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.